Serving Other Gods Through Co-Existence

Let's set the scene. We shall go back to before Michigan. Before Texas. Before Austria. Four months ago is all I ask. When a family member asked me a simple question: What is your view on Islam?

My answer was intentionally stark.

I believed the West was approaching a confrontation it had spent decades trying to avoid. The issue would eventually move beyond terrorism, immigration, and isolated acts of extremism and become a much broader argument over political Islam, assimilation, sovereignty, and whether religiously derived political systems can coexist with Western constitutional government.

I also argued that, historically, attempts to forcibly remove populations, dismantle religious-political institutions, or impose large-scale ideological exclusion do not occur peacefully. If Western governments ever moved from surveillance and accommodation toward prohibition and forced exclusion, violence would become increasingly probable. Blood would be spilled—not because violence is desirable, but because history gives little reason to expect a coercive confrontation of that magnitude to remain bloodless. Serendipitously, Islam's self enforced exclusion has increasingly been reinforced by a growing “them versus us” mentality, both here in the United States and across the European Union.

My family member did not appreciate the assessment. The conversation ended abruptly. But intelligence analysis is not supposed to be comfortable. Its value comes from identifying a trajectory before that trajectory becomes conventional wisdom. Four months later, the political environment has shifted. Uncomfortable words became reality, with reality becoming confrontational.

Texas has increased scrutiny of Muslim organizations and Islamic religious accommodations. American political rhetoric surrounding Islamist influence and Muslim political actors has hardened. Across Europe, governments are increasingly willing to discuss Islamism not simply as a counterterrorism problem, but as a challenge involving schools, associations, foreign influence, parallel social structures, integration, and constitutional authority.

And now Austria has crossed another threshold.

On August 28, Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker publicly called for a constitutional prohibition on “political Islam,” describing its political manifestation as incompatible with democracy and Western values. His government has subsequently begun developing a legislative proposal.

That distinction matters. Stocker is not proposing the prohibition of Islam as a religion. He is targeting what Austria defines as political Islam: movements or networks seeking to restructure society or political institutions according to an Islamist ideological framework.

But analytically, the significance remains considerable. The debate is moving, both here in the States and abroad. With many coming to realize that co-existence is a myth created by the devil. Such religious tolerance is unfounded in the Old Testament. But yet is common knowledge? I don't think say Satan.

For years, governments largely concentrated on violent jihadism: terrorist organizations, recruitment networks, financing, radicalization, and attacks. Austria's emerging position moves the argument farther upstream. The question is increasingly whether legalistic Islamist movements—organizations operating without terrorism but pursuing political or societal transformation—should themselves become objects of constitutional restriction.

That is a substantially different policy environment.

The next stage will likely revolve around definitions: What constitutes political Islam? Which organizations qualify? Where does protected religious activity end and political subversion begin? How should governments treat foreign-funded mosques, religious associations, schools, clerical networks, political advocacy, and organizations suspected of ideological connections to larger Islamist movements?

Historically, this definitional phase is often among the most volatile. Once governments begin drawing hard legal and political boundaries, those boundaries rarely remain neutral. They tend to shift with the political climate, and in periods of public fear or institutional failure, they frequently move toward more conservative and exclusionary interpretations. That is where the risk of violence rises most sharply. Communities that previously operated within ambiguous or permissive frameworks suddenly face restrictions, investigations, or prohibition, while governments attempt to enforce boundaries that were left undefined for years. The result is often resistance, radicalization, confrontation, and, at the extreme, bloodshed. The danger is not simply the definition itself, but the moment when definition becomes enforcement.

Those questions will generate court battles, protests, political polarization, and increasingly aggressive rhetoric on both sides. And there lies the portion of the original assessment that remains the most important. The danger is not that Europe suddenly awakens tomorrow and collectively expels its Muslim population. The evidence does not support that conclusion. The danger is escalation through successive thresholds. And if governments eventually attempt broad coercive enforcement while affected communities view those measures as existential persecution, the probability of political violence rises sharply.

