Not surprisingly, even the less devout Moslems look on western civilisation with uncomprehending horror. They accept western technology and science, and envy western prosperity. But they largely reject the spirit of free inquiry, intellectual and practical, upon which the western ascendancy rests. Yasmin Alibhai, for example, has not only lived in England for several years, but also worked as a journalist for The New Statesman and Society. She is completely unable to understand how a nation with no taste for book burning and the murder of authors can be anything but a “moral chaos”. But the most explicit rejections come from the younger theorists of the Iranian Revolution. Majid Anaraki, who spent several years in southern California, sees the west as

a collection of casinos, supermarkets and whore-houses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere. All that money, all that effort all those resources that are wasted so that idiotic women and shallow men can prolong their lives … You see ancient women who refuse to die at a normal time and who continue to paint themselves and crave youthful lovers right to the edge of the grave … To eat tons of hamburgers and popcorn, to imbibe oceans of Coca-Cola and whisky, to watch hundreds of hours of stupid television, to copulate mechanically a few hundred times, to be on guard minute against being robbed, raped or murdered. That is the American way of life.

Our civilisation is regarded as evil, and its destruction is taken as a sacred duty for reasons both defensive and offensive.

Defensive

There can be no doubt that Khomeini was a firm anti-communist. But, unlike the timid monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, he saw quite clearly where the true threat to Islam lay. Throughout his reign, the Russians presented at least a potential threat to the northern borders of Iran, But this was as nothing to the actual ideological threat of the west, Marxism in Iran had converted its tens of thousands, and influenced its hundreds of thousands. But western civilisation — with its clothing fashions, its films, its music, its enshrinement of individual happiness, its secular knowledge — had captured its millions. There was a “Great Satan” devouring Islam; and its body was not communism, but the West; and its head was not Russia, but America, “We must break those pens” he wrote, “that teach people there is something other than divine law. We must smash those mouths that tell the people they are free to say whatever they please, regardless of right and wrong in accordance with the commands of the Almighty”. On this reasoning, to carry the fight from Iran, or wherever, into the west, is the equivalent of turning from the periphery to the centre of an infection.

Offensive

In one of his occasional attempts at humane argument, Khomeini justified a war of extirpation against the west on the following grounds:

If one allows the Infidels to continue playing their role of Corruptors on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the Infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less.

For the most part, however, it is conversion to Islam that is desired of people in the west. Only those refusing to convert are to be slaughtered. In the first instance, all those areas of the world that were once Islamic, but have since been lost, are to be restored; and all those areas that contain sizeable Moslem minorities are to be Islamised. In 1982, a new map of the world was presented to Khomeini by the Cartological Society in Teheran. It was divided into three regions, distinguished by three colours. First, in green, came the House of Islam — this being the 41 member states of the Islamic Conference, together with soviet central Asia, southern Spain, Malta and Lampedusa, Albania, part of Yugoslavia, north eastern China, parts of Siam, Burma, the Philippines, and most of Africa. The remaining areas, the red and black, were divided between communism and the west. But the final state of affairs is to be a totally Islamic world. No part whatever is to be left in the hands of the “Cross worshippers”, as the Christians are contemptuously termed. Moslems in Great Britain at the moment comprise barely three per cent of the population. Nonetheless, “[t]hose Moslems” says Dr Shabbir Akhtar of the Bradford Council of Mosques, “who find it intolerable to live in a United Kingdom contaminated with the Rushdie virus need to seriously consider the Islamic alternatives of emigration (hijira) to the House of Islam or a declaration of holy war (jihad) in the House of Rejection. The latter may well seem a kind of hasty militancy that is out of the question, though, with Allah on one’s side, one is never in the minority. And England, like all else, belongs to Allah.

Sean Gabb, “‘The Challenge of Islam: Can We Face It?’ A paper prepared for the post-graduate seminar Dr Dennis O’Keeffe presiding at the Polytechnic of North London Tuesday the 16th January 1990” republished as “Flirting with the Neocons in 1990”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-02-24.