he
questions of the hour are "Is Islam the problem?" and
"If so, then what is Islam?" The West had been waiting
for the formidable Salman Rushdie - a man who has been
living under a "fatwa" a few years longer than the rest
of us - to weigh in, and he did so in early November,
answering the question "Is it Islam?" with a resounding
yes.
Islam, he noted,
unlike Christianity, is a petrified belief structure that
has never undergone any sort of Reformation since its
inception in the seventh century; its most modern self-critique
consists of 18th-century Wahhabism, a fundamentalist,
puritanical, theocratic reaction to the "corruption of
the true faith" which has now found its most perfect incarnation
in the Taliban.
Another man
who should know, expatriate Iranian author and journalist
Amir Taheri, also begs us to blame Islam. "The refusal
to subject Islam to rational analysis" - anathema to believers
- "is a recipe for further fanaticism," wrote Mr. Taheri
in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27.
"All but one
of the world's remaining military regimes are in Muslim
countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh,
there are no real elections in any Muslim country. Of
the current 30 active conflicts in the world no fewer
than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities.
Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held
in Muslim countries, which also carry out 80 percent of
all executions each year."
Islam should
be critiqued not as a belief system but as "an existential
reality," argues Mr. Taheri, one that prevents Muslim
nations "from developing a modern political culture, without
which they cannot reform their societies and rebuild their
economies."
Nick Griffin
is a British National Party politician who just shocked
the U.K. establishment by winning 16.4 percent of the
general election vote in Oldham, a town in the north of
England where Muslim riots and attacks on white Britons
have become epidemic. He was in the States the other day
to warn Americans what is in store for us as the "clash
of civilizations" gets up-close and personal.
Mr. Griffin
has made a study of Islam and finds it to be not a religion,
in the sense of requiring some sort of moral response
from the believer, but rather a tendency, in the political
sense of a faction contesting for power. The Koran, which
he likens to "the Talmud on angel dust," instructs believers
living in "infidel" nations to lay low until they reach
about 10 percent of the population; then they may attack
and disrupt the sinful host society with a better chance
of ultimate takeover.
With a birthrate
of six children per woman in contrast to the native British
rate of 1.7, Muslims are massing to hit that critical
percentage in Britain very soon. In France they are already
there, and Muslim unrest, from gangs assaulting French
girls to machine-gun attacks on police stations, has been
steadily increasing. Mr. Griffin warns that the European
experience has destroyed any illusions about Muslim assimilation
of the West. Official protestations to the contrary, they
are here not to assimilate, but to conquer.
What is the
wellspring of this implacable enmity? We know its history:
briefly, the repulsion of the Mohammedan armies by Charles
the Hammer near Tours in 732 A.D., the attack on Jerusalem
by the First Crusade in 1099 and the Crusades that followed,
the Cid's exploits in the 12th century, Ferdinand and
Isabella's expulsion of the Moors from most of Spain in
1492, Phillip III's reconquest of Granada and the remaining
Moor-held Spanish provinces in 1609, the halt of the Ottoman
Empire's forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman
collapse after World War I.
But what keeps
Islam's appetite for conflict with "Christendom" ever
whetted? After all, Spain no longer simmers vengefully
over England's rude reception of the Armada, nor are the
Dutch still spoiling for a rematch over the East Indies.
Islam does not move on because for some reason it cannot.
Shelby Steele
wrote "War of the Worlds" for the Wall Street Journal
of Sept. 17 a stirring ode to Western civilization in
which he declared, "It has always astounded me how much
white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly
decisive heritage of Western culture," and warned that
"White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West [and]
only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual" Third
World. Later, one Sajid Ali Khan opined from London that
"Greek civilization was fortunately translated into Arabic
and thence percolated into 'the West.' And so on so forth.
For instance do his heroic paler-skinned not all use Arabic
numerals? The Arab al-gibr gives rise to algebra in the
most recent spelling, and also to the sort of gibberish
with which Mr. Steele is haunted."
