Islam, the Caliphate and the West

Andrew McCarthy is doing great work explaining to poorly educated Westerners the history, teachings, strengths and weaknesses of Islam from a Western, Christian perspective. His National Review article "The OIC and the Caliphate" is well-worth reading.

"The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.

Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.

It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.

The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.

The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.

What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded."

Read the rest here.

Islam has been conquering Christian lands ever since the 8th century (eg. North Africa, Eqypt, the Middle East, Asia Minor). Charles Martel halted Islamic advancement into Europe at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD and during the Reformation the Turks were barely repulsed from Europe. Between the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Battle of Vienna in 1689 the tide turned with the result that Europe was preserved from Muslim rule. Taking the Iberian Peninsula back from Muslim conquest took seven centuries and was not complete until the end of the 15th century.

The question is whether Islam as a whole, or which parts of it, still holds to the ideal of the Caliphate as an alternative to the Western ideal of liberal democracy, human rights and individual freedom. There is no doubt that many Muslims, especially those educated or living in the West, have been influenced by Western ideals and there is also no doubt that the ideals of jihad, conquest, the worldwide dominion of Allah and Islamic supremacy also live on in widespread tracts of Islam. It is not always easy for Westerners to discern which geographical, ethnic and theological distinctives characterize which Islamic groups and individuals and to what extent they fall into which camp.

One implication of this is that the study of Islamic history, culture, politics, philosophy and religion is more important today than ever. Another implication is that it is naive for Westerners to project their own ideals onto Muslims as if all right-thinking people necessarily believe as we do. This is dangerous and makes us easy targets for subversion.

But when historical ignorance is compounded by naivety and a deep, pathological hatred of all things white, male, Western and Christian, we have a recipe for disastrous civilizational defeat. Make no mistake: if Islam triumphs over the West the list of good, decent, humane, civilized and life-affirming things that will disappear is a long one.

I do not think we can be conquered from without by force, not by Islam nor by any other earthly power. But I do think we can crumble from inward rot and the multicultural, liberal fascist, atheist, materialist, secularist, feminist, socialist and cultural Marxist voices embedded deeply within our cultural institutions are symptoms of a spiritual rot at the core of our civilization.

Those who care about the survival of freedom and justice and the glories of Western culture should be more concerned about the threat from within than the threat from without.

The Crusades Cannot Be Compared to Jihad

It is an article of faith on the left, a standard interpretation of Western history, a big lie repeated over and over again in textbooks, newspapers, articles, blog posts and conversations: the crusades were worse than any Muslim violence and aggression in history. This is false and misleading. It is a line I fell for in my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, and I now want to correct the record.

This is an excellent article which summarizes the facts of history concisely and precisely: "Enough is Enough: The Crusades and the Jihad are Not Equivalents" by Joe Hargrave at the American Catholic blog. You can read the work of Rodney Stark or many contemporary medieval historians for yourself or you can get an introduction to the basic issues from this excellent little piece. Let me summarize some of the main points here, but by all means please read Hargraves' post for yourself.

First, the crusades were a defensive reaction to Muslim invasion of the Holy Land and continental Europe itself. Muslims did invade, conquer and occupy by force many Christian lands including North Africa and Asia Minor. It is crucial to remember that it was the Muslims who were the aggressors and it was the Europeans who fought defensive wars for the first 1000 years of the rivalry between Islam and Christendom.

Second, when Europeans committed atrocities, such as pogroms against Jews, they acted against the teachings of their religion, whereas when the Muslims did so they acted in accordance with the teachings of their religion.

Third, Christianity has advanced over the last 1000 years and does not advocate religious violence today, whereas Islam has not advanced in a similar way and the militant and violent strains of Islam are growing not declining.

Fourth, the goals of the Crusades did not include forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity, whereas the many Islamic jihads in history have had as stated policy their intention to make conditions as harsh for non-converts as possible in order to coerce conversion to Islam.

Fifth, the Crusades ultimately failed and the forces of Islam invaded Europe occupying Spain and southern Italy and eventually failing to conquer Europe only because of European victories at Vienna in 1529 and 1683. This was a resumption of the attempt to invade Europe that was turned back by Charles Martel in 732 at Tours, France.

Sixth, it was only in the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" when anti-Christian atheism had gripped the European mind that Europe actually invaded and colonized the Middle East and North Africa. Secularism and atheism are more to blame for Western colonialism than Christianity, which has worked to mitigate many of the evils of colonialism (eg. the abolition of slavery).

In this light of these facts, the leftist slander of Christendom and whitewashing of Islam needs to be corrected and reversed.