The wages of Western disunity.
By Paul J Cella Posted in History — Comments (29) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Islam has, throughout the history of its aggression against the West, benefited immensely by, and in many cases cunningly exploited the divisions within the West. Some of the first Byzantine provinces to fall after the Mohammedan Revolution were those, like Egypt and North Africa, whose internal repose had already been shattered by the conflagrations of the great heresies of Christian antiquity. Many Arian, Nestorian, and Donatist communities had been subject to oppressions and persecutions from the Empire in the decades immediately preceding the rise of Islam, and they welcomed the Muslim invader, even, in some cases, collaborated with him. The rabble of the People's Crusade ravaged the Anatolian countryside — populated, by and large, by Greek Christians — before succumbing to the Turkish counterattack. The Crusader Bohemund, who betrayed his oath of fealty to the Emperor, made himself Prince of Antioch and never marched with the rest to Jerusalem, later returned to Rome and convinced the Pope that the real enemies of the Latin West were the Byzantines. His intrigues in the Vatican were as damaging to the endurance of Christendom as anything the Turks ever did.
When Constantinople was besieged in 1453, there were many Greek Christians among the Sultan's legions (and some few Turks among the city's defenders). A Christian engineer oversaw the construction of the guns that broke the city's great walls. The Venetians squabbled with the Genoese, and only sent a relief convoy after it was too late (though many individual Venetians and Genoese fought valiantly to the end). It is estimated that when she finally fell to Mehmet II, the great capital of Eastern Christianity, which had stood for eleven and a half centuries, could summon only a mere four thousand men to defend her.
Even at our great victory at Lepanto, the unity of the Christian forces was achieved only by extraordinary efforts, and by the extraordinary leadership of Don John of Austria. Chesterton's unforgettable picture of this disunity should be enough to emblazon it in our minds:
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Or again:
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Part of the dhimma contract extended to conquered Christians and Jews included the requirement those communities give their resources, when asked, to the cause of Jihad. In many instances these resources were quite substantial. The Janissaries were only the most salient, costly and terrible of these expropriations. It might be speculated that some significant portion of the success of the Ottoman Turks was due to the riches, both material and human, that they seized from the Greek world. We need only consider the explosions of creativity evident in the Western world as Latin Christendom gradually appropriated the learning and culture of antiquity.
The significance of this history for us today, who in our lassitude have forgotten it, cannot be particularly obscure. It seems to me remarkably relevant to the vexatious and pressing problem of American policy toward Europe. My old friend Orrin Judd speaks for some number of American patriots with his auguries that Europe under Islam will be a dramatic improvement over Europe under secular nihilism. There is, I admit, some real merit in this position. Certainly Islam contains more elements of truth than secularism. A religion which declares the awesome oneness of the sovereign God cannot but be superior to that despair which, denying God, embraces the emptiness of man. But it is this very grasp of some tremendous fragments of truth that has made Islam such a tenacious foe of our civilizations. Secular nihilism cannot sustain a civilization. It deprives a people of vigor, piety, foresight, and all that mysterious recklessness that we call creativity. Secularism cannot really be an enemy; it can only be a suicide.
But Islam can emphatically be an enemy, and one that commands respect and fear. Respect because of the doggedness with which it has laid hold to some very profound truths about God and man; fear because of, as Chesterton incisively put it, that “void made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it.” Islam cannot really settle down to the work of sustaining a culture. Even if some Muslims desire just that, their theology betrays them. Real stability is unachievable short of the final accomplishment of that peace which is the only kind Islam knows: the peace of unbelief defeated — destroyed utterly or subjugated. Chesterton continues, “The only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again.” He speaks of the chronic danger inherent in the religion of unleashing “lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests.” “The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”
There is no reason to expect that Islam, which once absorbed the great Christian cities of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Hippo, and later, Constantinople and the bulk of the Greek empire, will be unable to absorb the wealth and material resources of Europe. There is no reason to expect that the gradual subjugation of Europe to Islam, which we are already witnessing, will presage Europe’s decline as a economic and political power. Only the most brassbound and morbid of optimists could imagine that it will presage her decline as a military power. And I ask the contemners of Europe, like the one-man Global Content Provider, to calculate what contempt will remain when the factories of Germany are turning the tanks of our enemies; when the slippery diplomats of Belgium, having made their peace with Islam, will make its aims their own; when the clique of Eurocrats that dominates the ever-proliferating transnational institutions that would truss and check our action, have adopted the goals of Jihad; when we are all alone to enjoy our boasts about the superiority of Islamic Europe to secular Europe.
It is true enough that secular Europe is more hateful; it will be left to our children and grandchildren discover which is the more potent enemy.
