"Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979 has shattered this live-and-let-live atmosphere. In his manner, he was confirming that there are a billion Muslims in the world, they have only to make themselves felt as such, and power will then accrue to them, concluding in rightful God-given conquest. More than a challenge, here was an updating of the ancient division of the world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. What he preached and exemplified has spread rapidly through one Muslim country after another, activating those who agreed with his dogmatic vision, as well as challenging those with alternative political, secular, or nationalist definitions of their societies. In response to Khomeini, the struggle for self-definition within the Dar al-Islam has left behind it a huge trail of sectarian and communal horrors in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, Palestine, and elsewhere. This wave of violence finally engulfed Muslims who found themselves in the House of War. Their position became uncomfortable as all manner of crises were manipulated to promote separatism at the expense of integration. Completely artificial in substance, the Salman Rushdie affair soon demonstrated how deeply Iranian foreign policy now reached into the West. Also motivated by Iran, another example was the foundation by Dr. Salim Saddiqi of a Muslim parliament in Britain, with the avowed purpose of making Muslims responsible to it, and not to the elected national parliament. Some have had the craft to cloak the demand for separatism as a plea for tolerance. Tariq Ramadan, for one, grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a professor safe in Switzerland, argues that Muslims must enjoy all the rights of democracies in order to live among unbelievers as uncompromising Muslims—in other words Muslims are to receive everything and give nothing in return. Other separatists are openly imperialist. In Antwerp, Dyab Abu Jahjah, originally from Lebanon, heads a group whose aim is a transnational unity of all Muslims in Europe, the planting, that is, of the House of Islam on the soil of the House of War
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"In this phenomenon, apologists pretend that there is no connection between Islam and those who practice terror in its name, as though terror were incidental, a passing aberration; they also say that measures of self-defense are nothing but “state terrorism”—as bad as Islamist terror, or worse. Day after day, in one detail after another, European authorities and decision-makers, some of them at a high level and others local, degrade the values and practices of their societies by currying favour with Islam in politics, the media, cultural, and behavioral issues, and even the law—a British judge prohibited Hindus and Jews from sitting on the jury in the trial of a Muslim. Robin Cook, at the time British foreign secretary, told a Muslim audience, “Islam laid the intellectual foundations for large portions of Western civilization,” when in simple fact Muslim scholars were part of a chain transmitting knowledge from classical Greece and Rome, from Persia, and from the Judeo-Christian tradition."
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" For the moment, the relationship between the House of Islam and the House of War hangs in the balance, depending on imponderables such as what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether Islamists manage to recruit the rank and file, and what the Khomeinist ayatollahs really intend with their nuclear program. Optimists who think that we are bound to muddle through the way we somehow always have, and still come out on top and smiling, are few and far between."
RTWT