Has Islam become the issue?

Nothing shows up the shallowness of the American neo-conservatives better than the choice of a French Catholic, Professor Alain Besancon, to fire a first salvo against Islam in the May issue of their flagship journal, Commentary. His essay, "What Kind of Religion is Islam", re-states the millennium-old Christian case against Muslim theology, while barely hinting at why theology has any bearing on the civilizational conflict now under way. Nonetheless, a Rubicon has been crossed, for Islam itself has become the issue, rather than terrorism, dictatorship, slavery in the Sudan or mistreatment of women.

Until now the conservative establishment carefully toed the White House line, namely that "this is a war against terrorism, not against Islam". As Washington's visions for Iraq's future vanish like a desert mirage, the basic premises of its policy may be re-thought. In that respect, the fact that Besancon has surfaced among the neo-conservatives is news indeed, although both the regular media and the weblogs have failed to take note of it.

Something like this was inevitable after years in which American conservatives sought to shoehorn the problems of the Islamic world into the box of the Western enlightenment ("freedom" vs "tyranny"). Muslims who abhorred the entente cordiale of evangelical Protestants and Jewish conservatives, though, should be entitled to a bit of Schadenfreude. Where are the great intellectual lights among the Jews and Protestants? Apart from complaints about the Prophet Mohammed's marriage to a nine-year-old and suchlike, the Evangelicals have trouble explaining why they dislike Islam.

The secular literati who became the Jewish neo-conservatives have a tin ear for religion. Commentary's long-time editor, Norman Podhoretz, reduced the mission of the Jewish prophets to a "war against idolatry" in his recent book, observing that Islam has even stricter rules against worshipping images than does Judaism. In short, by Podhoretz's simple-minded standard, Islam is a better version of his own religion (Oil On The Flames Of Civilizational War, Dec 1, 2003).

In a nutshell, Islam, according to Besancon, is not one of the three Abrahamic religions, but a pagan throwback, not a "revealed religion" in the sense of Judaism and Christianity, but a reversion to the "natural religion" of the pagan world. He writes: "In Islam, God gave a law to man by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of sublime condescension. This law has nothing in common with the law of Sinai, by which Israel joined in partnership with God, or with the law of the Spirit about which Paul speaks in the New Testament. Rather, the law of Islam is wholly external to man, and it precludes any notion of imitating God as is urged in the Bible ('be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy'). There is some similarity here with pagan conceptions and specifically with pagan ethics. Predestination, in the Muslim understanding, is not so different from the ancient notion of fatum."

Rosenzweig had characterized Allah as a capricious Oriental tyrant who can reorder the universe at his whim. Besancon takes note of "the characteristic Islamic denial of the stability and consistency of nature - the world is not governed by an unchanging natural law. Atoms, physical properties, matter itself: these endure only for an instant, being created anew at every moment by God - it is no wonder that to many Westerners the Muslim cosmos has seemed a borderland between dream and reality." This, argues Besancon, makes Muslim faith an entirely different entity than that of Jews or Christians: "In Islam - the will of God extends, as it were, to the secondary causes as well as to the primary ones, suffusing all of life. Religious and moral obligation can thus take on an intensity and an all-encompassing sweep that, at least in Christian terms, would be regarded as trespassing any reasonable limit - outsiders may well be struck by the religious zeal of the Muslim world towards a God whom they recognize as being also their God. But this God is in fact separate and distinct, and so is the relation between Him and the believing Muslim. Christians are accustomed to distinguish the worship of false gods - that is, idolatry - from the worship of the true God. To treat Islam suitably, it becomes necessary to forge a new concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp - namely, an idolatry of the God of Israel."

Muslims, Besancon concludes, misappropriate the identity of the God of Israel, put an entirely different God in His place, and worship it as if it were an idol. That is worlds apart from Norman Podhoretz's naive conclusion that Islam, in consequence of its prohibition against images, opposes idolatry even more fiercely than Judaism. Now that the neo-conservatives have taken instruction in matters of theology, what policy consequences might ensue? Will they continue to counsel President George W Bush that democracy can be whipped up Iraqi-style like a round of instant falafel? If the remote, arbitrary, crypto-pagan god of Islam bears no imitation, as Besancon puts it, what political conclusions should one draw? The Straussians would answer with Immanuel Kant that a constitution could be devised for a race of devils if only they were sensible. If we believe Besancon, Islam is neither devilish nor sensible, and the old moral calculus of the Western Enlightenment simply is irrelevant to the Muslim world. Perhaps the last spark of Catholic combativeness against Islam will fall on dry tinder among American Protestants and Jews. No man is a prophet in his own country. Besancon drew the ire of the Church in October 1999, when he told a synod of bishops in Rome that Catholics should stop using "faulty expressions such as 'the three revealed religions', 'the three religions of Abraham' and 'the three religions of the Book' to refer to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The National Catholic Reporter commented October 22, 1999, 'This last point was viewed by some as an especially remarkable statement, given that the pope himself has used the language of Christians and Muslims as brothers in Abraham at least five times - in a homily in Ankara, Turkey, in 1979; in a radio address to the peoples of Asia in 1981; in an address to Muslim workers in Mainz, Germany in 1980; in an address to a Rome colloquium in 1985; and in a homily in Gambia in 1992'."