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But it's not quite correct, I don't think, to compare the hodgepodge of broken afterthoughts that comprises the Middle East of today with the magnificent martial machines of the Ummayads, the Abbasids, or the Ottoman Turks in their glory. The Islamic world that we deal with today is very like Europe in the 7th Century: separated, weak and rent by internal divisions. They are not the threat to the West that their forebears were. I don't think we'll see the Saudis massing before the gates of Vienna, for example, any time soon, and the Muslims who live there already tend not to be the conquering sort.
Strange that you quote Chesterton--your writing reminds me of him and others like him, such as C.S. Lewis.
Indeed the Middle East is "weak and rent by internal divisions"; but it retains its spiritual strength, which is the important thing. And my point here is that the conquest or appropriation of European wealth and resources would certainly change the material fortunes of Islam rather dramatically.
In my RS diary I've dealt with this in more detail, but I'm persuaded that current-day jihadi fully subscribe to the remarkably rigid ideologies of Taymiyya, al-Wahhab, Rida, al-Banna, Mawdudi, Qutb, et al. If so, few if any existing Sunni Muslim societies meet the jihadi's Islamic purity threshold...and there isn't a prayer (small pun intended) that the jihadi will ever see Sufi or Shi'a societies as anything other that heretical.
So, unless today's bin Laden, al-Zawahri & company are just canon-fodder for an Islamic Napoleon to come -- displaced like Stalin eliminated Trotsky -- huge conflicts will come between factions of Islam. The Sunni jihadi will probably be the aggressors, but a nuclear-armed Shi'a Iran may put one hell of a fight.
And my point here is that the conquest or appropriation of European wealth and resources would certainly change the material fortunes of Islam rather dramatically.
How is this not already being accomplished by a massive influx of oil money? Not trying to be combative, here, just trying to understand your point.
I'm echoing another comment. Could somebody please recommend a primer on this portion of world history.
Ideally, I'd find one that serves both my curiosity and could feed part of a speaking series I'm doing in my daughter's elementary civics class.
This was a college textbook I used for a class on Late Antiquity: "Empire to commonwealth: consequences of monotheism in late antiquity" by Garth Fowden.
that the seige cannons that finally allowed the moslems to turn Constantinople into Istabul were designed by a Hungarian Christian.
the current age for Muslims to invade Europe to come into possession of it. We have a situation in which there is a combination of: Muslim immigration, plummeting native birth rates, net emigration of native Europeans to the U.S. and elsewhere, and the blessings of a democratic system of government in all European states. Those factors combined will hand the continent to Muslims without a shot being fired.
Do most Muslims looking for work who show up in Europe see themselves as the front wave of a Jihad? Doubtful, though judging by a lot of talk I have heard on European streets there are a lot of them that do. But the point is what happens when they start to vote? Or, when their 7 children start to vote?
Their political strength will transform European society form the inside-out. It will be, unless the Europeans decide to fight, the first such complete and total, peaceful transformation of a society since Constantine was baptized.
In any case, I will wholeheartedly disagree with Cella on one point. Having seen godlessness up close, I much prefer it to Islam. Godlessness will collapse at some point. Whether in its Soviet or social humanist form, it is unstable and will be removed from the Earth at some point. When communism went bust, many Poles who had never been in a church suddenly showed up to see what it was all about. The same with the Russians and others. Humanism is a phase, it will pass, but Islam appears to be forever. Unlike humanism, Islam appears to have an iron grip which is impossible to dislodge.
Given the choice, I prefer the confusion of the Netherlands to the dogmatic surety of the Iranians. The lost and secularized are easy to preach too.
Which also brings up the other point I'd like to make. The Catholic Church is committed under Benedict to re-evangelizing the continent. While Muslims are in a majority, it still should be somewhat safe for them to convert, and there is still time for the native Europeans to become more solid in their own faith. What we need, then, is a call to evangelism in support of the Holy Father. I'd much prefer that to continued hand wringing, angst, and 'I told you so's' about the dangers of humanism.
I'm not accusing Mr. Cella of that - far from it. He has written an excellent piece. But rather, I am saying that instead of wallowing in doom and gloom, perhaps the time is ripe for Catholics and Protestants alike in America to heed the waring signs and start serious Evagelism on the European continent. This is a religious and cultural problem, and politics is not the solution to it.
Can be and in fact always will be replaced with something, by definition. It is worth keeping that something away, if it is Islam. Islam is not preferable to nihilism, since it destroys societies and replaces them with stagnant, oppressive regimes that only begrudgingly accept limited freedom and tolerance on occasion.
Afghanistan used to be a famous land of gardens and orchards. Islam reduced it to the wasteland it is today in order to crush the indigenous non-Moslem people, by way of example.
