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Commentary: Analysis
Islam: The Apparently Unconvertible Religion
Sunday, March 27, 2011
by James Schall
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James V. Schall, S. J. is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington
DC and one of the most prolific writers on political philosophy and theology
now living. Here in a speech he gave in February 2003, he reflects on the
legacy of the Belgium-born master of English prose Hillaire Belloc in coming to
an understanding of the challenge that Islam poses to Western Civilization and
the Christian Faith. It appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day, LXIX (April 1,
2003), 375-82 .
BELLOC ON THE "APPARENTLY UNCONVERTIBLE" RELIGION
"Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts
made by great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn
Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed.
We have in some places driven the Mohammedan master out and freed his
Christian subjects from Mohammedan control, but we have had hardly any effect
in converting individual Mohammedans...." Hillaire Belloc, The Great
Heresies, 1938.1
"Muhammad's monotheism began, no doubt, as a rejection of
paganism; yet it was highly positive. It was, as he never ceased repeating,
the monotheism of Israel. The god of Islam was Yahweh, without those truths
about Him revealed by Christ. ... The Qur'~n denies the Incarnation: `God is
one, eternal. He did not beget and was unbegotten' (Qur'~n, 112.3). For
Muhammad there was no redeemer, no need for redemption, no original sin."
J. Kritzeck/C. Wilde, "Islam," New Catholic Encyclopedia (2d
Edition, 2003), V. 7, 608.
"But there is no hiding the fact that bin Laden, his
lieutenants, and his foot soldiers have repeatedly stated their aim to impose
their values of Islam on, first, the Muslim world and, then, the rest of the
world. They want each country to accept or be forced into submission to their
version of Islamic Shari'a law.... Their public statements, their strategy and
recruitment, the notes and prayers left by the airplane hijackers, all show a
deep religious commitment. They do not lament inequality; decry poverty, or
call for democracy. They do not rant about globalization or consumerism or
capitalism. They explicitly name and target Christianity, Judaism, and
moderate Islam. By all means let us call this inauthentic religion, perverted
religion, hijacked religion. But, at the cost of blinding ourselves, let us
never forget that it is religion."
Islam
at the Crossroads, 2002.2
I.
One of the most difficult exercises in political prudence, I
think, is philosophically to describe accurately a regime in which one is
visiting or in which one lives or in which one finds a formidable adversary.
For, to delineate a regime correctly, we must have some criterion of judgment
according to which we can decide whether any regime is good or bad. Without
this standard, without a universal philosophy and political philosophy in other
words, we are engaged merely in name-calling without substance. This
possibility of describing regimes as they are implies a universal political
philosophy based on foundations independent of, though not unrelated to, actual
regimes, with enough civic freedom to articulate them, hopefully without fear
of prison or death for doing so.
As philosophers, beginning with Socrates, have led us
realize, this effort to examine the nature of a regime can be a dangerous
exercise. Deviant princes and rulers, whatever we call them, do not like to
know what they actually are. And citizens do not like to articulate the real
nature of their rulers, often themselves agreeing with the principles of
regime, a truth Plato taught us long ago when he spoke about the relation of
our souls to our regimes. Princes and people prefer to be told that they
themselves already embody the highest of moral norms, that they do God's will
or are the "best regime," whatever it is they embody in fact according to
classic philosophic standards. This endeavor to identify the type of polity
before us becomes doubly difficult when the regime is also directly or
indirectly said to be a regime that arises from or is devoted to the
implementation of a rule rooted in a revelation or religion. We no longer, in
this case, deal with a regime as a mere political entity, but with one that
claims transcendent origins or justifications. The grounds for the truth of
any revelation cannot be avoided.
Leo Strauss has noted that medieval Muslim philosophers,
aware of this particular difficulty in pronouncing in public the theoretic
character of a regime in which they lived, chose, for safety's sake, to do
their philosophy in private. The philosopher externally did what was expected
of him in terms of devotion and pious practices. But, even though he
dissembles about religion in public, he preferred in private philosophy to
religion as an explanation of the truth of things. Indeed, that alternative to
choose privacy in Islam was the philosophers' only viable alternative if they
wanted to live and philosophize, albeit cautiously.
This move to philosophy meant, in Strauss' view, that the
philosopher had to come up with a theory in which the presumed revelation that
ruled the public order was itself subordinated to philosophy. Philosophy
judged revelation. This judgment meant that the philosopher had to explain the
purpose and content of the revelation's terms on rational grounds alone. The
explained terms of religious credibility, the political theology of the
religion, in other words, were unsustainable intellectually because they could
be fully understood by philosophy. The notion that the Koran, for example, is
a book, the text of which is directly spoken to Mohammed in Arabic with no
intermediary is, even without examining its content for contradictory or false
teachings, unbelievable on any rational grounds.