Austria does not prove the endpoint. It does, however, provide another observable indicator that the trajectory has moved farther in that direction than it was four months ago.

Another Indicator: Portugal and the European Veil Debate

The European response continued to harden in August. Portugal promulgated legislation establishing identification and security rules for public spaces that, in practice, prohibit garments such as the burqa and niqab when they completely conceal the face. The Portuguese presidency explicitly justified the measure through social integration, equal dignity between men and women, public security, and the principle that citizens living within the same society must accept certain common rules of public interaction. Portugal therefore joins a growing group of European states imposing either national or situational restrictions on full-face coverings. This is not an EU-wide prohibition—the European Union presently has no common burqa or niqab law—but it is another indicator of a broader European policy movement.

The significance extends beyond clothing. Certain Islamist movements explicitly seek to order political, legal, and social life according to their interpretations of Islamic law. Sharia itself encompasses a much broader and internally contested body of religious jurisprudence, and it should not analytically be treated as synonymous with political Islam. The intelligence concern arises where religious doctrine is transformed into a coercive political program: pressure upon members of the community, rejection of civil authority, parallel legal structures, intimidation, or attempts to subordinate constitutional law to religious authority. In that environment, governments are no longer responding solely to individual terrorist actors. They are confronting questions of competing political authority.

That distinction reinforces the larger assessment. Europe remains predominantly reactive. Restrictions generally emerge after governments perceive integration failures, extremist networks, foreign ideological influence, public-order problems, or challenges to constitutional norms. Abbott's actions in Texas fit the same broader pattern: government pressure follows a perceived problem rather than preceding it. Austria's proposed measures against political Islam and Portugal's face-covering legislation likewise represent responses to conditions policymakers believe previous approaches failed to resolve.

COURSE OF ACTION / ESTIMATIVE CONCLUSION

It is highly likely that the Western world's predominantly defensive and reactive posture toward Islamist political movements will contribute to further confrontation over the medium term. For decades, Western governments largely assumed that inclusion, legal protection, economic integration, and generational assimilation would moderate ideological incompatibilities. Where those assumptions fail, governments are increasingly being forced to establish boundaries that earlier policy deliberately left ambiguous.

This creates an escalation problem.

Practices tolerated for years acquire an expectation of normalcy. Attempts to restrict them later can consequently be perceived not as restoration of an existing boundary, but as the removal of an established right. Government intervention therefore encounters greater resistance precisely because intervention was delayed. Regulation may produce protest; prohibition may encourage organized resistance; aggressive enforcement may create opportunities for extremists to portray ordinary constitutional measures as persecution. Violent actors on both Islamist and anti-Muslim extremes would likely exploit that polarization.

The historical analogy is Canaan: incompatible systems of allegiance allowed to develop within the same political space until coexistence itself becomes the central dispute. In Christian biblical imagery, Canaan represents the consequences of permitting a competing order to become entrenched until confrontation becomes substantially more costly than prevention. Applied as intelligence analysis rather than theology, the lesson is straightforward: strategic ambiguity compounds future enforcement costs.

The recommended course of action is therefore no political or legal coexistence between Western constitutional authority and an Islamist system seeking parallel or superior jurisdiction. There cannot be two competing sources of sovereign authority operating within the same state. Protected Islamic religious worship may remain within the constitutional order, but political movements, institutions, or networks seeking to impose religious law upon others, establish coercive parallel governance, subordinate civil law to religious authority, or undermine constitutional sovereignty should not be accommodated as an alternative system.

Western governments should consequently draw this boundary early, explicitly, and permanently. Violent organizations, foreign-directed extremist networks, coercive parallel institutions, terrorist financing, intimidation, and unlawful attempts to substitute religious authority for constitutional law should be dismantled. Immigration, foreign funding, education, political organizations, religious institutions, and clerical networks should be governed according to the principle that one constitutional order—and only one—possesses legitimate governing authority.

The intelligence recommendation is therefore not ambiguity, accommodation, or managed coexistence between rival political systems. It is the preservation of a single sovereign constitutional framework and the rejection of any competing political-religious structure that claims authority over the same population.