The nihilism infecting western Europe will pass, and revival of Christianity will be greatly preferable to Islam.
that Islam is preferable to secular nihilism. The latter as you say is suicidal, and thus in the long term cannot last. Over time, nihilists will cease to be nihilists or perish (also consider the great number of nihilists in the 1960s and 1970s who were hippies and radicals who became Christians and conservatives as they finally grew up.) Islamism, on the other hand is not suicidal but potentially homicidal, destroying everything in its path that it doesn't like.
It stopped cold all progress in the Islamic world. I defy anyone here who can cite a technological or even a cultural advance in the Islamic world after the advent of the scimitar. You have a 1400 year span from which to choose a single, solitary event that really matters, beyond the immediate destruction of someone else's culture or life.
Now they resent the cultural and technological gap that they have wrought for themselves, and feed off the rest of the world, demanding that we feed them more. The main problem is that in order to truly succeed, they must relinquish their religion. The other problem is that their religion requires succession through complete conversion or destruction of all infidels.
That'd be you and me. Well, I am through with about a billion people on this Earth.
I say cut them off technologically and culturally, and above all, geographically, and they are done. Go solar, split water, and let them eat their gold and drink their oil. Let them wipe each other out, and let us turn a blind eye toward Israel's response. They're due for a land grab, anyway. Let them aim for a huge one.
What say you all?
There is a lot of thought-provoking material in Mr. Cella's diary.
Historically, disunity is a widespread phenomenon. It has affected the Islamic world as well as Christendom, from the very beginning. Rival groups began battling very early in Islam, with the supporters of the Caliph Ali fighting the Umayyads, who in turn saw much of their territory taken by the Abbasids. The Arab Caliphate(s) declined as the various Turkish tribes grew in power, as did Shi'ite Persia, and there was much conflict among all of them, despite pressure from outside powers.
The Arab conquests followed a common pattern. At first, the wealth of the new territories increased the power of the invaders and a great deal of cultural growth and commercial expansion. But then complacency and decadence take over, and the groundwork is thus created for someone else's conquest.
People who practice Islam share our common human nature; they are not supermen immune from its weaknesses.
By the way, the French monarchy frequently allied itself with the sultans. Some habits last a long time!
The early years of Islam were tolerant of all learning, highly innovative, and intellectually vital. There were great school in Timbuktu, Spain, Cairo, and elsewhere. They preserved and salvaged a great deal of what was destroyed in Europe at the time. They invented algebra,a nd knew more about physiology than western Europe for many centuries.
And then it went stagnant.
And frankly except for oil money still would be.
I am not seeking to paint all with such broad brush strokes, but I am suggesting that while western Europe may be nihilistic, it is easier to recover from that than from stagnant Islam.
OK, two inventions, credit where credit is due, after all. I've had a bad day. I'm just sick to death about hearing about the latest suicide bombing.
I should have said "algebra and the scimitar", as I usually do. Of the two inventions, algebra has gotten us much farther than the scimitar. I'm curious to know if the Muslim world believes that, too.
It's clear from this one reference at the top of a long search:
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Arabic_mathematics.html
that algebra was an invention of the times when Islam was essentially peaceful and that invention occurred predominantly in Muslim territory. [Arabic numerals, the ones we currently use, 0 through 9, (1 thru 9, with 0 from India??) were also theirs. That even older invention allowed a much more processible mathematical form. Try formulating a consistent set of rules for adding several Roman numerals together.]
However, it should be noted that the reference goes on to say that peoples of many faiths, and lots of translations from previous civilizations, notably the Greeks, were involved. Algebra combined previously known fields (geometry and mathematics) seamlessly.
Presumably that learned society all ended in precisely the same stroke as when peaceful Islam ended. "Stagnation" doesn't being to describe my sense of waste here.
I'm going to go back and double check for the first appearance of the scimitar. My remark about since the scimitar may yet be valid, but the time frame since its inception may be greatly shortened to say, 800 years.
Thanks so much for such learned remarks. It is one of the reasons I love reading and responding in Red State. And I bookmarked your blog with Chesterton's poem. I never read it before. It will be among my favorites. It brings out so many thoughts and emotions. God bless you, for your wisdom and use of knowledge. Adios.
"Yo saludo por la bandera, de los Estados Unidos de America. Y a la republica quiere levantese, un nacion para Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos."
The implied comparison between the Crusades and the present will get some people fired up, I'm sure, but as you point out, the comparison doesn't really stand up to serious scrutiny. In 1400, the Muslim world was at least as advanced as Christendom -- technologicaly, politically, militarily, etc. That is obviously not the case today and is unlikely to be the case tomorrow.
