Islam: The Apparently Unconvertible Religion
Islam: The Apparently
Unconvertible Religion
Sunday, March 27, 2011
by James Schall
James
V. Schall, S. J. is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and
one of the most prolific writers on political philosophy and theology now
living. Here in a speech he gave in February 2003, he reflects on the legacy of
the Belgium-born master of English prose Hillaire Belloc in coming to an
understanding of the challenge that Islam poses to Western Civilization and the
Christian Faith. It appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day, LXIX (April 1, 2003),
375-82.
BELLOC ON THE “APPARENTLY UNCONVERTIBLE” RELIGION
“Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts made by
great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans
into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed. We have in
some places driven the Mohammedan master out and freed his Christian subjects
from Mohammedan control, but we have had hardly any effect in converting
individual Mohammedans....” – Hillaire Belloc, The Great Heresies,
1938.1
“Muhammad’s monotheism began, no doubt, as a
rejection of paganism; yet it was highly positive. It was, as he never ceased
repeating, the monotheism of Israel. The god of Islam was Yahweh, without those
truths about Him revealed by Christ. ... The Qur’~n denies the Incarnation:
‘God is one, eternal. He did not beget and was unbegotten’ (Qur’~n, 112.3).
For Muhammad there was no redeemer, no need for redemption, no original
sin.”
– J. Kritzeck/C. Wilde, “Islam,” New Catholic
Encyclopedia (2d Edition, 2003), V. 7, 608.
“But there
is no hiding the fact that bin Laden, his lieutenants, and his foot soldiers
have repeatedly stated their aim to impose their values of Islam on, first, the
Muslim world and, then, the rest of the world. They want each country to accept
or be forced into submission to their version of Islamic Shari’a law.... Their
public statements, their strategy and recruitment, the notes and prayers left by
the airplane hijackers, all show a deep religious commitment. They do not
lament inequality; decry poverty, or call for democracy. They do not rant about
globalization or consumerism or capitalism. They explicitly name and target
Christianity, Judaism, and moderate Islam. By all means let us call this
inauthentic religion, perverted religion, hijacked religion. But, at the cost
of blinding ourselves, let us never forget that it is religion.”
– Islam at the
Crossroads, 2002.2
I.
One of the most difficult
exercises in political prudence, I think, is philosophically to describe
accurately a regime in which one is visiting or in which one lives or in which
one finds a formidable adversary. For, to delineate a regime correctly, we must
have some criterion of judgment according to which we can decide whether any
regime is good or bad. Without this standard, without a universal philosophy
and political philosophy in other words, we are engaged merely in name-calling
without substance. This possibility of describing regimes as they are implies a
universal political philosophy based on foundations independent of, though not
unrelated to, actual regimes, with enough civic freedom to articulate them,
hopefully without fear of prison or death for doing so.
As philosophers, beginning with Socrates, have led us realize, this effort to
examine the nature of a regime can be a dangerous exercise. Deviant princes and
rulers, whatever we call them, do not like to know what they actually are. And
citizens do not like to articulate the real nature of their rulers, often
themselves agreeing with the principles of regime, a truth Plato taught us long
ago when he spoke about the relation of our souls to our regimes. Princes and
people prefer to be told that they themselves already embody the highest of
moral norms, that they do God’s will or are the “best regime,” whatever it is
they embody in fact according to classic philosophic standards. This endeavor
to identify the type of polity before us becomes doubly difficult when the
regime is also directly or indirectly said to be a regime that arises from or is
devoted to the implementation of a rule rooted in a revelation or religion. We
no longer, in this case, deal with a regime as a mere political entity, but with
one that claims transcendent origins or justifications. The grounds for the
truth of any revelation cannot be avoided.
