Posted on 04/19/2016 4:31:14 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now.
For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), as the Romans famously called it. It included North Africa. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”
After the breakup of the Roman empire, that northward migration saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization, with the classical legacy of Greece and Rome to be rediscovered only much later. It would take many more centuries for the modern European state system to develop. Slowly, though, feudalism, whose consensual give-and-take worked in the direction of individualism and away from absolutism, gave way to early modern empires and, over time, to nationalism and democracy. Along the way, new freedoms allowed the Enlightenment to take hold. In sum, “the West” emerged in northern Europe (albeit in a very slow and tortuous manner) mainly after Islam had divided the Mediterranean world.
Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book...Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
THIS ^^^^^^^^
The author attempts to justify his dhimmihood w/ historical fabrications.
I'll give him this though; he acknowledges socialism's contribution to European stagnation. His solution that the assimilation of Islam into a post-modern Europe is plain fantasy.
What I drew from the article was the islam is incompatible with Europe...yet Europe has allowed the wolf to come into the house.
The concluding paragraph is confused, and contradicts itself by asking nothing of the Islamic world. It's all on the West.
That's why I voted for Trump this morning.
Good for you.
I also thought the last paragraph, such as it was, could have been left out.
That said, it is the fault of the West that we allow muslims to enter our world.
That’s a good book.
His apparent need to incorporate current popular ahistorical ideology prevents him from getting the universal basic: that squabbling factions (eg, European nationalities) always need an external threat to unite in a common overarching cause. This occurred as he notes, with early threats from Islam. More relevant, it also occurred (which he misses) in the face of imperialistic Soviet communism, with western Europe bolstered in common cause by the Anglosphere.
In other words, the issue is not about Islam, it is about us.
The fall of totalitarian communism enabled the dissipation of the western alliance into the flabby remnants of NATO and the pseudo state of the EU, neither of which even approaches efficacy in facing renewed Islamic aggression. The current post-Cold War vitiation of western culture obscures the fact that Islam represents a cultural threat even more than a terroristic or military threat.
The solution, if Europe and the west are to have one, is not so much a "return to the past" but a recognition that history is cyclic rather than linear. In other words, we have been here before. In the past the emerging West met external threat by uniting around a common sense of security, energized by a cultural identity. That identity must be reignited, embodied in stronger states that reflect the people, and recognize the nature of the threat.
It is the attempt to fatalistically accommodate the flood of alien culture that is a recipe for surrender and assisted suicide.
I recently read “Isabella the Warrior Queen” by Kirsten Downey. Fascinating history. Isabella of Spain is due credit for the development of Europe (not to mention the Western Hemisphere).
Can’t recommend that specific book however. The author betrays bias despite having to refer to muslim atrocities throughout the book. For example, page 8 mentions Jesus as simply a Jew who announced a new religion; but the first mention of Muhammad is “the prophet Muhammad;” and 400 pages later, on her deathbed, Isabella is providing ransom funds for hostages held by “what she called infidels.”
History has gotten to be such a cow pasture of progressive anti-West bigotry. /rant
My reading of that is there is no way to "incorporate" a 7th century culture into a postmodern society. We are already seeing individual rights being subsumed for the muslim "citizens".
Articles and books which try to minimize the greatness of the west or attribute its rise to outside forces, as this article does, are undermining the very confidence the author says is necessary for the integration he fancies.
Cultural confidence must be homegrown, the attack on "nationalism" is self-serving for the cosmopolitan elite that have no allegiance to the native peoples of Europe.
He quotes arab apologists to support his notion that Europe is dead and can never again be a strong and thriving culture.
The answer is defeatism and dhimmitude because while the European elites are too sophisticated for nationalism the islamists certainly are not and will use it to subjugate the Belgian and the French people while their so-called leaders congratulate themselves from behind high walls.
But what the article nearly touch upon (walked up and touched...then quickly ran away) is how islam in Europe is giving rebirth or renaissance to the Right and its basis in reality as opposed to the basis of the Left which is fantasy and idealism.
But the article denigrates that movement and says there is no future in reemerging "nationalism", which is of course, merely people trying to hold onto their own culture.
The left hates culture and will only use one culture to destroy a stronger one.
That's why they currently love islam despite its incompatibility w/ everything the they supposedly hold dear. It's a means to an end for them.
Islam will allow them, the left, to destroy individual rights and that is the purpose of the left.
and the book that is essential reading if one wishes to understand what the threat of Islam really is->
Remember just how North African states fell to Muslims:
TREACHERY!
Their so-called leaders, kings, bishops and whatnot SECRETLY CONVERTED and let the enemy in to take over. They remained in power—their people LOST EVERYTHING.
SOUND FAMILIAR, you EUropean crazies????
Yep, not so much as a single fragment of evidence to back up the notion that assimilation is occurring. Indeed, everything points to Europe being "assimilated" into the Caliphate.
I normally like Kaplan’s writing but this article is just blinkered. Not once does it mention theocracy ... the ends of Islam. There is no compatibility between Islamic theocracy and relative Liberalism as evolved through Christianity.
As Kaplan mentions, it took a slow and tortuous path through many centuries to reach relative Liberalism (big L) and democratic ideals. It was a long and bloody path. Looks like it will be again.
What a fascinating site!
It is, indeed.
Ancient Topic!
Just adding to the GGG catalog, not pinging.
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