About all that, I certainly agree. But some additional nuancing seems in order. First, Christendom is no longer co-terminous with "the West." It is a global faith that has more adherents outside of Europe than inside of it. Second, Islam is not monolithic and unchanging. If Muslims were to become a majority within Europe -- which I frankly doubt will ever happen -- they would no longer be the same Muslims they are today. They will be more materialistic, more educated, and -- this bears emphasis -- have lower birth rates. Which is why they will probably never become a majority.
In short, this us vs. them, Islamic Europe scenario is silly.
Now, what about that picture of "secular Europe"? I agree wholeheartedly that I would rather live in secular Europe than an Islamic country. And I dare any of the other people in this discussion who thihk Islamic civilization would be easier to deal with than European civilization to spend some time in both places, as I have. I have no doubt of their conclusion.
As to the re-Christianization of Europe. On one level this is silly, because European culture is still deeply Christian. The basic ethos of the most secular European still bears a deep Christian imprint. If you don't believe this, spend some time talking to a Hindu or a Buddhist. So is Europe less Christian than America? Maybe. Maybe not. It is true that more people go to church in America. But which society comes closer to the fundamental Christian precepts of caring for the weak and pacifism and non-violence? It could be argued, and I would argue, that Europe has more fully realizing a society founded on Christian precepts than the US has. Unless, of course, you think the core precepts of Christianity are contained in Leviticus.
Whether Europeans will become more religiously observant again remains to be seen. I personally think this is unlikely.
As to whether secular humanism leads to social breakdown...I wuuld suggest that some of the earlier commentators compare various indices of social breakdown in Europe and the US -- violent crime, political corruption, disrespect for property, etc. I can tell you in advance that the US does not do well....
Norwich, Byzantium (three volumes). There may be a condensed version as well.
Lawrence Brown, The Might of the West.
Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople and Byzantine Civilization.
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom.
Henri Pirenne, Muhammad and Charlemagne.
Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad.
A whole mass of new and exciting books on the Crusades have appeared. See Thomas Madden's review essay.
Chesterton's poem is so good it's almost painful. A Western or Christian man who reads it and is unmoved is probably already dead. It should be read to our children, and memorized by our soldiers.
(and The Crusades)
Some of Europe's best examples of this fine quality are expressed by doctors in Belgium attempting to pull the plug on a twelve year old girl for being "terminally ill". Gotta love that compassion!
Other examples include excluding about 10% percent of their population(Muslims) fro ever gaining cititzenship, even though they are third-generation residents, and setting up a massive public welfare system that currently sports unemployment rates in the impressive 10%-15% category.
Sorry bud. Just because bleeding liberals have a bleeding heart don't make them any more Christian, nice or compassionate than anyone else.
the libraries and schools that were so powerful and influential in the early days as well. That algebra is a result of synthesis makes complete sense. The moslems had the best libraries and teaching. It was an exciting time and Islam looked to be very sophisticated, especially in contrast to Europe at the time. Can it come back? Who knows? I hope so. My patience is running out, and I think a lot of other people are running out as well.
here are a couple of internet resources:
Re: There is no reason to expect that Islam, which once absorbed the great Christian cities of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Hippo, and later, Constantinople and the bulk of the Greek empire, will be unable to absorb the wealth and material resources of Europe.
There's a very good reason: the Arab world's economies stink and could not absorb the resources of an African kleptocracy, let alone of the world's second most dynamic economies. Islamic civilization, as I have explained before, is severely dysfunctional and the chaotic violence we are witnessing are its death throes. Small comfort for those caught in the way of its thrashings, but in the long term Islam (as a civilization) will either change mightily or it will perish of its own incompetence.
RE: Arabic numerals, the ones we currently use, 0 through 9, (1 thru 9, with 0 from India??) were also theirs.
Actually, they borrowed them originally from the Hindus.
(a) The Arab world is not the same as the Islamic world.
(b) Absorbing a dying world is not a matter of economic competence. It is a matter of faith and will.
(c) Islam has absorbed peoples and resources before; it has made use of tools and traditions that it did not create; why can it not do so again?
Re: Absorbing a dying world is not a matter of economic competence. It is a matter of faith and will.
And you're way too smart to think that "faith and will" are all it takes to conquer. The Ghost Dancers certainly learned otherwise at Wounded Knee! Ditto for the South at Gettysburg. Paul, Islam is incredibly weak and dyfusnctional, and I repeat: we are seeing its death throes. That is not necessarily a comforting thought: dying civilizations generally cause far more calamity than rising ones. Consider the fall of Rome or (more recently) the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Once the oil is gone, the culture of Islam will be left in the dust of its deserts, inferior even to Africa. Let's just pray that dust isn't radioactive and stained with the blood of millions.
you're winning my point for me.
Very interesting detail about history in that part of the world. Mr. Cella: Can you recommend any reading?
Respectfully,