Leo Strauss
has noted that medieval Muslim philosophers, aware of this particular difficulty
in pronouncing in public the theoretic character of a regime in which they
lived, chose, for safety’s sake, to do their philosophy in private. The
philosopher externally did what was expected of him in terms of devotion and
pious practices. But, even though he dissembles about religion in public, he
preferred in private philosophy to religion as an explanation of the truth of
things. Indeed, that alternative to choose privacy in Islam was the
philosophers’ only viable alternative if they wanted to live and philosophize,
albeit cautiously.
This move to philosophy meant, in
Strauss’ view, that the philosopher had to come up with a theory in which the
presumed revelation that ruled the public order was itself subordinated to
philosophy. Philosophy judged revelation. This judgment meant that the
philosopher had to explain the purpose and content of the revelation’s terms on
rational grounds alone. The explained terms of religious credibility, the
political theology of the religion, in other words, were unsustainable
intellectually because they could be fully understood by philosophy. The notion
that the Koran, for example, is a book, the text of which is directly spoken to
Mohammed in Arabic with no intermediary is, even without examining its content
for contradictory or false teachings, unbelievable on any rational
grounds.
This task of letting the public life be
whatever it is, even if not credible, was accomplished by treating the way of
life depicted in the Koran to be a “myth” specifically and artfully designed to
enable rulers to keep the intransigent masses in line. This understanding of
myth was an ancient formula dating back at least to Epicurus. Aristotle himself
said that the tyrant, if he wants to stay in power, should observe the local
pious customs; he should keep the masses busy, exhausted, and entertained, while
not allowing anything to be spoken in private. A similar position occurred in
late medieval Europe in what is known as Latin Averröism. This was the position
that there were two “truths,” one of revelation and one of reason. The two
could contradict each other, what ever that view might eventually do to the
unity of the human soul. We need not “reconcile” them. If everyone played the
game, this theory allowed the philosopher to philosophize and the believer to
believe with no worry about evident contradictions.
The
myth of religion, thus, is useful politically but it is not true or compatible
with philosophy. The philosopher lived a secret or private life, as Socrates,
in his Apology, affirmed that he also did, lest he be killed sooner. It is
taken for granted that no vocal philosopher accused in the mythic religious
polity will survive. These are the rules of the game. It was thus not possible
that more than a few philosophers would know the falsity of the myth explaining
the particular revelation. On the surface, all would be calm. This difficulty
in knowing the truth about our being conformed more or less to what we know
about the opaqueness of human nature, with or without the notion of The Fall.3
Religion was in effect a useful way to control the inevitable turmoils in the
masses, those who did not know or rule themselves. Philosophy and truth are
not intended for everyone. It is instructive to recognize that when we come to
St. Thomas, it was first necessary for him to establish that revelation and
philosophy were not contradictory to each other before the truths of revelation
and reason could be coherently seen to belong to the same world of truth and
reality. Unavoidably, this position also required some position on the very
truth of the respective revelations.
II.
Considering that, in many ways, Islam has been the oldest and most persistent
enemy of Christianity, the one from which there is rarely a return if we look
back at the lands once conquered by Muslim armies or traders in whatever
century, it is surprising how little the official Church has said about Islam.
St. Thomas’ Summa Contra Gentiles still seems like the major Christian effort
to define what Islam is. Though Islam is a huge historical fact, the fastest
growing religion in the world today, including at least a fifth of the world
population, with new mosques regularly appearing wherever they are permitted, we
have, for example, no encyclical or letter on “What Is Islam?” We have nothing
that parallels Mit Brennender Sorge or Divini Redemptoris, no Syllabus of
Errors, or Canons of the Council of Trent. It is almost as if the Church has
never considered the truth claims of Islam important. From a theological point
of view, we trace multiple Christian heresies in our documents, but not Islam,
which was, in a way, itself a Christian heresy. On the surface, this lack seems
curious almost as if Islam was not important enough to take seriously or that
there was a certain danger in doing so.
