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Islam and the Vacuum
 A Christian recently kidded a Jewish friend
thus: “Nobody would call Jews stupid.  So
why did the early Zionists, wanting to escape anti-Semitism, choose to build a
Jewish state in, of all the places on earth, a region whose prevalent religion is
profoundly hostile to Jews?”
The
Jew shrugged ruefully: “Next stop, Mars.”
I
became disillusioned with the State of Israel a quarter of a century ago. Yet
today I can only pity the Israelis as they face the wrath of a resurgent
Muslim fanaticism.
Yes,
the Israelis have committed their own sins and mistakes. Tact has never
been their long suit. Like our own government, they have needlessly inflamed
the Muslim world to the point of murderous fury.
Maybe
their worst miscalculation has been to underestimate the depth of that
hostility. Most Jews, in Israel as elsewhere, are essentially secularized
Westerners who find it hard to believe that religion can be a decisive force in
politics.
Religion has long since been “tamed” in the West,
segregated from political affairs, especially international ones. In 1936, when
the white men of Europe were preparing for another huge and fratricidal war,
Islam was not a player. Europeans assumed that the Muslim countries were
too backward ever to recover their former glory (though Hitler would later
make alliances with some Muslims, finding their attitude toward the Jews to
his liking).
But in
that year, the reactionary Catholic Hilaire Belloc reminded his readers that
only Islam had ever come near to destroying Christian civilization and that it
had done so fairly recently (while the English were settling in America); and
he warned that it might yet revive and renew its assault.
Belloc
was ignored. But what sounded far-fetched in 1936 is now starting to sound
prophetic. Belloc was strangely like another Catholic of our own day, whose
dire predictions have repeatedly survived mockery and come to pass: Patrick
Buchanan.
![[Breaker quote for Islam and the Vacuum: Belloc's warning]](2006breakers/060829.gif) Belloc
had a gift for seeing patterns in
history that were invisible to complacent liberal opinion, which expected
progress in the form of continued secularization. As science and reason
advanced, religion would die out and peace would ensue.
It
hasn’t quite worked out that way. As Belloc observed, Islam still
retains its fervor, tenacity, and resistance to conversion. Today we are
shocked to find that young men born and raised in Western countries can
become fanatical terrorists, willing to kill and die for Islam. The ancient
desert faith erupts unnervingly in the heart of civilized London.
That
faith began with an ignorant, semiliterate, but extremely eloquent Arab
around the year 622. Mohammed claimed to follow in the traditions of
Judaism and Christianity and to supersede both religions, but his attempts to
convert Jews failed when Jews found his understanding of their religion
risible. The same happened when he approached Christians. His initial
friendliness to both faiths turned to bitter hostility.
Mohammed’s conception of Allah was a severe one: an
almighty and arbitrary deity (though “compassionate” and
“merciful”), not a loving Father in Heaven. Mohammed rejected
the doctrine of the Trinity, which he absurdly misapprehended, thinking
Christians believed that the three Persons were God the Father, Jesus the
Son, and Mary the mother of Jesus. Nobody knows where he got this idea, but
he denied Jesus’ divinity while honoring him as a prophet. (Curiously,
Mohammed accepted the Virgin Birth, and he both affirmed and denied the
Resurrection.) Believers in the Trinity, he taught, will be damned.
It is
often remarked that Mohammed’s Allah is even more remote and
forbidding than John Calvin’s God, more disposed to condemn than to
forgive. Even without the doctrine of Original Sin, arbitrary punishment and
predestination seem to be at the heart of Islam. The inscrutable will of the
Almighty is not bound by any natural law intelligible to humans; if he
commands murder, murder becomes a duty. Divine might is right. Allah is
free even to contradict himself.
Fortunately for Islam, Mohammed was a better warrior and
statesman than theologian, and in making converts he used the sword and
tax incentives to supplement persuasion. In a few generations Islam had
conquered not only the Middle East, but lands as remote as Spain.
Will it
conquer again? It remains a fighting faith, demographically expansive, facing
a depopulated religious vacuum in what used to be Christendom.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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