Kalifat..."is the solutiion"

Demonstrators in Hamburg this weekend have been calling for the establishment of a Caliphate in (or on?) Germany.

The problem, as such, is this. Islam is not just another flavour of monotheism, the final update on that questionable Jewish innovation.

The notion that it is as deserving of a kind of hands-off respect as any other faith tradition disregards, dangerously, the way that it includes codifications of some very explicit political intentions, which it would be as irresponsible to ignore as any other party manifesto with intolerant overtones. (Since WWII Germany has taken a very hard line with extremism, but appears a tad more reticent when metaphysical faith is the public persona of such.)

Like other believers, any given devout Muslim can of course cherry pick his or her way through the Koran, the Hadiths etc. ignoring the persistent political prescriptions and focusing exclusively on the spiritual. 

But in practice these earthly imperatives remain no matter what the body of believers choose to do, and they an underlying intentionality of their own, for this basic, innate Islamism baked into the religion itself has tended to bond on contact with the concepts and ways of expression formed within Western Europe's own tradition of illiberal thinking, and such contact is only going to become to more systematic within a civilisation seemingly striving for diversity…as if that alone might guarantee greater broad-mindedness.