Why Pan-Islamists should not bother with Pro-Western views.

When Pan-Islamists dismiss my admiration for the West by calling me a “colonial product” or an “Uncle Tom of the West,” I find the accusation laughable, because Islam itself is one of the most successful colonial projects in human history. From the 7th century onward, Arab armies exploded out of the Arabian peninsula, permanently Arabized North Africa, erased the Coptic and Berber civilizations of Egypt and the Maghreb, wiped out Zoroastrian Persia, and reduced the Christian Middle East to a persecuted remnant. They didn’t stop there: they swept into the Indian subcontinent, where for centuries Muslim rulers demolished temples, imposed the jizya, and carried out forced conversions and massacres that dwarf anything the British ever did. The Turks, whom so many Muslims still revere as heroic ghazis, conquered Anatolia, turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and ran the Devshirme system—kidnapping hundreds of thousands of Christian boys, converting them by force, and turning them into Janissaries who would later slaughter their own people. The Mughals you celebrate built their glittering palaces on the taxes squeezed from Hindu peasants and on the ruins of countless temples. The Ottomans you admire enslaved the Balkans for half a millennium.

Yet today the same Muslims who lionize the Arab conquerors, who name their children after Umar and Uthman, who boast about the “golden age” of Cordoba and Baghdad, who hang portraits of Ertuğrul and Salahuddin in their living rooms, turn around and lecture me for admiring Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Locke, or Jefferson. They cheer for the empires that colonized half the world in the name of Allah, but clutch their pearls if a brown or black person dares to love the British, the Germans, the French, or the Americans—the very civilizations that ended slavery in most of the world (a practice, by the way, that Islamic states kept legal until the 20th century, and some still tolerate in disguised forms).

There is no moral difference between you taking pride in the Abbasid caliphs or the Mughal emperors and me taking pride in Newton, Goethe, or the U.S. Constitution. You love the art of Persian miniatures and the architecture of Sinan; I love Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance painting. You revere the military victories of Khalid ibn al-Walid and Tariq ibn Ziyad; I respect the legacy of Charles Martel, Jan Sobieski, or the Allied soldiers who liberated Europe from tyranny. You consume the fruits of centuries of Islamic imperialism without apology, yet you demand that I apologize for admiring the civilization that produced modern science, human rights, and individual liberty.

So spare me the hypocrisy. Loving one’s own civilizational heritage is human. You do it openly and proudly every day. The only difference is that I’m honest enough to admit I do it too—and I refuse to be shamed for preferring the civilization that gave the world universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the moon landing over one whose highest ambition still seems to be restoring the caliphate and making the 7th century great again.

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