The affinity for Islam in the so-called identity left scene is a remarkable phenomenon. The fact that queer people in Islamic countries are endangered should lead to the realization that there can be no alliances between these worlds. Nevertheless, such alliances exist. The common explanation for this is that Muslims living in the West are viewed as the new proletariat, the underprivileged. Therefore, the woke want to protect this group from the all-consuming power of the market and from white racist colonialism. The mother of gender ideology, Judith Butler, has claimed, for instance, that the burqa is the protest of Muslim women against being “exploited by mass culture.”
In addition to the well-known neo-Marxist social critique, there are other notable peculiarities that require explanation. Wokeism and Islam agree in rejecting equality as it is understood in the West. In Islamic thought, religious affiliation also defines a person’s political and civil status: one is either Muslim, a person of the Book (Jew or Christian), or a non-believer. As a member of one of these groups, one participates in political co-determination and civil rights in a graduated manner. Wokeism is characterized by a similar mindset, as it does not focus on the individual, who already possesses inalienable rights “by nature.” Instead, it addresses people as members of groups, in a pre-Enlightenment manner. No longer are it the clergy, nobility, and commoners of the Ancien Régime that form the woke estate system. Today, it is Blacks, Whites, Jews, Muslims, Queers, Lesbians, Palestinians, and almost countless other groups.
Irony or tragedy of history: The woke and their identity-left sympathizers find themselves in good company with the anti-Enlightenment reactionaries of old. One of their leading figures, Joseph de Maistre, noted in 1796: “There is no such thing as a human being on Earth. In my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. But a human being, I declare, I have never seen.” Maistre’s kindred spirit, Louis de Bonald, opposed the Enlightenment schools of philosophy that centered their thinking on the individual, the self, with the traditional “philosophy of the we.” The pronouns of the self and the we precisely describe the differences between pre- and post-Enlightenment philosophy.
Not only is the free, open society that emerged from the Enlightenment on the blacklist of both radical Islam and left-wing woke post-Christians, but also Judaism and Christianity. At the same time, Islamism is downplayed. The factual denial or at least the trivializing contextualization of the events in Israel on October 7, 2023, demonstrate this to the world. Not only does trivialization and lack of demarcation indicate the compatibility between radical Islam and left-wing wokeism, but the search for clues also leads to theology. Tocqueville posited the thesis that every religion is accompanied by a politically related opinion. With this, he foreshadowed Carl Schmitt’s dictum that all significant concepts of modern political theory are secularized theological concepts. Tocqueville explicitly applied his insight to the relationship between Christianity and the societies that emerged from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: “Among the truly new things, the majority seems to me to be derived directly from Christianity. It is Christianity, applied through Enlightenment in the broadest sense: different political forms, a different social structure. In a word, these are new conclusions drawn from an old principle.”
From this perspective, behind the mentioned confrontations lie two incompatible, partially secularized images of God, which then result in two different images of humanity. The Jewish-Christian understanding of God is that He is the primal reason and created the world rationally. Therefore, God is recognizable in the works of His creation, as Paul says in the Book of Romans. Additionally, humans, as the image of God, participate in His reason. Thus, they can understand and further shape nature. The Jewish-Christian image of God and humanity legitimizes such actions. It is the foundation of the Enlightenment’s trust in the power of reason and its ability to scientifically-rationally understand and shape the world.
In contrast, the Islamist God has strongly volitional, voluntaristic features. The contradictions in His behavior, as contained in religious scriptures, have led to rational theology gaining little ground. Therefore, legal scholars prevail, ordering the state and society according to religious laws in the name of the fatalistic submission of believers to an absolutely transcendent, willful God. A God understood in this way cannot be the author of a nature governed by rational laws. This leads to the religious illegitimacy of the scientific exploration of the world, and the Creator is not sought in the traces of nature.
Here, gender ideology is compatible. It is brimming with a secularized irrational voluntarism that seeks to elevate humans godlike beyond their biological nature. Left-wing post-Christian dominated states follow this irrationalism by enabling one to “change” their gender, devoid of any natural science. This philosophy — we shape the world as we please — is not only a departure from the Christian participative creatureness of humans but also from an enlightened, scientific humanism. Jews and Christians have always been aware that God’s ways are inscrutable. But they also knew they were intellectually uplifted in the rationality of God, creation, and humanity. The Enlightenment built upon this. Subsequently, it partially emancipated itself from its origins in the Jewish-Christian image of God and humanity. This, according to the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, should prompt the West to engage in a “self-reflective overcoming of a secularist-hardened and exclusive self-understanding of modernity.” Only in this way can the West offer substantively grounded resistance to the current irrationalisms.
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