Or maybe this guy:
Charles Sidney "El Sid" Fernandez
Posted on 11/08/2001 11:27:01 AM PST by ouroboros
Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by.
One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam’s past and predicted, in his book The Great Heresies, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic revival, even in the twentieth century, was altogether possible.
Belloc saw Islam not as an alien religion, but in its origins as a Christian heresy, adopting and adapting certain Christian doctrines (monotheism, the immortality of the soul, final judgment) and rejecting others (original sin, the Incarnation and divinity of Christ, the sacraments). Its simple, rational creed had a powerful appeal to Arabs who had known only the arbitrary gods of grim pagan religions. It swept the Arab world, then made converts — and conquests — far beyond Arabia.
Islam was a militant religion from the start. Mohammed himself conquered the entire Arabian Peninsula in just a few years. The new faith was torn by violent internal divisions even as it continued to spread. But spread it did, with incredible rapidity.
Christians had good reason to fear Islam, which soon conquered Spain and held it for centuries. But because Islam has little attraction for Christians, the West has generally failed to grasp its appeal for others, its profound and permanent hold on the minds of believers. Unlike the Christian West, the Muslim world has never had crises of faith like the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Islam is a simple religion, easily understood by ordinary people. Its commandments are rigorous but few. When it conquered, its subjugated people often felt more liberated than enslaved, because it often replaced burdensome old bureaucratic governments with relatively undemanding regimes — and low taxes. As long as its authority was respected, Islamic rule was comparatively libertarian. It offered millions relief from their traditional oppression; for example, no Muslim could be a slave.
Belloc distinguishes sharply between Islam and such barbarous conquerors as the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan. The Mongols were purely destructive; they were known for slaughtering whole cities and making huge pyramids of severed heads.
Such savagery was alien to the Muslims. Where they conquered, daily life usually went on much as before and culture thrived. In many respects the Muslim world was far more civilized than Christian Europe for centuries. The West hated and dreaded Islam, but nobody would have thought of calling it backward.
That contemptuous image came much later, when modern Europe’s science, technology, and — above all — weaponry had eclipsed those of the Arabs. We are apt to forget how recently this development occurred; and, as Belloc warned, it is not irreversible.
Man, especially irreligious man, is apt to equate power and progress. Many of those who say America is “the greatest country on earth” really mean only that America has fantastic military might, capable of annihilating any other country — and some of them, at the moment, are in the mood to do some annihilating. To the pious Muslim this attitude seems crass and barbaric. He may conclude from it that the decadent West understands only one thing: force.
And would he be far wrong? Belloc admitted that the idea of a new Muslim challenge to the West seemed “fantastic,” but only because the West was “blinded” by “the immediate past.” Taking a longer view, he saw Islam, though inferior in material power, as having a great advantage: its religious faith was still strong, while the West was losing its religion and consequently its morale. He thought it entirely possible that Islam would catch up technologically, while he doubted that the West would undergo a spiritual revival.
Are we seeing the beginning of the fulfillment of Belloc’s prophecy? If so, the current uproar over Islamic terrorism may turn out to be a mere superficial symptom of a much larger historical drama. The West is still strong, but it is dying. Islam is still weak, but it is growing. Never mind the terrorists; check the birthrates.
Ibn Rushd worked mightily to do for Islam what Aquinas had done for Christianity - to reconcile pagan philosophy and revelation. His life work was a commentary on Aristotle. And it was people like him who kept alive the magnificent science, medicine, and philosophy of medieval Islam.
What went wrong, quite simply, is that the fundies won. Imagine a US in which not just Evolution, but almost every scientific finding is outlawed, including genetics, the germ theory of disease, Newton's laws (no, Ali, apples drop because Allah wills it), and so on. That's what happened to Islam.
I've not participated in the Islam bashing here, but now I'll say this: Islam and the West are on a collision course, and the only way to prevent a catastrophe is, indeed, to "de-fundamentalise" Islam. As it happens, we are doing the exact opposite, and have been for years. The heart of modern Islamic fundamentalism is Wahhabism; the sole major supporter of this sect is the House of Saud. And the House of Saud exists only becase the US props it up, as it has done for decades.
That is a contradiction in foreign policy that must be resolved.
Edited version to follow in the morning. Again.
True, because they were DEAD.
