What Frightens Them Is Not Violence
Islamist violence has never taken a capital or changed a structure. What the order cannot accommodate is the opposite scenario: a version that works.
The thing the established order finds frightening about Islam is not violence.
I want to state that plainly because it sounds like special pleading and it is not. Islamist violence is, measured against any serious threat to the Western order, marginal. It has never taken a capital, never toppled a Western government, never altered a single structural feature of the system it attacks. Judged as strategy it is a failure so complete that its principal achievement has been to supply the pretext for the surveillance apparatus now pointed at everyone.
What the order actually cannot accommodate is the opposite scenario.
A functioning Islamic civilisation. Not a threatening one. A working one: solvent, technically competent, governing well, treating its minorities decently, and doing all of it on foundations that contradict the ones everybody has been told are the only available foundations.
Because the argument for the current arrangement has never really been that it is good. It is that it is inevitable. That there is no alternative, that history has been run and the results are in. A working counterexample does not refute an argument about what is best. It refutes an argument about what is possible, and that is a far harder thing to survive.