Posted on 12/06/2001 9:06:57 PM PST by ouroboros
With the ouster of the Taliban and eradication of the al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Islamic extremism has sustained a crushing defeat. But what continues to unsettle Americans is that film of Arab and Islamic people, wildly cheering the barbaric atrocities of Sept. 11.
Is a war of civilizations coming?
Clearly, not a few in the Islamic world and the West so believe, and ardently desire. And, with the War Party cawing for an attack on Iraq, with Sharon unleashed after the atrocities in Jerusalem and Haifa, with the U.S. press calling for a reappraisal of our ties to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a clash of civilizations has moved from the possible to the probable.
President Bush, however, seems instinctively aware such a war would be a disaster. For no matter how many deaths or defeats we inflict, we cannot kill Islam as we did Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism and Soviet Bolshevism. Islam has survived for nearly 1,600 years; it is the predominant faith in 57 countries; it is indestructible.
Astonishingly, 63 years ago, when Islam lay dormant under the heel of Western empires, a famous Catholic writer predicted Islam would rise again. Wrote Hillaire Belloc: "It has always seemed to me ... probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Islam was a Christian heresy, Belloc believed, whose strength lay in its "insistence on personal immortality, the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on his Justice and Mercy [and] ... its insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator."
While The Prophet "gave to our Lord the highest reverence, and the Mother of God was ever for him the first of womankind," he rejected the Incarnation. Mohammed "taught that our Lord was the greatest of all Prophets, but still only a prophet, a man like other men." Belloc believed Islam to be a "Reformation" movement with parallels to "the Protestant Reformers – on Images, the Mass and Celibacy."
When Christians were illiterate, Islam spread "for 700 years, until it had mastered the Balkans and the Hungarian plain, and all but occupied Western Europe itself," almost destroying Christendom "through its early material and intellectual superiority."
Three heroes saved the West. In 732, at Poitiers, Charles Martel, the Hammer of the Franks, stopped Islam's invasion in France. In 1571, the Christian fleets of Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V, destroyed the Mohammedan armada in an epic battle immortalized in Chesterton's "The Ballad of Lepanto." And Polish Catholic King John Sobieski stopped the Turks at Vienna "on a date that ought to be famous in history, September 11, 1683."
One of history's great questions is why the Islamic world collapsed. A century before Yorktown, Constantinople was superior in arms. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Islamic world was not only superseded by the West, it fell backward – in technology, industry, communications, arms and governance. The Ottoman Empire became "the sick man of Europe."
Colonization by the West followed. In the 20th century, only at Gallipoli – the 1915 battle that cost its architect, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, his post – can one recall an Islamic victory over a Western army.
But if a clash of civilizations is coming, how stands the balance of power? In wealth and might, the West is supreme – though wealth did not prevent the collapse of the Western empires and did not prevent the collapse of the Soviet empire. Rome was mighty, and early Christianity pathetically weak. Yet, Christianity triumphed.
If belief is decisive, Islam is militant, Christianity milquetoast. In population, Islam is exploding, the West dying. Islamic warriors are willing to suffer defeat and death, the West recoils at casualties. They are full of grievance; we, full of guilt. Where Islam prevails, it asserts a right to impose its dogma, while the West preaches equality. Islam is assertive, the West apologetic – about its crusaders, conquerors and empires.
Don't count Islam out. It is the fastest growing faith in Europe and has surpassed Catholicism worldwide. And as Christianity expires in the West and the churches empty out, the mosques are going up.
To defeat a faith, you need a faith. What is ours? Individualism, democracy, pluralism, la dolce vita? Can they overcome a fighting faith, 16 centuries old, and rising again?
Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. Now a commentator and columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national televison shows, and is the author of six books. His current position is chairman of The American Cause. His newest book, "Death of the West," will be published in January.
Copernicus and Mendel were both clerics; Descartes, Pascal, and Gallileo, though facing different levels of patronage and prosecution at the hands of church authorities, were hardly secularists. You know, of course, that medieval Islam aquired its learning from the Orthodox Christian East?
It took much time and blood before France got its balance back.If a portion of the success elsewhere in Europe (including England) was due to 'theft' of Chuch property that 'theft' was good,'the system worked.'
Alas, I'm only somewhat surprised to hear genocidal communism praised on FR. Who was it that said "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs"? V.I. Lenin?
I'm hardly spinning, just trying to correct the view that Europe was simply an obscurantist charnel-house from the Romans until such-and-such a period after the Renaissance. Such a civilization could hardly have built the millennium-old cathedrals, or incorporated the universities of Oxford and Paris.
'Medieval' Islam preserved and studied all the works of the Greeks as well as creating their own works.Algebra came from them as I am sure you know.Of course,it wasn't 'medieval' Islam,Islam's great civilizations were concurrent with Europe's dark ages and medieval period,application of the term medieval to Islam at that time is a misnomer.
Medieval Western Europe's universities were studying the Greeks as soon as they got their hands on the texts--a long process, this being before Gutenberg. Medieval Islamic scholars, their forefathers having overrun most of the Eastern Roman Empire, simply had easier access to the source.
I hate quibbling over dated eras, since they are usually arbitrarily labled by historians with an eye for taxonomy. The beginning of the Mohammedan Era started in what, 670? The Dark Ages are generally pegged between the fall of Rome and the Carolinginan Renaissance--circa 800--or as late as 1000. Averroes and Avicenna, two of the greatest Arabic minds, were puttering around in the 11th and 12th centuries, and thus contemporary with the even the latest dating of the European middle ages.
I interpreted your declaration that the Revolution was a "balance" to atrocities perpetrated by Catholics, as somehow justifying the mass slaughter of the time. Sorry for misinterpreting you.
Thats a cheap house. Where do you find one like that?
Son, you are on the wrong thread. Such foolish neocon beliefs are not welcome here in the Patsie universe.
Your post was more thoughtful and contained more insights than Pat's piece.
Pat wants to sell books. Pat has an audience that is predisposed to buy his books. He knows what it is this audience wants to hear, so this is what he writes. "The Death of the West" was written for that audience and this column was written to help market it -- not to express any thoughts that might lead to other conclusions.
Pat is no longer in the original idea business. He is now in the business of "working the room".
Radical Islam & Basic Human Nature are antithetical.
The "West" has the very nature of Humankind as its most potent ally.
"Radical Islam" is an "itch" humankind is now forced to "scratch!"
Doc
Hmmmmmmmmmm.........While I tend to agree with your point I would like to add a further corollary:
Christianity and Judaism CREATED the modern world, and Islam can't adapt.
{For example see: "Why West is Best" by Paul Johnson; National Review; Dec 3, 2001; Vol. 53, Iss. 23; pg.18} Not to quibble, but to raise a valid point.
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