Hilaire Belloc on Islam

Real Religion ^

[robowombat]

Belloc's 1937 book The Crusades: the World's Debate, he wrote, The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved—to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? ... There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine.... We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice.... Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.

In The Great Heresies (1938), Belloc argues that, although, "That Mohammedan culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it—whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it."

At the time of his writing, the Islamic world was still largely under the rule of the European colonial powers and the threat to Britain was from Fascism and Nazism. Belloc, however, considered that Islam was permanently intent on destroying the Christian faith, as well as the West, which Christendom had built. In The Great Heresies, Belloc grouped the Protestant Reformation together with Islam as one of the major heresies threatening the "Universal Church".

Belloc cited the many beliefs and theological principles which Islam shares with Catholicism. For Belloc, the common ground includes the unity and the omnipotence, personal nature, all-goodness, timelessness and providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of all things by His power alone, the world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in war against God, with a chief evil spirit, the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the doctrine of reward and punishment after death, the Day of Judgment with Christ as Judge, and the Lady Miriam (Mary) as the first among womenkind—and exactly which, in Belloc's view, identify it as a heresy: where Islam decisively diverges from Catholicism is the "denial of the Incarnation and all the sacramental life of the Church that followed from it"—with Islam regarding Jesus as a merely human Prophet.

Writing in the early 20th century, Hilaire Belloc saw no reason why Islam would not rise in the future to once again menace civilization and the Church. Those post moderns in the West who call themselves civilized have by their apostasy embraced every manner of immorality and debauchery. This rejection of absolute truth and elevation of relativism to the status of religion has brought about a diabolical laissez-faire attitude toward the spread of Islam and in turn creates a breeding ground for it.

From Survivals and New Arrivals by Hilaire Belloc: "There remains... another indirect supporter of Neo-Paganism: a supporter which indeed hates all Paganism but hates the Catholic Church much more...I mean Mohammedan religion: Islam."

"Islam presents a totally different problem from that attached to any other religious body opposed to Catholicism. To understand it we must appreciate its origins, character and recent fate. Only then can we further appreciate its possible or probable future relations with enemies of the Catholic effort throughout the world."

How did Islam arise?

"It was not as our popular historical textbooks would have it, a "new religion." It was a direct derivative from the Catholic Church. It was essentially, in its origin, a heresy: like Arianism or Albigensians."

"When the man who produced it (and it is more the creation of one man than any other false religion we know) was young, the whole of the world which he knew...was Catholic. It was still, though in the process of transformation, the Christian Roman Empire, stretching from the English Channel to the borders of his own desert."

"Now what Mohamet did was this. He took over the principal doctrines of the Catholic Church--one personal God, Creator of all things; the immortality of the soul; an eternity of misery or blessedness--and no small part of Christian morals as well...But at the same time he attempted an extreme simplification."

"Many another heresiarch has done this, throwing overboard such and such too profound doctrines, and appealing to the less intelligent by getting rid of mysteries through a crude denial of them.

"With the energy of his personality behind that highly simplified, burning enthusiasm, he first inflamed his own few desert folk, and they in turn proceeded to impose their new enthusiasm very rapidly over vast areas of what had been until then a Catholic civilization; and their chief allies in this sweeping revolution were politically the doctrine of equality and spiritually the doctrine of simplicity. Everybody troubled by the mysteries of Catholicism tended to join them; so did every slave or debtor who was oppressed by the complexity of a higher civilization.

"For centuries the struggle between Islam and the Catholic Church continued. It had varying fortunes, but for something like a thousand years the issue remained doubtful. It was not until the year 1700 that Christian culture seemed for a time-- to be definitely the master. "

"During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Mohammedan world fell under a kind of palsy...At last by the end of the nineteenth century, more than nine-tenths of the Mohammedan population of the world...had fallen under the government of nominally Christian nations, especially of England and France."

"On this account our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our own culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble."

"That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our faith it will rise."

"Remember that our Christian civilization is in peril of complete breakdown. An enemy would say that it is living upon its past; and certainly those who steadfastly hold its ancient Catholic doctrine stand on guard as it were in a state of siege; they are a minority both in power and in numbers. Upon such a state of affairs a steadfast, permanent, convinced, simple philosophy and rule of life, intensely adhered to, and close at hand, may now that the various sections of the world are so much interpenetrating one and the other, be of effect."

"We must remember that the subjection of the Mohammedan -a purely political subjection -was accomplished by nothing more subtle or enduring than a superiority in weapons and mechanical invention. We must further remember that this superiority dates from a very short time ago."

"A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know." |

[Sergio]

bkmk

[proxy_user]

I can’t really agree. Without oil money, they’d be nowhere. They could not have a modern economy with educated workers and continue to be fundamentalist nuts.

[aquila48]

It’s not the people living in the countries that have oil that are the threat to what’s left of the western civilization, rather it’s the hoards of Muslims invading the west while us, with a decrepit value system and no belief system are accommodating all their whims and demands.

They have been able to get their way in most western countries with only a few percentage of the population - what do you think will happen when they are 20, 30, 50%?