This task of letting the public life be whatever it is, even
if not credible, was accomplished by treating the way of life depicted in the
Koran to be a "myth" specifically and artfully designed to enable rulers to
keep the intransigent masses in line. This understanding of myth was an
ancient formula dating back at least to Epicurus. Aristotle himself said that
the tyrant, if he wants to stay in power, should observe the local pious
customs; he should keep the masses busy, exhausted, and entertained, while not
allowing anything to be spoken in private. A similar position occurred in late
medieval Europe in what is known as Latin Averröism. This was the position
that there were two "truths," one of revelation and one of reason. The two
could contradict each other, what ever that view might eventually do to the
unity of the human soul. We need not "reconcile" them. If everyone played the
game, this theory allowed the philosopher to philosophize and the believer to
believe with no worry about evident contradictions.
The myth of religion, thus, is useful politically but it is
not true or compatible with philosophy. The philosopher lived a secret or
private life, as Socrates, in his Apology, affirmed that he also did, lest he
be killed sooner. It is taken for granted that no vocal philosopher accused in
the mythic religious polity will survive. These are the rules of the game. It
was thus not possible that more than a few philosophers would know the falsity
of the myth explaining the particular revelation. On the surface, all would be
calm. This difficulty in knowing the truth about our being conformed more or
less to what we know about the opaqueness of human nature, with or without the
notion of The Fall.3 Religion was in effect a useful way to control the
inevitable turmoils in the masses, those who did not know or rule themselves.
Philosophy and truth are not intended for everyone. It is instructive to
recognize that when we come to St. Thomas, it was first necessary for him to
establish that revelation and philosophy were not contradictory to each other
before the truths of revelation and reason could be coherently seen to belong
to the same world of truth and reality. Unavoidably, this position also
required some position on the very truth of the respective revelations.
II.
Considering that, in many ways, Islam has been the oldest and
most persistent enemy of Christianity, the one from which there is rarely a
return if we look back at the lands once conquered by Muslim armies or traders
in whatever century, it is surprising how little the official Church has said
about Islam. St. Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles still seems like the major
Christian effort to define what Islam is. Though Islam is a huge historical
fact, the fastest growing religion in the world today, including at least a
fifth of the world population, with new mosques regularly appearing wherever
they are permitted, we have, for example, no encyclical or letter on "What Is
Islam?" We have nothing that parallels Mit Brennender Sorge or Divini
Redemptoris, no Syllabus of Errors, or Canons of the Council of Trent. It is
almost as if the Church has never considered the truth claims of Islam
important. From a theological point of view, we trace multiple Christian
heresies in our documents, but not Islam, which was, in a way, itself a
Christian heresy. On the surface, this lack seems curious almost as if Islam
was not important enough to take seriously or that there was a certain danger
in doing so.
We do have, to be sure, recent exhortations about what we
have in common with Islam and other religions. Our contemporary mode of
approach is liberal and irenic, dialogue, when and if that is possible, never
any confrontation, even when provoked. We are loathe to mention any problem,
including the vast numbers of Christians killed in Islamic countries in the
past century, except when it is posed in the most general terms that often make
the problems sound to be caused by western ideology, not Muslim belief or
practice. We impose western philosophical or ideological methods of analyses
on Islamic lands and expect this formula to explain their inner ethos. We use
scientific method that blind ourselves to what is going on. In short, we do
not really dialogue with Muslims but with ourselves. It frightens us to hear
ourselves called "infidels" by Muslims because of what we believe about God and
Christ. It is not merely a case of exaggerated rhetoric but the definition of
what seems to threaten Islam, namely, another understanding of God,
particularly the Trinitarian God and the Incarnation. Much of the appeal of
Islam seems to depend directly on the denial of this complex understanding of
the Deity which we are bound to hold and propagate.
The 21st Century, it seems clear, will more likely be a
century of confrontation with world religions rather than with world
ideologies, as was the 20th Century. Few intellectuals expected this event.
