The Ancient War Between the
Judeo-Christian West and Islam
by James P.
Pinkerton
Note:
Jim Pinkerton outlines the central issues in the 1500-year struggle between
competing cultural visions several years ago in this article, which first
appeared in "The American Conservative."
In one of the great
epics of Western literature, the hero, confronted by numerous and powerful
enemies, temporarily gives in to weakness and self-pity. “I wish,” he sighs,
“none of this had happened.” The hero’s wise adviser responds, “So do all who
live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.” The old man
continues, “There are other forces at work in this world … besides the will of
evil.” Some events, he adds, are “meant” to be, “And that is an encouraging
thought.”
Indeed it is.
Perhaps, today, we are meant to live in these times. Perhaps right here, right
now, we are meant to be tested. Maybe we are meant to have faith that other
forces are at work in this world, that we are meant to rediscover our strength
and our survival skills.
And so the
question: can we, the people of the West, be brought to failure despite our
enormous cultural and spiritual legacy? Three thousand years of history look down
upon us: does this generation wish to be remembered for not having had the
strength to look danger squarely in the eye? For having failed to harness our
latent strength in our own defense?
With apologies to the
frankenfood-fearers and polar bear-sentimentalizers, the biggest danger we face
is the Clash of Civilizations, especially as we rub against the “bloody
borders” of Islam.
What if, in the coming century, we lose that
clash—and the source of our civilization? What
if Muslims take over Europe? What if
“Eurabia” indeed comes to pass? Would Islamic invaders demolish the Vatican, as
the Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001? Or would they
settle merely for stripping the great cathedrals of Europe of all their
Christian adornment, rendering them into mosques? And what if the surviving
non-Muslim population of Europe is reduced to subservient “dhimmitude”?
It could
happen. Many think it will. In July 2004, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis
told Germany’s Die Welt that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this
century, “at the very latest.” Other observers, too, have spoken out: Melanie
Phillips in& ;Londonistan, Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept: How
Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, and Mark Steyn in
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Admittedly, these
writers share a mostly neoconservative perspective, but such can’t be said for
Patrick Buchanan, author of the book that out-Spenglers Spengler, The Death
of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country
and Civilization.
On the other side of the
great divide, militant Muslims are feeling the wind at their backs. Last November, Abu Ayyub al-Masri,
leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, released an audiotape in which he vowed, “We
will not rest from our jihad until we are under the olive trees of the
Roman Empire”—which is to say, much of Europe. This August, Iranian president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, traveling to Afghanistan, declared, “There is no way for
salvation of mankind but rule of Islam over mankind.” To be sure, there’s no
shortage of Christians who speak this way, but none of them are currently heads
of state.
If demography
is the author of destiny, then the danger of Europe falling within dar
al-Islamis real. And in addition to the teeming Muslim lumpen already
within the gates, plenty more are coming. According to United Nations data, the
population of the Arab world will increase from 321 million in 2004 to 598
million in 2050. Are those swarming masses really going to hang back in
Egypt and Yemen when Europe beckons? And of course, over the horizon, just past
Araby, abide the Muslim multitudes of Central Asia and Africa, where tens of
millions more would love to make the secular hajj to, say, Rome or Berlin.
In other words, if
present trends continue, the green flag of Islam—bearing theshahada, the declaration of faith,
“There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God”—could be fluttering
above Athens and Rotterdam in the lifespan of a youngster today. If so, then
the glory of Europe as the hub of Greco-Roman and Christian civilization would
be extinguished forever.
If this
Muslimization befalls Europe, the consequences would be catastrophic for
Americans as well. Although some neoconservatives, bitter at Old European
“surrender monkeys,” might be quietly pleased at the prospect, the fact is that
a Salafist Surge into the heart of Europe—destroying the civilization that
bequeathed to us Aesop and Aristotle, Voltaire and the Victorians—would be a
psychic wound that would never heal, not across the great sward of America, not
even in the carpeted think-warrens of the American Enterprise Institute. A
dolorous bell would toll for all of us, scattered as we might be in the
European Diaspora.
So for better ideas, we might turn to J.R.R. Tolkien. The
medievalist-turned-novelist, best-known for The Hobbit and The Lord
of the Rings, has been admired by readers and moviegoers alike for his
fantastic flights. Yet we might make special note of his underlying political,
even strategic, perspective. Amid all
his swords and sorcery, we perhaps have neglected Tolkien’s ultimate point:
some things are worth fighting for—and other things are not worth fighting for;
indeed, it is a tragic mistake even to try.
In his subtle way, Tolkien argues for a vision of individual and
collective self-preservation that embraces a realistic view of human nature,
including its limitations, even as it accepts difference and diversity.
