Rosetta stone territory in those two sentences. Thank you for taking the trouble to post this interesting interview.
I noticed that Lewis commits the very error he warns against by projecting his own world-view onto his subject.There is this tendency among "Islamic experts" to ascribe everything that is occuring to the religion of Islam. This is, of course, a projection of the obsessions of post-christian, secular scholars. As with historians of medieval Christendom, these scholars have an unintentionally ironic tendency to inflate the religious content of every worldy political, social, military and economic confrontation.
A perfect of example of this is in the linked article "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in which he casually speaks of the "terrible religious wars" in Europe as though their roots were entirely and specifically theological. This is a fantastic, and easily disproved assertion. These wars were far more complex than triumphant enlightenment analysis would have it.
It seems to me that to pay excessive obeisance to moslem religious scruples as a "root cause" of the ongoing "clash of civilizations" would be to miss the mark as widely as those who pay no heed to them at all.
Also, just as an aside, I noticed in the subtext of this interview how vulnurable "Christendom" is to having its history caricatured and de-natured by post-christian scholarship. Without a political base from which to exert "earthly" power a religious culture really has no chance of defining itself in the face of its enemies--active or passive.
We see this at work every day in the American media and the continual defensive posture of "fundamentalist" christians in the face of definitions of their behavior and beliefs by those who neither know nor care about their beliefs and are often actively hostile to them on the basis of their own prejudice against "fundamentalism".
Perhaps, in some strange way, "backwards" moslems are ahead of Western Christians in their understanding and analysis of who's zoomin' who.
I just finished flipping through a Mid-East travel guide published by Harvard Press. It acknowledged that Israel is important to the "Three Great Monotheistic" religions. It goes to great length to srupulously detail the religious "beliefs" and practices of moslems--with great approval and a sort of condescending contempt for the reader's assumed philistinism in the face of such delightful, spiritually uplifting and healthy practices.
The Jewish religion is presented more as a great, ongoing historical saga.
The Christian religion, on the other hand, is dismissed with a terse reference to the split between the Eastern and Western Church!!
Whenever we hear the theory of "the clash of civilizations" being bandied about--whether from the mouths of government officials, media commetators or as in this Lewis interview--we see a complete unwillingness to countenance a contemporary christian element to the struggle. Christianity is dismissed with terse references to the lingering resentments of the "horrors" of the crusades.
I can't help returning to the image of the two World Trade Towers collapsing onto the tiny Greek Orthodox Church. It seemed an apt metaphor to explain my unease with Bush's famous "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists," dictum. My unease has grown as large as Bush's poll numbers.
>Perhaps, in some strange way, "backwards" moslems are ahead of Western Christians in their understanding and analysis of who's zoomin' who.
Yes. And perhaps in some strange way the terrorists who piloted the planes into the WTC were innocent victims, and the two thousand plus people working in the Towers who are now memories were terrorists.
>Without a political base from which to exert "earthly" power a religious culture really has no chance of defining itself in the face of its enemies--active or passive. We see this at work every day in the American media and the continual defensive posture of "fundamentalist" christians ...
[sigh] A religion that's not driven by the spirit world -- in the case of Christianity, not driven by the Holy Spirit -- isn't a religion at all. It is politics. Or an advertising campaign.
>I just finished flipping through a Mid-East travel guide published by Harvard Press. ...
The American media, even Harvard Press, neither define religion in America, nor "reflect" pop culture. They are more Establishment cattle prods than they are mirrors, even of the fun house variety.
Mark W.
Interesting that you mention this in the same post in which you lament the destruction of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. The Christian Roman empire, and certainly its Byzantine remnant, are a nice example of a political base for an authentically religious culture. Speaking of interpreting history through one's preoccupations, I wonder if you're aware of the late Stephen Runciman's view of the crusades as the last of the barbarian invasions.
In the West, of course, we have the unique polity that is the Holy See, which bids fair to remain influential for the forseeable future. Only today I started reading a diplomatic history of the Vatican in the age of the 20th century dictators. Small as it was, without this political base from which a religious culture works, history would have proceeded very differently.
"I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Bedouins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and, for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was as dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was an hereditary lawyer or arbiter among them, the the custome of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice, ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ [Christian (Nazarene)] They said, “Khalîl [the Stranger] was come of himself.’ Then turning to Hamed he whispered a word which I well overheard, ‘Why have you not left him -- thus?’ and he made the sign of the dead lying gasping upright. Hamed asnwered the shrew in a sort of sighing, Istugfir Ullah, ‘Lord I cry thee mercy!’ Târiba (the man’s name) was of a saturnine turning humour; and upon a time afterward, with the same voice, he defended me at Teyma, against the splenetic fanaticism of some considerable villager, threatening me that ‘except I would convert to the religion of Ullah and his Apostle, as I carelessly passed by day and by night in the lanes and paths of the oasis, a God-fearer’s gunshot might end my life.’ Târiba answered him with displeasure, ‘Wellah, [Indeed (by God)] the Beduw be better than ye!’ Târiba’s cavilling was now also for my greeting (as they use) salaam aleyk, ‘peace be with you’. It is ‘the salutation of Islam and not for the mouths of the heathen, with whom is no peace nor fellowship, neither in this world not the next:’ also he would let the people know I was a khawâja. This is the titles of Jews and Christians in the mixed Semitic cities of the Arabian conquest."
One hundred years later, in VS Naipaul's Among the Believers, very little seems to have changed. Yet Doughty's impoverished Bedouin, too backward to grasp the complete otherness of an Englishman, despise kaffirs already, for their unbelief only, not even sensing the existence of a culture to clash with theirs.
So true. One of the great lies of our time, engineered no doubt some by anonymous Gramscian martyr, is the notion that "religion has killed more people than any other cause." Our children barely make it through 2nd grade before they begin spouting this little meme, and even otherwise intelligent and educated adults cling to it.
Preposterous!
I'm actually in the middle of a little experiment. I'm adding up all of the deaths attributable to Secular Materialists (Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Napoleon, among many many others) in order to compare the death toll to that of all of the "religious wars" in world history.
It's early in the process, but the Secularists are already well over 200MM. I'd wager that the Religionists never get close to that mark.