Yeah, the Moors had a real positive influence on Spain. < /sarcasim>
5.56mm
I may try to cut and paste the discussion of Belloc's anti-semitism since I still believe there's a difference in finding fault with certain Zionists and finding fault with "Jews".
In addition to the conversion of Russia, I'll pray one day we can all have that conversation here on the boards and iron a few things out.
All of the current forms of Islam are doomed unless they can go through some sort of reformation. The Sufis may hold a key to this, but I do not know if Islam can be reformed. Its simplicity makes it monolithic, unyielding, and unbending.
The Muslims as they swept through North Africa which was predominantly Byzantine Christian at the time, killed, raped and pillaged on their way up to Spain. They did preserve much of the Byzantine culture which was more intellectually advanced than both the Muslim world and Western Europe at the time.
I like Sobran's writing but to suggest that they strolled into Spain using Aristotelian logic on the poor natives to convince them to convert just does not jibe with reality. Tell that to Charles Martel and El Cid.
Sounds like Joe's a regular here. But seriously, I'd think that when Americans talk about the greatness of our country, very, very few really mean that America can destroy other countries. I think they refer to our freedoms first of all, to our wealth and strength and perhaps to our morals as well. It's not simply a question of destructive power. Sobran has criticized Bush for his simplified view that the conflict is about envy or good vs. evil, but Joe looks pretty simplistic and distorted himself here.
A pious Muslim, like a pious Christian would find boastfulness about one's own sheer power distasteful. It's also true, though, that some of the religious positively delight in their God's destructive power. You may say, "we are free, we have a marvellous culture," but they interpret everything in terms of your God's power against their Gods. And some devout Muslims rejoiced in their co-religionists ability to destroy the towers.
Joe is doing the same thing that the neo-con writers are doing, just with the opposite goal in mind. He's creating his model Muslim and fitting him with the characteristics that he wants that Muslim to have to make his argument work. To get at what real Muslims might think, you'd have to look elsewhere and take in more sources
Re Belloc: We've just come out of a two- or three-generation war between Democracy or Liberty and its Fascist and Communist opponents. I hope we're not facing an equally long conflict with Islam. I don't feel up to it just now. I pass my torch on to a new generation.
Today's conflict can be seen as a result of the "One World" idea. Once there was our house, their house, the Indian and Chinese houses and so forth. Now we are One World in one house, and a house divided against itself cannot stand. If it doesn't fall completely it will become all one thing or all another. Belloc and others of missionary temper wouldn't agree, but one of the great achievements of the Twentieth Century was that toleration that let people worship the God they chose and come together for secular purposes. A world all one thing or all another would lose some of its flavor, richness, and spirit.
True, but the west and the church in the wast emerged stronger and better able to face the modern age because of these + the renaissance. The west became strong because of the Islamic world. At the end of the crusades all these knights etc. came back to europe having aquired a taste for things like bathing, and food that had spices in them plus they brought all these books writen by the greeks and romans and BOOM an explosion of new ideas took place. The Islamic world had all this learning but didn't do anything with it. At one point in the 12th century the university of paris had a grand total of 12 books, one library in barrsalona(sp) alone had something like 25,000. It took a bunch of greedy western europeans to grab it and fly.
Yes, they did. The Moorish civilization of Al-Andalus was in its day one of the finest in the world.
el CID c.1043 - 1099
Spanish Warrior
El Cid was born Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar in Spain. He was a military leader who became a Spanish national hero through exageration of his role in history by chroniclers.
El Cid became a commander under the Castilian king in 1065. He was the hero in the struggle to liberate Toledo from the Moslems. After a conflict with his king he entered the Moors service. He served the Muslim rulers of Saragossa while preparing to seize control of the Moorish kingdom of Valencia, accomplishing that in 1094. He ruled it until his death, but it again fell under Muslim control afterward.
Or maybe this guy:
Charles Sidney "El Sid" Fernandez
Maybe, if you totally discount the slave trade.
5.56mm
The question is, can an ersatz religion designed for propagandistic purposes prevail over religions of true spiritual insight such as Judaism and Christianity? No doubt that by removing all the diffucult for human comprehenion stuff, like original sin or the sacraments, they got an effective tool of social cohesion. So the world of Islam is filled with committed fools, while the smart ones secularize and emigrate. On the other hand our material progress, that manifests itself in military power among other things, is a consequence of our spirit of truth-seeking, which we got straight from the Genesis.
Gecko once wrote a piece on the ascendance of Islam. Let's see if I can find it.
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