Tragedies are tragedies precisely because the protagonist has no choice but to walk into a trap that he cannot possibly anticipate. We now are in the second act of the great tragedy of the 21st century, in which the terrible secrets hidden from the actors gradually are revealed to them. Buy another packet of crisps and stay in your seat: this is where it gets interesting.

Numerous Asia Times Online readers have raised pertinent issues regarding my contrast of Islam on one hand and on the other Judaism and Christianity in Why Islam Baffles America (Apr 15, 2004) and Horror and Humiliation in Fallujah (Apr 26, 2004). Rabbi Moshe Reiss observes that while Judaism and Christianity are closer theologically, Islam and Judaism are more similar in ritual. He is quite right, but the experience of the Islamic and Jewish beliefs still may be quite different. Few Muslim prayer books exist, because the five-times-daily prayer consists of relatively few repeated lines which easily may be committed to memory. Much of the prayer service consists of stylized physical movements, which during my attendance at Muslim services reminded me of a close-order drill. The few Muslim prayer books available at booksellers on the Internet run to 30 or 40 pages. Hundreds of Jewish prayer books are sold on the Internet, and they typically run to between 500 and 1,000 pages. I reiterate the mainstream Jewish and mainstream Muslim prayer (leaving out fringe elements such as the Sufis) are an entirely different thing, and will address readers' questions in more detail in the near future.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=T3Vbc.10222%24NL4.7531%40newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2522THE%2520WAY%2520WE%2520LIVE%2520NOW%2522%2520%2520niall%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&position=

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Eurabia?

By NIALL FERGUSON

Published: April 4, 2004

"In the 52nd chapter of his ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' Edward
Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the
French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of
Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam?

''Perhaps,'' speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ''the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford,
and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and
truth of the revelation of Mahomet.''

When those words were published in 1788, the idea of a Muslim Oxford could
scarcely have seemed more fanciful. The last Muslim forces had been driven
from Spain in 1492; the Ottoman advance through Eastern Europe had been
decisively halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less risible. The French historian
Alain Besancon is one of a number of European intellectuals who detect a
significant threat to the continent's traditional Christian culture. The
Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor has for some years referred to the rise of a
new ''Eurabia'' that is hostile in equal measure to the United States and
Israel. Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an apocalyptic book titled
''The Death of the West,'' prophesying that declining European fertility and
immigration from Muslim countries could turn ''the cradle of Western
civilization'' into ''its grave.''

Such Spenglerian talk has gained credibility since 9/11. The ''3/11''
bombings in Madrid confirm that terrorists sympathetic to Osama bin Laden
continue to operate with comparative freedom in European cities. Some
American commentators suspect Europeans of wanting to appease radical Islam.
Others detect in sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism a sinister
conjunction of old fascism and new fundamentalism.

Most European Muslims are, of course, law-abiding citizens with little
sympathy for terrorist attacks on European cities. Moreover, they are drawn
from a wide range of countries and of Islamic traditions, few of them close
to Arabian Wahhabism. Nevertheless, there is no question that the continent
is experiencing fundamental demographic and cultural changes whose long-term
consequences no one can foresee.

To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic
decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still
crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries
that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the
world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by
2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4
percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for
immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current
European Union members will fall by around 7.5million over the next 45
years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European
population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the
United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and
2050.)

With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed 50
by 2050 -- roughly 1 in 3 people will be 65 or over -- the welfare states
created in the wake of World War II plainly require drastic reform. Either
today's newborn Europeans will spend their working lives paying 75 percent
tax rates or retirement and ''free'' health care will simply have to be
abolished. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans will have to tolerate
more legal immigration.

But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a
high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's
fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A
youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised
to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.

This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the
decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany,
Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a
month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say
that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms
that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism,
their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of
fanaticism.

What the consequences of these changes will be is very difficult to say. A
creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom is one conceivable result:
while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith weaker, the
Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their
religious observance. A backlash against immigration by the economically
Neanderthal right is another: aging electorates turn to demagogues who offer
sealed borders without explaining who exactly is going to pay for the
pensions and health care. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a happy
fusion between rapidly secularized second-generation Muslims and their
post-Christian neighbors. Indeed, we may conceivably end up with all three:
Situation 1 in France, Situation 2 in Austria and Situation 3 in Britain.

Still, it is hard not to be reminded of Gibbon -- especially now that his
old university's Center for Islamic Studies has almost completed work on its
new premises. In addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, the building
is expected to feature ''a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret
tower.''

When I first glimpsed a model of that minaret, I confess, the phrase that
sprang to mind was indeed ''decline and fall.''

Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of history at the Stern School of
Business, New York University. His book ''Colossus: The Price of America's
Empire'' will be published this month by Penguin Press.

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