How did it come to pass that twenty years after neoconservatives launched their ‘war on terror’, self-proclaimed Muslim leaders were queuing up to ingratiate themselves to a mainstreamed far-right headed by Donald Trump? Forget those four to five million people who were killed as a result of the 9/11 wars, better we embark on a ‘war on woke’. To be sure, the ‘war on terror’ had cast Muslims as both external and internal enemies, severely curtailing their political possibilities. As imams self-censored, politics disappeared from the Friday pulpit. A supposed war against Islamism made every Muslim a potential target. Meanwhile, under the guise of ‘counterterrorism’, a new generation of Muslims, born after 9/11, was integrated into the American nation-state – domesticated. Muslim politics turned inwards to the private realm.
Yet the intellectual Guantanamo in which Western Muslims found themselves confined after 9/11 was but one reason for the pivot to the hard right. According to the recent book by the Islamic studies scholar, Walaa Quisay, Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West, Muslim leaders such as the American traditionalist Hamza Yusuf felt Muslim-Left-wing alliances forged in the early days of the war on terror had skewed the ‘metaphysical lens’ of Muslims. ‘Our discourse is troubling,’ Yusuf cautioned young Muslim students in 2017, ‘they seem to derive from dark luminaries as Derrida, Foucault, and their influence from Karl Marx.’ Instead, Yusuf sought an ‘alliance of virtue’ with willing evangelical Christians and Jews. He even took up a seat on a human rights panel set up by Donald Trump, a man he described as ‘God’s servant’.
Hamza Yusuf is just a symptom of a rising tendency among Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic to find allies on the hard and far right. This includes the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the English Conservative Philosopher Roger Scruton who were both courted by Yusuf. Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed ‘misogynist’ influencer has found an audience with younger Muslim males. But as Yahya Birt, the eagle-eyed British historian writes, this snuggling up to brazen reactionaries comes while Euro-America is going ‘through a wave of populism that is pandering to ideas around Western superiority and white ethno-nationalism.’
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