In terms of morals and vitality, the West has already declined. Roger
Scruton's remark strikes home: "The intrusion of the media into the battlefield
has had a shattering effect on the perception of war. And the declining
birthrate and increasing longevity of the population have made Western
societies ever more reluctant to risk in combat their dwindling supply of
sons."4 An abundant supply of sons is something that Islam has, many of whom
seem surprisingly willing to die defending or expanding it. Muslim, Hindu,
Chinese, and Buddhist movements seem to have grown stronger not weaker during
the supposedly skeptical 20th Century.
Christian populations are under pressure in India, China, in
Buddhist and Muslim lands. Many Christians in these lands leave voluntarily,
usually under pressure to do so. Most of Christians once in Arab lands are now
in the West. They voted with their feet. Meanwhile, the Muslim presence, due
in part to their comparative increase in numbers, is found everywhere in Europe
and America, along with Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and other representatives of
various world religions. The modern secularist seems almost like a cultural
oddity confined to small academic enclaves in small corners of the world. It
is ironic that much of modern political philosophy was premised on the notion
of reducing the importance of religion to prevent religious and civil wars. In
the light of the stringent closure of these religions in on themselves in their
historical locations, together with their lack of any real sense of religious
freedom based on the dignity of the person, the alternative of skepticism or
atheism almost seems healthy in comparison to the lands in which there is no
escape, except perhaps inwards, as in the case of the medieval Muslim
philosophers.
III.
In this light, it may be of some merit to take a further look
at Belloc's discussions of the future of Islam made back in the 1930's. What
is remarkable about Belloc's comments on Islam, as we read them today, is his
ability to judge historical trends on the basis of a spiritual force or power.
Though he was a soldier and a military historian who loved the knowledge of
battles and battlefields, generals and soldiers, Belloc never thought that it
was material power that ultimately determined what would happen among men and
civilizations. "Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force
which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the
universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture
corresponding to it we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom
today"5 (132). He is aware that, for some three hundred years after the Battle
of Vienna on September 11, 1683, the Muslim lands had gradually dropped out of
the modern picture as serious threats. They were seen to be backward lands and
in fact were backward. In spite of the oil, the cause of whose value they had
little or nothing to do, this is still largely the case.
Yet, Belloc was aware that Islam did not change in spite of
centuries of western influence. When it came to the fundamentals, it was
utterly unaffected by western occupation. As Belloc wrote in Survivals and New
Arrivals:
we thought of its (Islam's) religion as a sort of fossilised thing about which
we need not trouble. That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost
certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our
Faith it will arise. For after this subjugation of the Islamic culture by
nominally Christian nations had already been achieved, the political
consequences of that culture began to notice two disquieting features about it.
The first was that its spiritual foundation proved immovable; the second that
its area of occupation did not recede, but on the contrary slowly expanded
(1929)..
Suffice it to say, we are reckoning with Islam today. Europe and much of
America did largely lose the faith, as Belloc observed even before World War
II. The expansion of Islam is also into Europe and Africa, as well as in Asia
and even in North America.
The solidity of Islam, its inner coherence, whatever its cause and the methods
by which it was kept, was something that struck Belloc. As he wrote in the
same book,
Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The so-called
Christian governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised. The ardent
and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with courtesy,
sometimes wit fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam. I think
it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which
Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. Its votaries are the one
religious body conversions from which are insignificant.
Belloc recognized that Islam flourished because it did have some basic truth
about God, however that be interpreted. "Mohammedanism struck permanent roots,
developing a life of its own, and became at last something like a new
religion...," Belloc wrote in The Great Heresies. "Like all heresies,
Mohammedanism lived by the Catholic truths which it had retained. Its
insistence on personal immortality, on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God,
on His Justice and Mercy, its insistence on the equality of human souls in the
sight of their Creator these were its strength" (128). Belloc saw the
strength of Islam in its virtues.
It is for this reason alone, the impregnability of Islam to
Catholicism, however, that the Church needs to take more cognizance of what is
this growing force in the world. It is not enough to condemn violence in the
abstract. "Go forth and teach all nations" is not possible if the nations will
not allow themselves to be preached to. The western theories of freedom of
religion, whether secular or religious, have made no headway in Islam, and only
rarely are they criticized for this lack. Those few who are Christians or
members of other religions, in most Muslim lands, in practice must be content
to remain second-class citizens and are constantly subject to the pressure to
convert to Islam.
III.
Belloc's thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy
which retained the Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of
God, but denied all the Christian aspects the Incarnation, the divinity of
Christ, who, as a result, became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the
priesthood, and the sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own
terms, it was a simple religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few
doctrinal and devotional points. The expansion of Islam was almost always by
arms; after each conquest, the Muslim Califs or Sultans ruled. They were
intolerant but they more or less accepted political submission in return for
tribute. At least twice in the history of the West, Islam almost overran
Europe, once at Poitiers in the 8th Century and once at Vienna in the 17th
Century.
