The BBC reported that French President Emmanuel Macron used his speech to the joint Houses of the US Congress to denounce nationalism and isolationism. He said isolationism, withdrawal and nationalism “can be tempting to us as a temporary remedy to our fears. But closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world. It will not douse but inflame the fears of our citizens”. He added,

“We will not let the rampaging work of extreme nationalism shake a world full of hopes for greater prosperity.”

He delivered this speech however, in the same week that the French National Assembly passed a tough new immigration law that tightens the rules around asylum. The bill shortens asylum application deadlines, doubles the time for which illegal migrants can be detained, and introduces a one-year prison sentence for entering France illegally.

Such contradictions are to be expected wherever humankind makes its own legislation and values from its own minds. Nationalism is a poor Western solution to organise the affairs of mankind, where citizenship is based on the fixed borders of the nation state. It inevitably leads to an original national group of citizens, who then decide upon the rights of immigrants to join them, or not, as is increasingly the case in Europe and America today. The original group’s nationalism leads them to believe that they have more rights than the new arrivals, who are now classed as a minority in the nation.

Whilst Mr Macron may complain of the increasingly fanatical nationalism that is growing among his own people, and elsewhere such as Britain and America, he should not reasonably expect them to have a benign nationalistic bond. Nationalism is the basis of citizenship in all Western states and it will inevitably grow more sinister, whenever there is a perceived benefit in it. Often, however, it festers and fumes below the surface until it emerges into the open as a destructive uncontrollable force, destroying the minority people and their lives in its path.

This is the same France that refuses to grant nearly five million of its own citizens of different ethnic background their linguistic and cultural rights, such as the Basque and Bretons. It is the same France that used the concept of minority rights and promoted nationalism to interfere in the Ottoman Islamic Khilafah state (Caliphate).

The problem of immigration and minorities is a manufactured problem, and its solution cannot be through the democratic secular state, because the secular state is unable to solve the problem, for it is the one that created it.

Oppressed people across the world for the past century have viewed the Western countries as a place for asylum to escape their oppressors, even though their oppressors have mostly been employees and agents of the Western colonial powers. Today, however, they are witnessing the hardening attitude towards their plight, as the Western countries turn away many asylum seekers, and treat the successful applicants as second and third class minority citizens.

Islam does not recognise this desire for immigration as a problem like the West does. Islam also doesn’t recognise the problem of minorities within the Islamic State, as all people, Muslim and non-Muslim, are citizens with equal rights before the law. Islam prohibited discrimination based on colour, race, language and other matters.

There will be no solution to the problem of immigration, and minority rights except under the Khilafah state, because it is capable of smelting people in the crucible of Islam, as history bears witness to. It alone is capable of justly looking after the affairs of the non-Muslim citizens, as well as the Muslim citizens, guaranteeing them a happy, secure and stable life.

Witten for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Yahya Nisbet,

Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Britain