Before I was banned from Tinder, I used to encounter so-called “hojabis” as I swiped through the galleries. The hojabi: a portmanteau of hijab, the lightest Muslim veil, and “hoe”—which stands for, well, “hoe”. The hojabi is a Muslim woman, usually a second or third generation immigrant, who dresses in the uniform of the standard Western girl—her posterior, contained in tight jeans, telescopes out of her profile picture on Tinder—but she ices her outfits with a minimal concession to Islamic law: she wears a hijab. The entire effect is ironic, since the hijab is about modesty and yet everything else—from her heels to lipstick—is modesty turned inside out; nothing is hidden. Hence she is, as they say, a hojabi; she was birthed by the collision of progressive liberalism and Islam.
I live near Britain’s second-largest city, a city that is almost certainly, whatever the statistics say, majority-minority now; and among the biggest minorities in the city are those Muslims, mostly Pakistani, who began to settle here in the late 1960s. Even a decade ago, when I was at university in the city, the politics of the student union was divided between the Muslims on one side and the Jews—with their allies, the gays—on the other; though these groups were minorities on campus they had the tightest interests and solidarity: the world is ruled by determined and highly coordinated minorities—and in this case the competition was, as in city council politics, about who could stuff more ballots than the other side.
The rise of the hojabi is often taken to mean that Islam will be melted down in the West; only the token hijab will remain, just as nominal Christians rock up to church once a year for Christmas. Traditionalists despair that under Western nihilism Muslim girls will be corrupted, while liberal progressives and neoconservatives celebrate the inevitable victory of Western values. “The Muslims just want iPads, they’re just like us. They’re rational, right? At worst, they’ll end up like Ilhan Omar, a socialist married to a white man who wears a hijab to bait conservatives. A real Muslim would stone her to death!” The question is merely, from this perspective, how fast all Muslims can be melted down to the hojabi level—and can we get these girls on OnlyFans already?
It is true that most Muslims will be melted down to the Tinder-OnlyFans level; however, Islam has a secret weapon: the Koran. Unlike the Bible, this text must be understood in Classical Arabic—the vernacular is unacceptable. Further, unlike the Bible, the Koran has not been textually pulled apart by scholars: Darwinism hit Christianity hard, but so too, as Nietzsche knew, did the linguistic exegeses of the 19th century that undermined the authority of the Bible.
The Koran is proofed against the village atheist, the pedantic boor who reads the Bible in English and points out “contradictions” to all and sundry—Muslims have the recitation, the chant; the chant is meaningful, not the words. The chant is a fortress against nihilism. The Koran is still proofed at the scholarly level against doubtful hermeneutics—the Muslim faith can endure in modernity, whereas Christianity has dismembered itself.
The majority of Muslims in the West will be picked off by Western liberal-nihilism, but a core will not; and this group will be fecund, rigidly coordinated, and hostile to the progressive-liberal state—they have already demonstrated the capacity to use violence against it. Already, in my city, the devout Muslims push the liberal state’s LGBT ideology out of their schools; and the liberal state, defender of “minorities”, finds itself unable to impose its writ. Islam is almost anti-liberalism as a religion, and the progressive liberals have landed a kernel that despises everything they stand for—and is prepared to use violence to resist those values—in the midst of a nihilistic population. The hojabis should gather their roses while they may, for their daughters will wear much more than the hijab.