I’ve just finished reading Robert Spencer’s excellent book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades).
It’s my first real foray into the topic of Islam, which I previously only really understood through shadowy memories from history classes that touched on the topic. From those memories, I had always had the distinct impression that Islam was an inherently violent religion. This later reinforced by a stunning homily I heard at Mass a few years ago by a priest not afraid to make the distinction between the notions that are pushed on us by Islam and the PC campaign to protect it and the reality that history and the Qu’ran itself bear witness to. It was the first time I had heard the case clearly made that “Islam” did not mean “Peace” but rather “Submission.”
Europe still bears the scars of the centuries-long war with Islamic jihad, and once understood all too well that it is not a “religion of peace”. The refurbished 14th century Carthusian Monastery I stayed in as a student in Franciscan University’s Austria program was said to still bear the scorch marks from flaming arrows fired by the invading Turks. I also spent a decent amount of time in southern Spain as well, walking the palace grounds of the Allhambra, home to the Moorish invaders during a good portion of their 800-year-long occupation of parts of the Spanish Kingdom.
These echoes of the glory days of jihad are treated as historical curiosities. What we in the West fail, it seems, to understand, is that Islam’s quest for global expansion and totalitarian control of all nations has never ceased. If I learned one theme from Spencer’s book, it’s this: while moderate Muslims may exist, the religion of Islam is itself never moderate.
We hear references to “Islamofascism” and “Muslim extremists” and any number of other euphemisms that seek to distinguish men like Osama bin Laden from the Muslim faith. Few seem to take the time to stop and think that bin Laden may be something other than an extremist - he may be simply an orthodox Muslim, who follows the example of Mohammed and the dictates of the Qu’ran.
I grow increasingly convinced that this is true.
In the book, Spencer references a definition of the term Islamophobia penned by writer Stephen Schwartz:
Islamophobia consists of:
- attacking the entire religion of Islam as a problem for the world;
- condemning all of Islam and its history as extremist;
- denying the active existence, in the contemporary world, of a moderate Muslim majority;
- insisting that Muslims accede to the demands of non-Muslims (based on ignorance and arrogance) for various theological changes, in their religion;
- treating all conflicts involving Muslims (including, for example, that in Bosnia-Hercegovina a decade ago), as the fault of Muslims themselves;
- inciting war against Islam as a whole.
Spencer does his own treatment of these points, but I’d like to touch on them from my perspective. I think that Islam is a problem for the whole world, and has been from the beginning. I think that while it’s difficult to categorize the entire history of any system of belief or action as extremist, Islam, properly applied, is extreme by the standards of the Western World, which we believe are the standards that most closely adhere to natural law. The question of a “moderate Muslim majority” seems a straw man to me. I tend to define a person’s religion by how closely it adheres to the fundamental tenets of that religion. Call to Action claims they are Catholic; I submit that they are not, because they do not follow Catholic teaching. A group that disavows the Qu’ran’s repeated instructions on dhimmitude, the treatment of women, and the necessity of jihad, among other detestable things, seems to me not to be Muslim. But it would require such a disavowal for any group to be able to call itself “moderate”.
I won’t address the other points, because I think what I’m trying to say is clear: those of us who adhere to the fundamental beliefs of religious dogma, whatever our religion, have a clearer understanding of the immutable nature of truths we believe to be divinely revealed. If the divinely revealed truths of Islam require them to act in ways not at all incompatible with the methods of Al Qaida, then we are deceiving ourselves in trying to claim that those who condemn the methods of Al Qaida can’t in any strict sense call themselves orthodox Muslims. They become something else when they change, and this is something that the deconstructionist views the West has adopted seems incapable of grasping.
If recognizing this makes me an “Islamophobe” then I suppose I’ll have to accept the title.
This morning, I started the next book in my queue, Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West. Buchanan cites Gustave Le Bon, from his classic The Crowd:
The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a porfound modification in the ideas of the peoples…The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought…The present epoch is one of these crtical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.
On this prescient observation, Buchanan comments:
Le Bon was speaking of his own time, the end of the nineteenth century, but what he wrote is truer of ours.
For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a “profound modidication in the ideas” of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration. Now that all the Western empires are gone, Western Man, relieved of his duty to civilize and Christianized mankind, reveling in luxury in our age of self-indulgence, seems to have lost his will to live and reconciled himself to his impending death.
This is precisely what Spencer argues must not be allowed to continue. We must stop hating our culture and being ashamed of the accomplishments of Western Civilization. We must stop apologizing for the Crusades and start realizing they may the only thing that preserved European culture from the onslaught of the Muslim invaders.
Our populations in the West are diminishing, and the Third World is growing. And among the Third World nations with population growth are those who believe in jihad, in the spread of Sharia law, in the return to dhimmitude and the eradication of human rights and the freedom of religion.
We are signing our own death warrant by doing nothing. This is a slow, painful process, a death by a thousand cuts. We need to reclaim our culture and be willing to identify our enemies, rather than obstinately burying our heads in the sand and pretending we can fight a war on “terror” which makes about as much sense as fighting a war on IEDs. Terror is a tactic, not an enemy.
The enemy is identifiable, and has distinct religious beliefs. Jihad is one of them.
