Iran and Turkey missed The Age of Enlightenment And It Shows

IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi did not speak in metaphors. The same day Erdogan informed Al Jazeera that Turkey cannot leave Gaza alone and will do “whatever is necessary.”

These are not isolated outbursts, but logical products of a political theology that never passed through the Western Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment settled a basic question in Europe and its offshoots - religion does not get to rule by force. Political legitimacy is not derived from the sword in the name of God. That argument was fought out, bloodily, over centuries. The result is the system most Westerners now take for granted.

Islam, as much as it tries to appear as religion, took a different historical path. Its expansion is driven by military conquest on a massive scale. The pattern is straightforward: victory, political domination, genocide and Islamization of the conquered populations.

Vahidi’s statement is simply the ideology speaking cleartext.

Their Islam still works the old methods, but adopted new tricks as well.

Fertility. Migration. Financing of mosques, schools, preachers and cultural centers.

When the moment allows, force.

Iran in particular has spent decades building political and religious influence far beyond its borders. In Germany, authorities eventually banned the Islamic Centre Hamburg, describing it as the direct representative of Iran's Supreme Leader and an exporter of the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.

In the US, the extraordinary 650 Fifth Avenue affair spent years exposing Iranian-linked financial structures in the middle of Manhattan. Apparently exporting the revolution eventually required commercial real estate.

Western societies are now so far past the Enlightenment settlement that we treat freedom of religion as an almost boring background condition. You can join a Wiccan circle, practice Voodoo, follow New Age crystals, invent a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or declare yourself a Satanist for aesthetic reasons.

When a commander of a modern military can openly celebrate the proof that Islam can be imposed as the ruling order of the planet, and a NATO member’s president can frame open-ended religious solidarity as state policy, the Western world is not facing a misunderstanding. It is facing a different operating system — one that never accepted the Enlightenment settlement and has no intention of doing so now.