On Muslim Supremacy
Some Muslims in the West have had enough
Substack is becoming an interesting place for political writing and speech. Some of you may have seen the interview recently on
, where and interviewed an anonymous American Muslim called . I’ll summarize some of this for a bit, then reflect on how it all relates to Turkish politics.Dragoman made waves with a piece entitled Meet Your Allies published by the American Mind, which is a publication of the Clermont Institute, a pro-Trump think tank in California. Dragoman argues that a fundamental shift is underway in the political alignment of American Muslims:
A long-simmering internal tension has exploded to the fore, resulting in large numbers of Muslim voters, many of whom reside in swing states critical to winning the 2024 election, now willing to turn to the GOP. American conservatives must not be blinded by prejudice and miss the opportunity dangling in front of them.
After 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” American Muslims supported the Democratic party out of a feeling of solidarity with fellow minority groups. This fed into the tendency to “racialize” Islam into a cultural identity rather than the religious doctrine it is. This period, Dragoman argues, is now over. American Muslims have a stronger position in American society and now have cause to side with the right. I’m simplifying a bit, but it seems like there’s two reasons. First, they don’t like the progressive agenda on gender - I don’t think that requires further explanation. Second, Muslims believe that the Democrats (I can’t call them ”the left“) are more interventionist abroad, including Muslim countries, while the Trump Republicans respect borders and want to turn inwards (Trump got along with “strong Muslim leaders like Erdogan.”) So a readjustment is afoot, and though the Trumpian right probably won’t like Muslims, they have an interest in reaching out to them on a party-political level.
In the
podcast, Dragoman goes into a lot more detail. And I have to say, dear reader, that while my politics is a lot different, I enjoyed listening to him. On the question of Islam in the West, we had all been stuck in a stuffy room of liberalism, and this guy comes in and opens all the windows at the same time. It certainly helps that Dragoman is well-read, speaks in crisp sentences, and most importantly, is serious about political ideas.At the center of the interview was Dragoman’s claim (reluctant at first, but more strident as he warms up) of being a ”Muslim supremacist“ in the sense that “certain things happen once you die” that literally bear out the Truth of Islam. At another point, Dragoman says that Muslims should be pawns in Christian game, and that “if anything, Christians should be a pawn in a Muslim game.” He acknowledges that Muslim societies haven’t done well in modern times, but that they are still far more theocentric than nominally conservative Christians.
The conversation then goes into alternative forms of a Western political order that would grant Islam more public space. Dragoman muses about how an Ottoman-style millet system could allow Muslims in the United States to have their own sphere of laws and regulations, presumably concerning things like gender and education. Dragoman says that the Jews arrived in the West as Orthodox practitioners of their faith, and would hate to think that Muslims would go through something similar. The progressive idea of “communities” interacting in a rainbow society is therefore repellent to him. That is why, he says, he is seriously thinking about moving away from the United States. He doesn’t want to subject his kids to the gender madness of progressive Westerners.
It’s a 2 hour interview well worth your time. Hamid recently wrote something on LGBTQ education and Muslims, and
reacted to it on his Substack (which by the way, not coincidentally, now has a studio in Istanbul) For the Dragoman’s Substack, see (I’d advise a name separate from his alias, but that’s just me.)This debate tracks pretty nicely with Turkey’s political trajectory. I actually think Muslims in the West seem to be following it, and in some sense, getting momentum from it.
In the 2000s, most people who wrote about Turkish politics in DC and Brussels were liberals, and they wanted Western governments to have closer relations with the country. I’m thinking of people like Steven Cook, Kemal Kirişçi and Henri Barkey. And when AK Party officials visited Western capitols, they were put up at left-leaning places like the Brookings Institute. I was in DC in the early 2010s, and when Davutoğlu came to town he was treated like a rock star.
Fast forward to now, and all the same left-leaning Turkey watchers are critical of the country. Some of the people above can’t step foot in the country for fear of prosecution (or persecution.) It’s now Trumpist right wingers like Rich Outzen and Michael Doran lobbying for Ankara, or defense specialists like Can Kasapoğlu at the Hudson Institute. Broadly, their argument is that the left is blinded by quaint concerns for democracy and human rights, and that Turkey is a perfectly reliable ally if you take seriously the country’s self-professed strategic priorities. Considering stern competition from China, they say, the United States really doesn’t have the luxury to turn down Turkey based primarily on its domestic affairs.
