Freedom and Machiavelli's 'Armed Prophet': What The Prince tells us about how to respond to Militant Islamic Supremacy

We must stop believing that the mere fact of liberty and human rights will win, that we don’t need armed men operating in the shadows to defend that freedom, and that our enemies are not our enemies

“And so it happens that all armed prophets win, and the unarmed are ruined. For…the character of populations varies; and while it is easy to convince them of something, it is difficult to keep them persuaded. And so one should see that once they no longer believe, they should be convinced to do so by force.”

Niccolo Machiavelli is a much more interesting man than our modern caricature of him suggests. The Prince, from which the quote above comes, is both the most famous job application in history and a celebration of Machiavelli’s biggest passion, humanist republican government. Machiavelli’s ‘armed prophets’ were the enemies of his beloved Florence and especially the militant secular power of the Papacy. You could persuade Florentines of republicanism but without arms - a citizens’ militia - those other prophets would destroy the city’s nascent liberty.

When I ran across the quotation, however, the first thing I thought of was Islam and that Mohammed was, literally, an armed prophet. And how force and the threat of force was an important factor in turning places colonised by Arabs into the Muslim ummah. If the west wants to defend itself against militant Islamic supremacy then the starting point is to remove the militancy, to disarm the prophet. This wouldn’t be an attack on Islam or the ideas that surround Islam but an endeavour to prevent the threat of violence and, indeed, actual violence being used to stop criticism of Islam.

In March 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School, in a structured discussion with sixth-formers about free speech and blasphemy, showed a picture of Mohammed. What followed was a violent protest targeting the school and the teacher. As a result the teacher, faced with repeated death threats, was forced into hiding and the school cowering behind shallow apologies returned to normal. Or at least a normal where the limits of free speech reach only as far as the discussion of Islam and the symbols of Islam. The ‘armed prophet’ had won. For sure, there was an inquiry but it just said the teacher was let down by the “...council, police and the trust running the school” and that there was a wider cultural problem of “self-appointed community faith leaders aggressively interfering in teaching”.

The aggressive targeting of perceived offence with threats of violence continued - and continues. An autistic boy in Wakefield and his mother were forced into humiliating contortions of public apology. A cinema chain pulled a screening of ‘The Lady of Heaven’, a film about Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, to “ensure the safety of our staff and customers”. We can trace the willingness to use violence back to the mid-1980s in Bradford where headteacher Ray Honeyford was targeted for his, by today’s standards mild, criticisms of religious segregation and multiculturalism. Today the main targets of militant Islamic Supremacists are often what they see as immodesty (it is no accident that they killed girls at Manchester and Southport, and threatened to attack a Taylor Swift concert). The slaughter by Islamic Supremacists at the Nova Festival in Israel connected this violent targeting of perceived immodesty with another ‘armed prophet’ hatred: Jews and Israel.

Over recent weeks there has been a series of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. Each of these attacks has shown that the British state is unwilling to declaw the ‘armed prophet’. After an initial shock there’s a collection of platitudinous statements about there being ‘no place for antisemitism’. These are followed by the revelation that the perpetrator is a lone wolf with a history of mental ill-health and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that this isn’t an organised thing but just a random nutter. But climb into responses to reports of the attacks and a different story emerges of Jew-hate, celebration of violence and shifting the blame from the attackers to the victims. Because, you know, they’re Jews and what about Gaza. Baby killers.

Machiavelli wanted to protect his beloved republican Florence from men who would use violence to crush the idea of liberty. And you get this protection, according to The Prince, by the righteous being prepared to adopt the methods of the enemy, to also be ‘armed prophets’. Today’s militant Islamic Supremacy succeeds and sustains because Western states, entranced by human rights and a 21st century idea of liberty, refuse to use main force to defend free speech and the rule of law from militant Islam’s attacks. People sometimes ask what modern conservatives should want to conserve as if it is an unanswerable question. Yet is it liberty that we want to conserve, that liberty set out in England’s Bill of Rights, baked into the Constitution of the United States, claimed by revolution on the streets of Paris, and restored by two terrible 20th century wars.

To defend liberty, Machiavelli’s passion, requires us to accept the cynical truth of The Prince: if you cede an advantage in arms to the enemies of that liberty, they will win and you will lose your freedoms. To maintain liberty you cannot allow its enemies the freedom to force, through threat of violence, a teacher into hiding, a writer to a life behind a screen of secrecy and security, and a rabbi to leave his university chaplaincy. Yet that is what we have done in Britain. Militant Islamic Supremacy with its Jew-hate, its sexism dressed as modesty and its preparedness to threaten violence and riot is the enemy of liberty. But instead of arming ourselves against this threat, we adopt a mantra of human rights, tolerance and community cohesion to avoid confronting those who would destroy our liberties.

The lesson is that we must stop believing that the mere fact of liberty and human rights will win, that we don’t need armed men operating in the shadows to defend that freedom, and that our enemies are not really our enemies. You don’t protect the liberties of Jews, girls at pop concerts and families at Christmas markets with words about kindness, tolerance and decency. You win, as John Doniphon taught Ranse Stoddard in Shinbone, by being prepared to destroy, if necessary kill, the enemies of freedom and the rule of law. Until we do this, militant Islamic Supremacy will continue to thrive and, swimming in its pool of wider Muslim support, threaten the lives and liberties of our people. Machiavelli, so demonised for his honesty in defence of his beloved republic, was right:

“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.”