Interestingly, the Church since that period has celebrated
certain feast days precisely in memory of these victories, the most notable is
St. Pius V's establishment of the Feast the Holy Rosary, on October 7, 1571.
This feast commemorated the naval victory at Lepanto. "The name of Lepanto
should remain in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the
half dozen great names in the history of the Christian world" (122). In these
days of apologizing for practically everything, one wonders if some pope
someday will not rescind this feast on grounds of good will. The cynic might
hope that we at least wait till Islam first apologizes for the initial
slaughter and conquest of Christian lands from Spain to Africa and Asia.
These earlier popes, in any case, understood that they had an
enemy and that they were blessed not to have fallen under Muslim army rulers.
Urban II's call to the Crusades, though much misunderstood, can largely be
judged as a belated and mainly unsuccessful effort of the European Christians
to defend themselves against Islam. Belloc, in fact, thought that the
Crusaders were from the beginning undermanned and rather poorly led, though
often with much heroism. Their final defeat at the hands of Saladin at Hattin
in 1187, he considers to be one of the most significant battles in the history
of the world because it confirmed Muslim rule across a wide stretch of the
world, most of which it still controls.
Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think that there was
something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam's ever becoming a
major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133). The fact
that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely an
accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute notion
of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki sees
much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to
modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found
in Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with
oil money.
The "new" weapon that Islam has displayed with September 11,
2001, is a kind of fanatic willingness to use any method of terror even if it
costs the lives of individuals who are often popularly considered to be
"martyrs" for killing Infidels. This method needs little technology. The West
has minimum moral equipment with which to respond to such tactics. Indeed, as
both Aristotle and Machiavelli saw, that if someone does not fear for his own
life, it is very difficult to stop him. But neither of them thought of the
idea of sacrificing one's life specifically for this purpose. Indeed, in the
history of the West, Islam has always sent a kind of terror through the hearts
of those on its borders who were about to be attacked or in the hearts of those
who had to live under its control. Belloc alludes to this phenomenon:
These things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that
terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization
again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand
years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and
maintain complicated machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal
part in the modern world? (131).
The question seems less rhetorical today because numbers, in the end, count as
does the willingness of people to die using modern machinery like normal
airplanes to carry our what is attested to be a religious mission, however much
we choose to identify it as simply "terrorism" without a cause. What is also
true is that this terrorism, or its threat, is now everywhere. Thus far, at
least, we see within Islam itself little effort to control its own "terrorists"
or to sympathize with those who suffer from tem or who must defend themselves
against them.
The inconvertibility of Islam leads us to several perhaps
radical reflections. It is a common saying among Christians that the blood of
martyrs is the seed of the faith. There have been many, many Christian martyrs
by Islam over the centuries and currently. As in the case of the slaughter of
the Armenians by the Turks, there will always appear some justification the
Christian blasphemed Allah in one sense. The very existence of Christianity
is a blasphemy in Muslim terms if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation,
that God became man. These historical martyrdoms have had little or no effect
in terms either of conversion or even acknowledgment, even by ourselves often.
Moreover, we have the parallel phenomenon of the Muslim
martyr, the man who kills in the name of Allah, whether it be in a suicidal
attack in a church in the Philippines, French Trappist monks whose throats were
slit in Algeria on Christmas eve, or the pilots who flew into the World Trade
Center. In some basic sense, these killers are pictured as martyrs. Nor is
the notion of "holy war" unknown in Islam. However much the Church tries to
argue that such actions cannot be considered to be justified, still within at
least some branches of Muslim opinion, they are considered to be genuine
martyrs seeking to defend or propagate the religion and therefore worthy of
Allah. When we try to oppose this position on say natural law terms, we find
that our mode of discourse is itself alien to what much of Islam conceives
itself to be. The basis of our arguments are not admitted to be valid.
Belloc thought that Islam began as a heresy and became a new
religion culturally when it had to account and explain its successes on the
field of battle. The stunning successes on the field of battle had to be
administered. "Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to
grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion.
It was not a pagan contrast with the Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was
a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the
appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw
it for what it was not a denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the
Christian thing" (76-77). As most scholars recognize, the main parts of what
Islam took from revelation are from Judaism rather than Christianity. Islam
kept much of what Christianity has in common with Judaism the transcendence
of Yahweh, creation, divine justice and punishment, the devotion of the people
to God.
