Mainstream?
Another grand delusion
THE NOTION that by now a modern, mainstream Islam has succeeded the old, crusading zealous faith, just as Christianity had its Reformation and settled down, so that Muhammad’s fighting creed is now just an ordinary religious identity, a kind of methodist Islam, was thoroughly debunked the other day in the pages of the New Criterion, a thoughtful quarterly that respects the old ideas instead of asserting, as so many moderns do, that they have outgrown them.
We have often had occasion to cite in these pages George Orwell’s observation that an indispensable adjunct to freedom is a willingness to call things by their real names. Islamic extremism is not, as a British Home Secretary fatuously declared, “anti-Islamic activity,” nor is the slaughter of a baker’s dozen U.S. soldiers in Texas by a radicalized Muslim officer an instance of “workplace violence.” Euphemism is the enemy of true security.
What is the relation between Islamic extremism and “mainstream” Islamic thought? That is not, we would suggest with sadness, an easy question to answer. Winston Churchill, writing about Islam back in 1899, observed that “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund,” Churchill wrote in The River War, “Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
These days, it is worth noting, Islamic entities are scrambling to achieve mastery of “the strong arms of science,” as Iran’s rapidly accelerating nuclear program should remind us. “Death to America!” is a chant one often hears echoing from the mullah-besotted crowds in Iran. Ayaan Hirsi Ali outlined one possible course of action. Barack Obama pointed to another when, a couple of days after the massacre in Paris, he noted impatiently that, “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with . . . . I’m too busy for that.”
And the assaults against the West continue all along the contested borderland between West and East, not to mention within them, when jihadis strike here, there and everywhere, within once unthreatened Western capitals. Folks, these people are not all little John Wesleys. Somehow we have moved back to the great medieval confrontation between the crescent and the cross, even if one side—oh so modern Christianity and its secular remains— seems blissfully unaware that it is still under assault by Muhammad’s still zealous armies of true believers. For we infidels here in the West are ignoring the first rule of war: Know thy enemy— who in this case knows us all too well.