That relationship model has been shown to work on a smaller scale. Erdoğan has excellent relations with the far-right leaders of Hungary, Serbia, and to a lesser extent, Poland, who happen to be pretty hostile to the few Muslims coming into their countries. He has very volatile relations with liberal leaders in Germany and France, who try to accommodate Muslims. Erdoğan also courts China, which is staging the biggest and most precise oppression against Muslims anywhere at any time (no, that is not just a Western media narrative.)
All this has a similar texture to the kind of argument that Dragoman makes. It’s a politics in which borders are respected, where we don’t judge other societies by our own norms. Within countries too, we might have a millet system where groups have their own spheres of law (on the podcast, they mention Kukathas’ liberal archipelago argument).
And it does sound nice. I think of myself as a cultural conservative and economic progressive. I am uncomfortable with the way liberal societies are hurling towards identitarian progressivism. I’m not religious myself, but I find it upsetting how religions get reduced to quaint menu of identity groups. And yes, the West’s democracy promotion has failed, and progressive foreign policy certainly hasn’t helped.
And yet, I think this vision is fatally flawed.
The borders argument requires us to think that these identities are self-contained, positive, and more or less independent of their political contexts, i.e. that we are Christians or Muslims or indeed, “patriots” of this nation or that, more or less independent of what other people are. I don’t think so. I think we are in these groups because they allow us to establish a certain kind of relationship to all other groups.
“There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” wrote Nietzsche, meaning that the self-professed message of love is a ruse, that it’s really about the feeling of transcendental chosenness, the “world revolves around me effect,” (what in Turkish we nowadays adorably refer to as biriciklik.) Originally - and this is touched upon at the later stages of the WoC interview - we subscribe to these religious groups because we like to think that when we die, we will be saved and some other person won’t. The contemporary versions are softer, so we might assume religious or national identities because they accentuate our place within the “multicultural” society. So in my job application, I may want to click the “Muslim” box because I know that the edgy technology company (or whatever) will want greater diversity. It seems to me that a key point of this new wave of Muslims in the West (they would hate “New Islamists”) is that they reject this for the older, more concrete assertion of supremacy: they alone are God’s chosen. It reminds me how on his way to Pennsylvania in 1998, Fetullah Gülen stopped by the Vatican, met the Pope, and is said to have told him that Christians too, will go to heaven. Many Islamists like to say that that’s when they knew the man couldn’t be trusted. He yielded on Islamic supremacy while ironically creating a “golden generation” of chosen people.
So belonging to religions and national identities are at bottom political choices, and they’re always about engaging in competition. That is especially true in reactionary movements like Trump’s. If one is in them, one is already in a competition against the “civilizational” other. We are intensely comparative and competitive creatures, and those drives are baked into the Abrahamic religions. I could hear in the podcast that Dragoman is dreaming of a more isolated Muslim community in the West, not because it would be a good way of living together, but because it would give Muslims in the West a strong position to attract more people.
That of course, is also the attitude of Turkish Islamists. There’s a few quotes Erdoğan keeps coming back to, but the most important one is Al Imran 139: “if you believe, you are superior” (inanıyorsanız üstünsünüz). This turning things upside-down, saying “no you’re a pawn in our game” is immensely appealing to people. The optimistic reading would be that it gives people a long-lost dignity, and that strong, more self-conscious, and inevitably, a more internationalist Muslims will contribute to a more stable world order. The pessimistic reading is that the competition won’t be contained, the reactionary strand will dominate, and cause problems on a larger scale.
It’s very hard for me to be optimistic about Turkey’s new elite. I am, however, encouraged to see more Western Muslims moving to Turkey, or otherwise interacting with its wider cultural sphere. The experience of moving for political reasons can be especially exciting. The mind races to situate itself in relation to the new society, it goes through periods of utopian bliss and terrible loneliness over decades. The Turkish Muslim who moves abroad either becomes more religious or drops his religion all together. Second or third generations develop their own relationship with the old country, layering the relationship. I’m really curious to see what happens with Western Muslims going the other way. My hope is that it deepens the capacity for introspection on both sides and leads to a more confident culture.