“We want a caliphate!” shouted the participants of the demonstration in Hamburg, Germany, mostly young men, but also a significant number of properly veiled and standing aside young women. If people are willing to come together for something in the streets and shout it out loud, it’s worth believing them. So we also have a certain contingent of people in neighboring Germany who want a caliphate, an Islamic religious state, whose last failed incarnation was ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
The principle that I privately call “far from Istanbul” can be clearly seen in Hamburg. Distrust and hatred of Islam grows in Europe as you approach the Bosphorus, because in proportion to the shrinking distance so does historical experience of what it looks like when Allah’s faithful mount their horses and whiz their curved sabers through the air, seeking necks unbelievers.
Backwardness, slavery, illiteracy and relentless brutality, this was the rule of the caliphate in Europe (because in the last centuries it was the Turkish sultans who bore the title of caliph) – and the Balkans will probably never recover from it. Even now, it is perfectly clear on the GDP per capita maps how many hundreds of years the Ottomans ruled which part of the Balkan Peninsula. The longer the worse; centuries of Muslim rule in the Balkans managed to essentially wipe out the earlier developed civilization of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Hamburg is quite far from Istanbul, and the level of naivety here was therefore considerable. The port city, which has been used to foreigners since the Middle Ages, “welcomed” ostoseth during the migration crisis, which is not too surprising for the electoral stronghold of the Greens (24 percent in 2020). Behind this “welcoming”, however, there was also a tacit assumption that Germany is attractive to foreigners due to its modern, secular-liberal character. Oh no, not necessarily – and the Pandora’s box that the lovers of the caliphate have opened will not be closed just like that. Both he and the guy who called the demonstration look a bit like a Muslim version of Himmler, or rather Goebbels, and who knows if he will one day achieve similar power. For many decades, the German “wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy) focused mainly on the right-wing scene, to a lesser extent on anarchists, but it allowed the undergrowth of Islamic fundamentalism to grow to a state where it might not even be possible to eradicate it.
The Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, is now speaking with shock that the demonstration of bearded men on German streets is just “difficult to bear”. Where was she when teddy bears were being waved at the Hauptbahnhof? After all, the demographic change is the reason why the German streets started to take on a bit of a Middle Eastern character. Those young men did not emerge from the country or become radicalized at universities, they are simply representatives of a different civilization and brought to Europe not the year 2024, but the year 1445 of the Hijra. With everything that belongs to the year 1445. Only the cameras and Kalashnikovs that belong to today’s image of the caliphate are somehow extra.
