New on IBA

Pastorius graciously invited me to join the IBA.

I have been blogging about Multiculturalism and Islam in Europe since 2005 on my blog Snouck Hurgronje.

My blog is named after the Dutch Orientalist and Islam scholar Snouck Hurgronje. He was the first European visitor of Mekka.

The Netherlands was in charge of what is now Indonesia in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim country in the world. In the middle of the 19th century the Islamic state of Aceh in Indonesia started a Jihad against infidels. The Jihad involved mostly acts of piracy against Chinese and Western shipping in the straits of Mallacca. The victims were often subjects of the Queen of Great Britain and the British demanded that the Dutch ended the Jihad. Or they would step in themselves. Eventually the Dutch send a force to Aceh and got bogged down in a war against the Jihadists that lasted decades and took a steady toll on Dutch manpower and resources.

After getting nowhere for 25 years Snouck Hurgronje and General Van Heutz came to a strategy based on understanding Islam and its workings in Indonesia. The Dutch went over to the offensive and defeated the Jihadists in a few years.

The parallels between the present situation are, I believe, clear. Islam is a threat not just to the West, but to the whole "infidel" world. Defeating Islam will only happen if we understand it and do not try to fight it in a mode that worked in the previous industrial wars between Western states. In order to defeat it we must look critically at our own ways of thinking about society and war.

I do not think Islam can be crushed and become a unoffensive part of the world. Islam has been around for 1.400 years and has proved itself during that time. But I do think it is possible to make ourselves safe from the Islamic threat in a way that is acceptable to our Western morality.