'Islam is not a religion': Why integrating Muslims in the West is difficult
Historian David Starkey joined Ezra Levant to discuss how Western nations are facing integration challenges after allowing millions of Muslims entry, given his view that "Islam is a complete structure of life, law, politics," and completely transcends citizenship.
British historian David Starkey joined Ezra Levant on Friday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show for an in-depth conversation about cultural difference, hyper-liberalism, and what happens when a civilization refuses to acknowledge that not all people share the same values.
Starkey opened with the Archbishop of Canterbury incident Ezra raised — the photo from the September 11th anniversary in which the then-Archbishop, a woman, placed an award medallion not around the neck of the Pakistani imam who received it, but around his wife's neck, because he refused to be touched by a female.
At the Women’s Policy Centre, we strongly oppose the decision of the Archbishop of Canterbury @ArchbishopSarah to award a man who subjects his wife to abuse by concealing her identity in such a barbaric manner. No religion can permit anyone to deny the dignity and freedom of… pic.twitter.com/MN0DeOiFqx
— Women's Policy Centre (@womenpolicyctr) September 17, 2026
His wife, Starkey noted, was present in a full face-covering niqab, describing how the imam was essentially using her "as a coat hanger." Starkey called it an example of "hyper-liberalism" — a madness, he said, that is understandable once you trace its roots.
On the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Starkey was characteristically blunt. He said he was reliably informed that when she was accepted for ordination, a condition was attached that she normally would not preach because she was not sufficiently theologically literate to do so. "Anglicanism used to be a religion that prided itself on its scholarship," he said, citing a tradition of deeply learned archbishops stretching back centuries.
What the Church of England now has, he said, is someone "pig ignorant" — a former chief nursing officer whose background placed her at the centre of the DEI project before a late vocation brought her to divinity school.
The deeper argument was about the category error at the heart of Western immigration policy.
"Islam is not a religion," Starkey said. "Islam is a complete structure of life, law, politics," a system of loyalty that transcends the particular citizenship acquired by moving to Britain or Canada. Treating it as a private matter, the way Christianity has become in the post-Christian West, is not tolerance. It is ignorance, he suggested.
"The sheer absurdity of treating Islam just as though it were Christianity as Christianity has become" — a privatized faith, practiced quietly, entirely personal — misunderstands what Islam actually is and what it demands.
On the British grooming gangs, Starkey made a distinction that Ezra said explained why the West has had such difficulty processing them. "They're not gangs," Starkey said. "They're extended families. The rape is done by father, son, uncle, cousin, brother-in-law." They operate, he said, like a mafia — and the mafia calls itself a family too.
The reason Western institutions could not see what was happening is that no Western man could conceive of calling 10 friends and proposing a collective crime of this nature. It is so contrary to individualistic Western culture that it was literally unimaginable — and therefore unseen. "A fish doesn't know it's in water," Ezra noted.
Starkey closed on the paradox of English cultural identity. The English, he argued, invented the modern world — the woolen suit, the parliament, the rule of law, the beginnings of responsible government, the language the world now speaks.
Because those inventions became universal, England is now told it has no culture. "We were the first universal people since the Romans," he said. And like the Romans, having given the world its organizing principles, find themselves with nothing left that is particular to them.
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