Preferring
not to dwell on the peculiarities of Mr. Khan's opinion,
Jed Skillman opined back from Brookfield, Ill., that he
had missed the point: "It's true the West has adopted
the use of Arabic numerals. It happened some time ago
and it's not news. I think the point is that no one thinks
of himself as 'acting Arabic' for doing so." In other
words, algebra was a long time ago - what have you done
for us lately?
Explaining
why the Arab world, once a center of learning and scientific
inquiry, had lost momentum to the West by around 1500,
Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy noted mildly in the
New York Times on Oct. 30: "The notion that all knowledge
is in the Great Text [Koran] is a great disincentive to
learning." Arab scholars may have preserved and translated
the treasures of Greek science, keeping them alive to
be passed later to Europeans, and collaborated on the
invention of zero and the decimal system, but they could
not sustain the social conditions necessary to the search
for scientific truth.
Because Islamic
states are theocratic, they dare not encourage theoretical
inquiries and technological innovations that would tend
to produce strains in what should be a perfect and immutable
God-ordained system. And because the Islamic motivation
to do science is only religious, the kind of disinterested,
open-ended "pure" science that has so benefited the world
is rarely pursued.
One also need
not be a Friedan feminist to see how the lowly status
of Muslim women permits an unhealthy psychic base of unearned
male supremacism. Chivalry, another innovation unique
to the West, was a deliberate drive by European men to
reform masculinity and to honor women qua women. Muslim
polygamy, likewise, creates a large pool of "undomesticated"
and disenfranchised men ripe for recruitment to fanaticism,
while Western monogamy has worked to offer each man a
peaceful democratic stake in society (cf. the writings
of Kevin MacDonald).
One of the
nastier features of globalization is how every culture
is now forced to compare itself to every other. No more
do the veiling effects of time and distance mercifully
render "mysterious" the brutish everyday realities of
more backward peoples. For those who once were great and
now are way behind, the glare of global invidious comparison
is particularly unbearable.
Not a contemporary
but nonetheless a highly modern voice is that of Friedrich
Nietzsche, the "posthumous" man who inhabited a world
post-God and beyond Good and Evil. His critique of ressentiment
- the "self-poisoned mind" of resentment - fits Islam
like a glove. For Nietzsche, the repressed emotion of
ressentiment leads at length to an entire falsified worldview,
a whole revalued code of values, a complete morality based
upon sour grapes, vindictiveness, delusions of grandeur
and an embittered sense of helpless inferiority. The envied
enemy is hated for his superior virtues, which are transformed
by the alchemy of ressentiment into objects of loathing.
Sociologists
also distinguish between two types of juvenile deviant
behavior: criminality which aims at direct personal gain,
and delinquency which targets symbols such as schools
and churches. This distinction accounts for the strong
element of vandalism - sheer malicious joy in destroying
- that is so striking in the current terrorist campaign;
Islam is collective, ethnic ressentiment expressing itself
in the attempted wholesale vandalization of Western society.
The "Son of
Sam" defense ("My dog made me do it") has now been joined
by the "Son of Islam" defense ("My god made me do it").
Gods, dogs - as long as you can relocate the will to kill
and maim outside yourself in some higher power, you're
righteous. Right?
Before September
11, Americans who reacted against the many hate-filled
threats and insults directed at our country were labeled
"paranoid" and instructed to blithely ignore such provocations.
Now the media squeak in wonderment at "how naive we all
were," and scold us to hurry up and worry about everything
under the sun.
Meanwhile,
London's Sunday Telegraph reports that our close trading
partners, the Chinese, by the thousands are snapping up
garish videos of the September attack with narration like
"This is the America the whole world has wanted to see,"
and "Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off
the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings - now
just a heap of rubble. We will never fear these people
again, they have been shown to be soft- bellied paper
tigers."
Please let
us know when it's no longer "paranoid" to react to these
little digs, OK?
