After the collapse of the totalitarian Communist regimes in 1989-91, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote in The End of History and the Last Man that “we may have reached the end of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.” Terri Murray begins Identity, Islam and the Twilight of Liberal Values by arguing that Fukuyama's optimism was premature, because the rise of religious fundamentalism—especially radical Islam—has become a powerful bulwark against the spread of liberal democracy. Rather than exposing and opposing the damage done by Islamism in the West, soi disant liberals, leftists, and progressives have acted as its supporters and cheerleaders. Murray instead labels them as “pseudo-liberals” and the “regressive Left” as a result of their abandonment of bedrock liberal principles, and progressive and secular values.
Murray aims to diagnose the ways in which European and American social liberalism has been eroded in the post-9/11 era, asserting that these are not because of its internal flaws but because Westerners have been reluctant to defend its strengths and to apply its principles internally. She maintains that a “paternalistic orthodoxy” has arisen that demands positive respect for, or deference to, those who oppose liberalism, secularism, and democracy. Universal human rights and principled politics have given way to moral relativism and total subjectivism—developments that Murray argues were by no means inevitable. This trend is encapsulated in the buzzword that has become so fashionably prevalent in recent times—“diversity.” Murray contends that the rhetoric of diversity has been used to peddle policies that have curtailed any genuine liberal dissent from the establishment's orthodoxies and politically correct posturing. This, in turn, has resulted in a decrease in intellectual diversity.
Murray's core liberal values rest on the teachings of John Stuart Mill. At its heart is the primacy of the individual which is essential to social progress and human flourishing. In his classic work On Liberty, Mill provides the following reasoning:
Where, not the person's own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.
Islamists in the West have successfully hijacked the moral prestige of liberal terminology for the purposes of disseminating ultra-social conservative beliefs and practices. Murray quotes the Pakistani-American writer Tashbih Sayyed, who pithily summarises the effects of this strategy as follows:
By casting its fascist agenda in terms of human rights and civil libertarian terms, political Islam has successfully been able to use the American liberal and progressive groups to project itself as an American phenomenon and win intellectual elites, liberals, and the media with left leanings on its side.
Murray correctly observes that violent acts of Islamic terrorism have had the effect of misleading people into thinking that anything short of terrorism is “moderate.” She points out that the ideology of an organisation may be extremist and deeply illiberal even if the group does not resort to violence to promote its views. Hence, Islam, with its myriad illiberal doctrines, has been embraced beneath the umbrella of a diverse society to such a degree that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proclaimed that “Islam is part of Germany.” This preoccupation with diversity has brought the efflorescence of identity politics and the sphere of “competitive victimhood.” Murray asserts that Western apologists for the Islamists' victimhood narrative subscribe to the false belief that a vigorous critique of Western foreign policy must necessarily exclude castigation of its violently regressive Salafi-Islamist counterpart—in reality, Western Islamophiles diligently refrain from critiquing and criticising any aspect of Islam.
