Islam Level-Set

The short clip above is from anti-woke comedienne Arynne Wexler. It illustrates the problem for feminists and women generally in joining any coalition with Muslims. But for several days, I've also been returning to a passage from William James's 1896 essay The Will to Believe that I first encountered as an undergraduate:

A live hypothesis is one that appeals as a real possibility to the person it is proposed to. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to sparkle with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. But to an Arab (even if he isn’t one of the Mahdi’s followers) the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and aliveness are not intrinsic properties of an hypothesis but relations ·of the hypothesis· to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. /p>

. . . A living option is one in which both hypotheses are alive. If I say to you: ‘Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan’, it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: ‘Be an agnostic or be a Christian’, it is otherwise: given your education, each hypothesis makes some appeal—however small—to your belief.

You can quibble a bit with his choices of dead option -- theosophy and other forms of "spiritualism" were in fact common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- but he's probably more or less correct in saying belief in the Mahdi or Islam generally was not a living option, at least in the UK and US at that time. Now, things seem to be different; avowedly Muslim US politicians are somehow able to garner electoral majorities among non-Muslims. Something has changed.

The otbher day, without too much reflection, I put the period of European confrontation with Islam from the Crusades, starting in 1095, to the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Actually, it extended over a much longer period. It began in 711, when the Umayyad general Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa into Iberia. At the Battle of Guadalete that year, Tariq's forces decisively defeated the Visigoth King Roderic, establishing Muslim rule on European soil.

The Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732 turned back further Muslim advances into Europe, but the Reconquista, the gradual reconquest of Muslim territories in Spain, lasted from about 722 to 1492. Intriguingly, according to Wikipedia,

The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499–1526) that forced the conversions of Muslims in Castile, Navarre, and Aragon; these same groups were expelled from Habsburg Spain by a series of decrees starting in 1609. Approximately three million Muslims emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610.

The 1683 Siege of Vienna was only the high water mark of an entirely separate Muslim incursion into Southeastern and Central Europe.

Beginning with the conquest of eastern Thrace in the mid-1300s, the Ottomans soon took Macedonia. They fought Serbian prince Lazar and his Balkan army at Kosovo in 1389, and defeated Bulgaria soon after in 1393. Along with military conquest, the Ottomans brought Muslim settlers from Anatolia to occupy main march routes and river valleys. In 1456 Athens fell to the Ottomans, followed by Bosnian and Albanian lands, and finally Belgrade in 1521.

. . . [A]s western European countries gained power in trade routes and military prowess, formerly the purview of the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire weakened economically and the Austro-Hungarian Empire took territories from the Ottomans, including Hungary, part of present-day Croatia (1699), and later Bosnia (1878). The position of Muslim communities gradually declined as well until the breakup of Ottoman power in the Balkans left many of them vulnerable.

The following period in the history of Muslims in the Balkans, the time of growth of nation-states, began variably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with southern Greece becoming independent in 1821, followed by Serbia (whose northern part had been autonomous since 1815), Romania, and Bulgaria, all in 1878, and later by Albania in 1912. During these times there were forced migrations, massacres, and expulsions of Muslims, especially from the eastern Balkans, for the new nation-states were largely conceived as ethnic units tied to language and a form of Christianity. In contrast, many Balkan Muslims, who did not fit in the new nation-state design, were seen as allied with the Ottomans who had been increasingly ineffective and oppressive in the last century of their rule. Thousands of Muslims were forced to flee to Turkey. This would continue throughout the twentieth century with Balkan Muslims from Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bulgaria emigrating to the safety of Muslim Turkey.

In other words, the European confrontation with Islam took place over an extended period, often accompanying the development of nation-states, which allowed Christian culture to consolidate and assert itself, often militarily. One less-noted phase of this extended confrontation was the newly established United States' campaign against the Barbary Pirates:

In the late 18th century, the Barbary pirates were a well-known problem in Europe. These pirates—who came from Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunisia—captured vessels sailing in the Mediterranean Sea and held their crews for ransom.

To free a captured vessel, European nations were forced to pay the ransom. Some European nations signed treaties with the four Barbary nations and paid tribute for safe passage of their vessels.

The Barbary pirates were not an issue for the American colonies while they were under the protection of the British Empire or during the Revolutionary War while they were under the protection of France. However, those protections effectively ended in September 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Revolutionary War and freeing the United States from British rule.

In October 1784, the Boston brig Betsey was captured by Moroccan pirates. On July 25, 1785, Algerian pirates captured the Boston schooner Maria. Less than a week later, the Algerians also captured Captain O’Bryen’s ship, the Dauphin. Americans had a rude awakening to their hopes of free trade throughout the world.

. . . Congress didn’t approved a treaty with Algiers until September 1795. The final cost of the return of all 119 captives (other ships were captured after the Maria and Dauphin), and peace with Algiers was $642,000, plus $21,000 in annual tribute.

Piracy and the related slave trade weren't ended by the European powers until the mid-19th century. According to Wikipedia,

The number of slaves captured by Barbary corsairs is difficult to quantify. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The basic problem, which I want to go into at greater length when I get a copy of Bp Barron's What Do Their Deaths Demand? is the incompatibility between Islam and what are generally accepted as Western cultural norms, and the historicsl reality that this inmcompatibility must be resolved via the use of both military force and forcible relocation. What we're seeing currently with Muslim migration to Western countries is simply an asymmetric renewal of the same historic conflict.

In the UK, there are increasingly vocal demands that dogs not be kept as pets, because it offends Muslim sensibilities. Now, we're beginning to see the same thing in the US:

Two Muslim cops in New York stopped a nurse for no apparent reason other than that she was walking her dog. They cornered her and threatened to seize her dog. When confronted, they got angry and couldn’t say what law she had broken. This is what happens when you give these people power. All I can say is that she was lucky there were passersby, because it was 3 AM and things could’ve ended much worse. https://t.co/Dm2wFLcevm

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) November 7, 2026

In the UK as well, we're beginning to see demands that pubs be eliminated, because alcohol offends Muslim sensibilties. This is going to have to be addressed, sooner or later. It goes beyond the problem that Muslims kill Christians, and it extends to the current condition that Islam is effectively being foced on the West as a living option.