Moreover, Tolkien counsels robust self-defense in one’s own area—the homeland,
which he calls the Shire—even as he advocates an overall modesty of heroic
ambition. All in all, that’s not a bad approach for true conservatives, who
appreciate the value of lumpy hodgepodge as opposed to artificially imposed
universalisms.
So with Tolkien in mind, we might speak of the “Shire Strategy.” It’s
simple: the Shire is ours, we want to keep it, and so we must defend it. Yet by
the same principle, since others have their homelands and their rights, we
should leave them alone, as long as they leave us alone. Live and let live. That’s not world-historical, merely
practical. For us, after our recent spasm of universalism—the dogmatically
narcissistic view that everyone, everywhere wants to be like us—it’s time for a
healthy respite, moving toward an each-to-his-own particularism.
Tolkien comes to the particular through the peculiar, creating his
Bosch-like wonderland of exotic beings: Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Wargs, Werewolves,
Ents, Eastlings, Southrons. To audiences relentlessly tutored in the PC pieties
of skin-deep multiculturalism, Tolkien offers a different sort of diversity—of
genuine difference, with no pretense of similarity, let alone universal
equality. In his world, it is
perfectly natural that all creatures great and small—the Hobbits are indeed
small, around three feet high—have their own place in the great chain of being.
So the Hobbits, low down on that chain, mind their own business. One of
their aphorisms is the need to avoid “trouble too big for you.” Indeed, even
Hobbits are subdivided into different breeds, each with its own traits. Frodo,
for instance, is a Fallohide, not to be confused with a Harfoot or a Stoor.
Tolkien wasn’t describing a clash of civilizations—he was setting forth an
abundance of civilizations, each blooming and buzzing and doing its own thing.
Tolkien died in 1973. During his lifetime, and ever since, critics and
pundits have put their own spin on his work. He was writing, it was said, about
the totalitarian temptation. About the lure of fascism. Or maybe about the
Circean song of communism. Or perhaps it was all a jeremiad aimed at
industrialization. Each of these was, of course, a universalism, and so each
was, in its way, antithetical to the natural variegation that Tolkien so
treasured.
Yet more than three decades after
Tolkien’s death, new universalisms—new all-encompassing ideologies—have gained
prominence, vexing, once again, tradition and difference throughout the world. One such
universalism is capitalist globalism. In the late ’80s, Francis Fukuyama
published his legendarily misguided piece “The End of History?” suggesting that
the West had found The Answer. Madeleine Albright expressed similar hubris when
she declared that America was “the indispensable nation.” And Thomas Friedman
has since argued that everyone has to submit to “golden handcuffs,” managed by
planetary financiers, even as the wondrous force of capitalism “flattens” the
world. But of course, it took Paul
Wolfowitz to bring Rousseau to life in another century: Uncle Sam would force
people to be free. And how are these bright bold visions working out, in the
wake of 9/11, in a world that includes IEDs, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Jazeera?
Defending—and Redefining—the Shire
Underneath his neo-medievalism, Tolkien preached realism. He wrote, “It
will not do to leave a live dragon out of your plans if you live near one.”
That is, the dragon, red in tooth and
crescent, is lurking. It cannot be ignored.
Nor can we ignore the painful reality
of a genuine fifth column in the West. This summer, Gordon Brown’s government
concluded that 1 in 11 British Muslims—almost 150,000 people living in the
United Kingdom—“proactively” supports terrorism, with still more rated as
passive supporters. And this spring, a Pew Center survey found that 13 percent of American Muslims, as well
as 26 percent aged 18-29, were bold enough to tell a pollster that suicide
bombing was “sometimes” justified. These Muslim infiltrators, of
course, have potential access to weapons of mass destruction.
So what to
do? Call the ACLU? The United Nations?
That won’t work. Just as the Roman Empire’s dream of universal dominion
once collapsed, leaving the peoples of Europe to create new institutions for
their own survival, so, today, any
thought that the United Nations could save us from ruin has evaporated. The
Blue Helmets have fallen, and they can’t get up.
At the same time, at a level just below the UN, the vision of an
ever-expanding European Union, to include all the states touching the
Mediterranean, has happily collapsed. Now it seems certain that even Turkey
will never be admitted. Increasingly,
people see that in a world of transnational terrorism, the key issue is
not figuring out a common agricultural policy that unites Denmark and Cyprus,
but rather a common survival policy for Europa, from the Pillars of Hercules to
the Ural Mountains.
So we must look to older models for hope and survival—models more
faithful, more fighting, more fertile. A case in point is France. To be sure,
on the Mars-Venus continuum, most Americans regard the French as hopelessly
Venus, but they were Mars in the past.