But Islam was itself not like Arianism and other early
heresies. It arose from without the old ancient Christian world. For it,
Christ was not God but rather a human prophet. This is the explicit denial of
the root principle of Christianity. "With the denial of the Incarnation went
the whole sacramental structure. He (the Muslim) refused to know anything of
the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of Mass, and
therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so
many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplicity" (79). Though
it is not often attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia,
even in private, and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and
constantly hemmed in by various formal and informal practices. "Freedom of
religion" is not a concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a
Western idea, even largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice
of freedom of religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to
Allah, even where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.
Belloc thought that Islam expanded rapidly for the very good
reason that "it won battles." (81). This success should give modern pacifists
pause, but it usually does not. Yet, to call Islam a religion of "simplicity"
is, in Belloc's terms, rather a compliment. He notes that it freed many people
from the complicated clutch of usury, from the lawyers. It freed slaves if
they converted and made them
brothers within the system (81-82). The brotherhood of faith trumps other
relationships. Belloc distinguished between the character of the spread of
Islam initially in the near East and that expansion into Persian and Mongol
lands the area from Mesopotamia to India and the Eastern Roman empire (85).
"The uniformity of temper which is the mark of Asiatic society, responded at
once to this new idea of one very simple, personal form of government,
sanctified by religion, and ruling with a power theoretically absolute from one
center" (86). It was from these conquests that Islam learned of Greek
philosophy and other cultures and was the origin of much of its science and
art. "Islam was the one heresy," Belloc wrote, "that nearly destroyed
Christendom through its early material and intellectual superiority" (88).
Much has been made of the "tolerance" in Islam, especially
for religions of the book. This tolerance was often merely the inability to
change large conquered populations in a short time. Belloc thought that "the
Mohammedan temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and
bloodthirsty. It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from
whom it differed. It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the
high Christian culture about it. It still so regards it even today" (90). The
practical compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain
but within very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute.
Many were gradually absorbed into Islam (91).
IV.
This record of Islam's own consistency, its closed nature,
its remaining itself had to be reconsidered in some detail, Belloc thought. It
has been "the most formidable of the heresies" (92). The question is now why
has it survived? "Millions of modern people of the white civilization that
is, the civilization of Europe and America have forgotten all about Islam"
(92). This could be written in 1938, but not in 2003. The questions must now
be asked not merely "why has it survived?" but "why has it flourished?" Belloc
can only be said to have foreseen the problem: "It is, in fact, the most
formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any
moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past" (93).
Neither our modern culture or the modern Church allows us this frankness.
Usually, Belloc thought, heresies make an initial impact then
they decline and disappear. Islam did not do this (94-95). When Islam was
defeated, it remained strong in numbers and in convictions (95-96). How then
is Islam different? Some westerners say it is because it is simple and founded
on justice and improves on Christianity. Belloc did not think that this reason
works because every heresy maintains the same thing but they still fade, not
Islam (98). Historically, Islam constantly gained new recruits: the Turk, the
Mongol. "The causes of this vitality (of Islam) are very difficult to explore,
and perhaps cannot be reached. For myself I should ascribe it in some part to
the fact that Mohammedanism being a thing from outside, a heresy that did not
arise within the body of the Christian community but beyond its frontiers, has
always possessed a reservoir of men, newcomers pouring in to revivify its
energies. But this cannot be the full explanation" (129) Today, I suspect,
they gain new recruits largely from their own population growth which expands
to fill the vacuum left by the low birth rates in the West. The Crusades did
not split Islam geographically. Belloc held that if the Crusades (1095-1200)
had cut Africa from Asia, Islam may have declined (103). It is interesting how
many of the advocates of occupation of Iraq today use this theory of the need
to split Islam and hence reduce its geopolitical power.
