Nations like the US, UK and Australia have for decades been characterised by high immigration. Multiculturalism and cultural diversity aren't mere bureaucratic buzzwords. They represent the status quo to be preserved in the absence of compelling reasons.
Cultures of both the majority hosts and minorities inevitably adapt to each other by a process of gradual osmosis.
But many western conservatives are abandoning their traditional embrace of diversity in favour of populist monoculture. In the US, the Trump government includes members of the 'alt right' who embrace notions of white 'identity' and white 'civilisation'.
Members of the alt right reject multiculturalism and other forms of 'political correctness', often using provocative, racist, anti-Semitic, violent and misogynistic language that make Trump's own campaign pronouncements look tame.
Alt right thinking and its Hansonist/Reclaim Australia equivalents go beyond emphasising economic sovereignty and rejecting free trade and globalisation. This may be an extension of the Huntington 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis, the idea that the 21st century will be characterised by a clash between western civilisation on the one hand and Islamic and/or Confucion civilisation on the other.
American jurist Matha Nussbaum, in her book The Clash Within, argues that 'the real clash is not a civilisational one between "Islam" and "the West", but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition'.
So how do we collectively fight the scourge of cultural totalitarianism? Perhaps if I may, I will share something from my ancestral tradition.
Before claiming prophethood at age 40, Muhammad was a humble illiterate merchant in Mecca, a large city in the Arabian desert whose main sources of income were pagan pilgrimage and the trade it generated. Arabian society was organised into clans and tribes who often settled disputes using war. There was no royal family, no king, no independent courts or judiciary. The only source of justice was revenge by your own tribe or one which adopted you.
"If those who would embrace the campaign rhetoric of Trump and Hanson wish to threaten our diversity, it would only be through building broad alliances that the threat can be met."
In his biography Muhammad: His Life Based On The Earliest Sources, English writer and scholar Martin Lings writes that 'in Arabia there was no comparable system of law by which a victim of crime, or his family, might obtain redress' other than all-out war. This was also the case in civil matters. Lings continues:
'A merchant from the Yemeni port of Zabid had sold some valuable goods to a notable of the clan of Sahm. Having taken possession of these, the Sahmite refused to pay the promised price. The wronged merchant, as his wronger well knew, was a stranger to Mecca, and had no confederate or patron in all the city to whom he might go for help.'
A small but influential group of merchants could not allow such wrongs to continue. They founded 'an order of chivalry for the furtherance of justice and the protection of the weak ... and they vowed that henceforth, at every act of oppression in Mecca, they would stand together as one man on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor until justice was done, whether the oppressed were a man of Quraysh or one who had come from abroad. The Sahmite was thereupon compelled to pay his debt,' failing which members of the order would enforce a commercial boycott.
So what can we learn from this incident? Perhaps it is the attitude of a member of the order, the illiterate merchant Muhammad who later claimed prophethood, rejected idolatry and was eventually pushed out of Mecca to establish a city-state in Medina. He spoke of the order of chivalry (hilf al-fudul) years later in the following terms: 'I was present in the house of Abd Allah ibn Jud'an at so excellent a pact that I would not exchange my part in it for a herd of the most valuable red camels; and if now, in Islam, I were summoned unto it, I would gladly respond!'
He would have gladly joined hands to fight for justice even with those who rejected his message, some of whom were in other contexts happy to wage war on his new home.
Cultural totalitarianism is a major injustice of our age. To fight it effectively, we have to enter into coalitions with those whose opinions we otherwise find distasteful. An anti-racism rally with only leftwing speakers is not going to make as big an impact as one with speakers across the spectrum. If we insist the fight against racism is necessarily a leftwing issue, aren't we effectively saying anti-racist conservatives aren't welcome in this struggle?
Justice involves respecting and embracing our diversity of faiths and ethnicities. If those who would embrace the campaign rhetoric of Trump and Hanson wish to threaten our diversity, it would only be through building broad alliances that the threat can be met. Those not wishing to embrace the reality of coalition building are in some ways engaging in their own form of cultural bigotry.?
Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney based lawyer and blogger.