Perhaps their most virtuous Martian was Charles Martel, King of the Franks, who
defeated the Muslim invaders at the Battle of Tours in AD 732. In the
words of the contemporaneous chronicler, Isidore of Beja, “In the shock of the
battle the men of the North seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they
stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great
blows of their swords, they hewed down the Arabs.” The defeat of the Muslims was one of the “Fifteen Decisive Battles of
the World,” according to 19th-century historian Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy,
because it saved the West from destruction.
The French have remembered “Charles the Hammer” ever since, even naming
warships after him. Indeed, across 2,000 years, from Vercingetorix to
Charlemagne (Martel’s grandson) to Napoleon, the French have showed plenty of
fight, and usually much skill. That’s why there’s still a France. And now, despite their recent failures and
cupidities, the French are showing renewed determination, as in the election of
Nicolas Sarkozy, a man who based his campaign on restoring border security, as
well as law and order, to his beleaguered nation.
Meanwhile, as European birthrates plummet, the continent faces the
prospect of demographic desiccation. Yet
surely a civilization-saving alternative to imported Muslimization must be
found. One option, bringing in Eastern Europeans to Western Europe, is
probably less than desirable because those Eastern Europeans are needed where
they are, to defend Russia and Ukraine against the New Tatars further east. A better solution would be to bring the
poorer children of Europe—from countries such as Argentina—home to Europe,
allowing the New World to help rescue the Old World.
But we
need bigger and broader ideas as well, to replace the doddering vision of
international law as the antidote to terrorism.
The Revival of Christendom
Two years ago, the Eurocrats in Brussels drafted a 300-page EU
constitution that consciously omitted reference to Europe’s specifically
Christian heritage. The voters of France, as well as Holland, rejected that
secular document.
Maybe there’s a lesson here. The
people of Europe might not be so eager, after all, to declare that they are
“united in diversity.” What does that phrase mean, anyway? How about trying to
find something that unites Europeans in unity? How about a revival of
Christendom as a concept—as a political concept? A revival, or at least a
remembrance, of Europe’s cultural heritage could be the healing force that
Europe needs.
After all, it worked in the past. In the words of the 19th-century French
historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the victory of Christianity marked
“the end of ancient society”—and all the petty divisions that went with it.
Fustel de Coulanges continues, “Man felt that he had other obligations besides
that of living and dying for the city. Christianity distinguished the private
from the public virtues. By giving
less honor to the latter, it elevated the former; it placed God, the family,
the human individual above country, the neighbor above the city.”
Some will smile at the thought that Christianity might be part of the
solution to the problems of the Third Millennium. Admittedly, there’s an
element of faith in the idea of trying to revive the idea of Christian unity. But Christendom is the Shire Strategy,
applied.
To keep the peace, we must
separate our civilizations.
We must start with a political
principle, that the West shall stay the West, while the East can do as it
wishes on its side of the frontier, and only on its side. The
classical political maxim cuius regio, eius religio(“whose region, his
religion”) makes sense. To be sure, it has been unfashionable to talk this way
in the West, but Muslims are avidly applying it as they set about martyring the
remaining Christian populations of Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. So we of the West
can build walls, as needed, and as physically imposing as need be. Going
further, we can finally recognize the need for an energy-independence embargo,
so that we no longer finance those who wish to conquer or kill us.
For obvious reasons, strategic as well
as moral, the Western political alliance must be bigger than just a few
relatively friendly countries along the other side of the Atlantic. It should
include, most pressingly, Russia. Vladimir Putin might think of himself as a
rival, even a foe, of the United States, but he knows he faces a mortal enemy
in Islam; it’s the Chechens who are killing his soldiers. So
as Russia enjoys its own Christian revival, a reconciliation with mostly
Christian America is possible. Immediately, America should renew the spirit of
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative speech, in which the Gipper
called for including Moscow inside the protective shield. So instead of
building missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe, dividing Europe from Russia, the United States should put those sites
in Russia’s southern reaches, to face the real enemy, which is Iran and the
rest of nuclear Islam. Even Putin has suggested this defensive
placement, perhaps because down deep, he, too, understands that the Christian
West should be unified, not divided.
But what of Christians
elsewhere in the world?
How to withstand these many challenges? The answer: through political co-operation. In Tolkien’s world, it was
the Council of Elrond. Perhaps in our world, it could be Council of the West.
It’s been done before. In AD 325, Constantine the Great Constantine was
the first Christian Roman Emperor, although he concerned himself more with
geopolitics than theological minutiae. “It is my desire,” he told this first
ecumenical convocation, “that you should meet together in a general council …
and to know you are resolved to be in common harmony together.” The council was
a success, producing the Nicene Creed, which united European faith for
centuries to come.
But today, how to find a new unity that reaches across oceans and
continents, to include the likes of Putin and Chavez? Answer: with great difficulty, not all at once, and with no certainty
of success.