Yet, Belloc maintained that, though based on the army, Islam
did have a cultural force. `The success of Mohammedanism had not been due to
its offering something more satisfactory in the way of philosophy and morals,
but, as I have said, to the opportunity it afforded of freedom to the slave and
debtor, and an extreme simplicity which pleased the unintelligent masses who
were perplexed by the mysteries inseparable from the profound intellectual life
of Catholicism, and from its radical doctrine of the Incarnation" (103). This
position is not unlike that of Eric Voegelin, who argued that the
susceptibility of western Christians to modern ideology was due to the
practical disbelief of many Christians in the ultimate transcendent goal of the
faith.7
Belloc, in fact, saw a relation between the failure of the
Crusades and the rise of modern Europe which at first turned in on itself
before finding the technological means of bypassing Islamic lands with the
discoveries of America and the sea route to Asia. Belloc even held that the
success of the Reformation in part was due to the defeat of Catholic and papal
policies in the Crusades (107-09). Belloc's book on The Crusades remains one
of the most poignant accounts of a failed enterprise. "Had the crusaders'
remaining force at the end of the first Crusading march been a little more
numerous, had they taken Damascus and the string of towns on the fringe of the
desert, the whole history of the world would have been changed. The world of
Islam would have been cut in two, with the East unable to approach the
West."(114) North Africa, the old Roman lands, was not recovered. "They
failed ... but they made modern Europe" (115). The Reformation was due to the
weakness at the Center (115).
What Belloc was most conscious of, however, was that, unlike
Islam, that Christianity did not retain its inner coherence, its faith.
"Christian Europe is and should be by nature one; but it has forgotten its
nature in forgetting its religion" (116). Belloc connected this loss of inner
coherence in the West to the opportunity for Islam to rise again. It is partly
the downplaying of the importance of religion in the West that it has been
unable or unwilling to understand the attraction of Islam in its own inner
coherence. "It has always seemed t me possible, and even probable," Belloc
wrote,
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.... The
future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting
at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I
cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of
Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes
and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed but morally
intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot
remain permanently unstable (127-28).
It is interesting that even with the return of Islam to the forefront of our
consciousness, we do not want to see this return as a religious thing explained
in terms of Islam itself.
V.
How are we to assess these potent reflections of Belloc?
Stretched half-way across the world, Islam is divided up into many "nations,"
though that concept of nationalism is not an Islamic idea. The central organs
of the Church seem to be against doing anything radical about any Islamic
threat, preferring diplomacy and not forcefully noting the widespread attacks
on Christians throughout the world. It is interesting that several Vatican
officials give as a reason for not using force is the fear of the rising up of
Islam and the potential terror it can cause everywhere in the world. They are
right, the danger is real. Normally, this view would be an argument for doing
something about the problem when we can, before something more terrible
happens, particularly if the problem lies in Islam itself and its inability to
accept the normal peaceful structures of society. Almost all the minor wars
today have some Islamic component. Within Islam, there are various schools of
interpretation from the well-financed Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia to the
more mild versions of the Shiites.
Geo-politicians and theologians alike argue that, since we
really have no common philosophy, we must seek ways to reinterpret Islam within
itself, using its own texts and traditions to mollify the extremists who now
see an opportunity to establish Muslim dominance all over the world. At first
sight, this seems preposterous. But as Belloc said, surprising things happen,
like the rise of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism in the first place. It
makes us wonder whether there is not something objective to be said for the
reality of salvation history after all.
For Catholics in particular, Belloc's estimate was sobering.
He lived before "ecumenism," but he certainly wondered about its effectiveness
in the case of Islam, however politically wise it might be to proceed as the
Muslim philosophers and not mention any truths outside the Koran. "Missionary
effort has had no appreciable effect on it (Islam)," Belloc concluded.
It still converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time
some European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes
a Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of
morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine. In view of this,
anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not
see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the
old pressure of Islam on Christendom (130).
These words are strong and historically true. They also today strike us as
prophetic. Few paid much attention to Belloc in his time. No Muslims are
converted. No one ever abandons the book or its ritual.
In the end, I cannot help but have a gratefulness to the
"apparently unconvertible" religion, to radical Islam for waking us up. We
could make the case that all our studies, all our concern with western ideology
and power may have been misplaced. What we should have been paying attention
to are our souls and what is the best explanation of our existence and destiny.
Islam has another soul and another destiny which it seeks to spread, by its
own proven means, to the ends of the earth, an idea that it probably got,
ironically, from the end of the Gospel of Matthew.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (New York: Sheed & Ward,
MCMXXXVIII), 98.
2Paul Marshall, Roberta Green, and Lela Gilbert, Islam at the
Crossroads: Understanding Its Beliefs, History, and Conflicts (Grand Rapids:
Baker Books, 2002), 107.
3See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
(Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1973, 11-24; Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi,
"Introduction," Medieval Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978), 1-21.
4Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the
Terrorist Threat (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 59.
5Unless otherwise indicated, citations from The Great
Heresies will simply place the page number after the citation.
6Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God
(Chicato: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 35-36.
7Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago:
Regnery/Gateway, 1968), 109.
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