The immediate mission is to delineate
a Christian Zone and a Muslim Zone, dividing countries if need be. All
Christians, and all Muslims, have a stake in minimizing conflict; the obvious
way is by separating the combatants. So a wall should go up between the warring
faiths, and then a bigger wall, until the flashpoint risk of civilization clash
goes away. Then, and only then, might we hope to find workable solutions within
the Christian Zone.
Some will insist that this neo-Constantinian vision of muscular political
Christendom is implausible—or inimical to world peace. But in fact, whether
we like it or not, the world is forming into blocs. Samuel Huntington was
right about “the clash of civilizations”—but
with political skill, we can keep clashes from becoming larger wars.
No matter what we say or do, the blocs of Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese
are all going their separate cultural ways, rediscovering their own unique
heritages. And Islam, of course, is at odds with all of its neighbors. If Westerners,
Russians, Africans, Hindus, and Chinese all feel threatened by Islam—and they
all do—there’s plenty of opportunity for a larger encircling alliance, with an
eye toward feasible strategies of containment, even quarantine. But not conquest, not occupation, not
“liberation.” So the big question is whether or not Christians will
continue to be divided into four blocs, as they are at present: Western,
Russian, African, Latin. Can four
smaller Christian blocs really become one big bloc? One Christendom? Perhaps—borrowing
once again from Tolkien—such unification was meant to happen.
That is an encouraging
thought: a Council of the West, bringing all the historically Christians
countries of the world into one communion.
The Rescue of Israel
But what of Israel? If East is East and West is West, what of the Jewish
state, which sits in the East? We can make two points: first, Israel must survive, and second, on its current course, Israel
will likely not survive.
In recent years, Israel finds its strategic situation worsening. It is
increasingly confronted, not by incompetent tinhorn dictators but by determined
Muslim jihadists, many of whom live in the Palestinian territories, some of
whom live within Israel itself. Meanwhile, Iran proceeds with its nuclear
program, while Pakistan, just a heartbeat away from Taliban-ification, already
has its nukes in place, ready for export should the right fatwabe
uttered. And the Russians and the
Chinese, empowered and lured by high energy prices, have their own designs on
the region, which include no good tidings for Jews.
Unfortunately, if we look forthrightly into the future, we can see blood
and fire ahead for Israel. Any
destruction of Israel would be accompanied, one way or another, by the
destruction of much of the Middle East. If Masada came again to Zion,
it would likely also be a Strangelovian doomsday for tens or hundreds of
millions in the Middle East. And it might mean the annihilation as well of
other Muslim religious sites, from Qum and Karbala to, yes, Mecca and Medina.
Some say that the solution to Middle
Eastern problems is some sort of pre-emptive strike: get Them before they get us. That, of
course, is exactly the sort of bewitching that Tolkien warned most strongly
against—the frenzy to solve a problem through one hubristic stroke, to grab the
One Ring of power for oneself, even if that grabbing guarantees one’s own fall
into darkness.
A better vision is needed. The Council of the West must do its duty, to
Christians, to Jews, and to the need of the world for peace. This summit of
civilizations would be difficult and expensive, even heartbreaking. It might
take a hundred years. But let us begin because the reward could be great:
blessed are the peacemakers.
The Knights of the West
With great effort, the West could unite around the Shire Strategy,
seeking to secure and protect all our Christendom, spanning oceans and
continents. But it won’t be easy. It
will take more than diplomacy—it will take strength.
This Shire is ours now, but the way
things are going, it won’t be ours permanently. So we must
vow to defend the Shire, always. In the last of the “Rings” films, Aragorn the
Strider proclaims, in full St. Crispin’s Day mode, “A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our
friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of
wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is
not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth,
I bid you stand, Men of the West!”
We in the West will always need warriors. We must have chevaliers sans
peur et sans reproche—“Knights
without fear and without reproach”—to safeguard our marches and protect our
homes. Men such as Leonidas, whose Immortal 300 held off the Persians at
Thermopylae in 480 BC, long enough for other Greeks to rally and save the
nascent West. Or Aetius, the last noble Roman, who defeated Attila the Hun,
Scourge of God, at Chalons in AD 451. Or Don Juan of Austria, who led the Holy
League to naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Or Jon Sobieski,
whose Polish cavalry rescued Vienna from the Turks in 1683.
These are not just legends,
not just fictional characters—they were real. And if we dutifully honor
those heroes, as heroic Men of the West and of Christendom, we will be rewarded
with more such heroic men.
Future epics await us. Future Knights of the West, ready to defend
Christendom, are waiting to be born, waiting for the call of duty. If we bring
them forth with faith and wisdom and confidence, then also will come new heroes
and new legends.
Maybe it was meant to be.
And that is an encouraging thought.