We do have, to
be sure, recent exhortations about what we have in common with Islam and other
religions. Our contemporary mode of approach is liberal and irenic, dialogue,
when and if that is possible, never any confrontation, even when provoked. We
are loathe to mention any problem, including the vast numbers of Christians
killed in Islamic countries in the past century, except when it is posed in the
most general terms that often make the problems sound to be caused by western
ideology, not Muslim belief or practice. We impose western philosophical or
ideological methods of analyses on Islamic lands and expect this formula to
explain their inner ethos. We use scientific method that blind ourselves to
what is going on. In short, we do not really dialogue with Muslims but with
ourselves. It frightens us to hear ourselves called “infidels” by Muslims
because of what we believe about God and Christ. It is not merely a case of
exaggerated rhetoric but the definition of what seems to threaten Islam, namely,
another understanding of God, particularly the Trinitarian God and the
Incarnation. Much of the appeal of Islam seems to depend directly on the denial
of this complex understanding of the Deity which we are bound to hold and
propagate.
The 21st Century, it seems clear, will more
likely be a century of confrontation with world religions rather than with world
ideologies, as was the 20th Century. Few intellectuals expected this event. In
terms of morals and vitality, the West has already declined. Roger Scruton’s
remark strikes home: “The intrusion of the media into the battlefield has had a
shattering effect on the perception of war. And the declining birthrate and
increasing longevity of the population have made Western societies ever more
reluctant to risk in combat their dwindling supply of sons.”4 An abundant
supply of sons is something that Islam has, many of whom seem surprisingly
willing to die defending or expanding it. Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist
movements seem to have grown stronger not weaker during the supposedly skeptical
20th Century.
Christian populations are under pressure
in India, China, in Buddhist and Muslim lands. Many Christians in these lands
leave voluntarily, usually under pressure to do so. Most of Christians once in
Arab lands are now in the West. They voted with their feet. Meanwhile, the
Muslim presence, due in part to their comparative increase in numbers, is found
everywhere in Europe and America, along with Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and other
representatives of various world religions. The modern secularist seems almost
like a cultural oddity confined to small academic enclaves in small corners of
the world. It is ironic that much of modern political philosophy was premised
on the notion of reducing the importance of religion to prevent religious and
civil wars. In the light of the stringent closure of these religions in on
themselves in their historical locations, together with their lack of any real
sense of religious freedom based on the dignity of the person, the alternative
of skepticism or atheism almost seems healthy in comparison to the lands in
which there is no escape, except perhaps inwards, as in the case of the medieval
Muslim philosophers.
III.
In this light, it may
be of some merit to take a further look at Belloc’s discussions of the future of
Islam made back in the 1930's. What is remarkable about Belloc’s comments on
Islam, as we read them today, is his ability to judge historical trends on the
basis of a spiritual force or power. Though he was a soldier and a military
historian who loved the knowledge of battles and battlefields, generals and
soldiers, Belloc never thought that it was material power that ultimately
determined what would happen among men and civilizations. “Cultures spring from
religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its
philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves
the decay of the culture corresponding to it – we see that most clearly in the
breakdown of Christendom today”5 (132). He is aware that, for some three
hundred years after the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, the Muslim
lands had gradually dropped out of the modern picture as serious threats. They
were seen to be backward lands and in fact were backward. In spite of the oil,
the cause of whose value they had little or nothing to do, this is still largely
the case.
Yet, Belloc was aware that Islam did not
change in spite of centuries of western influence. When it came to the
fundamentals, it was utterly unaffected by western occupation. As Belloc wrote
in Survivals and New Arrivals:
we thought of its (Islam’s) religion as a
sort of fossilised thing about which we need not trouble. That was almost
certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the
near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will arise. For after this
subjugation of the Islamic culture by nominally Christian nations had already
been achieved, the political consequences of that culture began to notice two
disquieting features about it. The first was that its spiritual foundation
proved immovable; the second that its area of occupation did not recede, but on
the contrary slowly expanded (1929)..
Suffice it to say, we are reckoning
with Islam today. Europe and much of America did largely lose the faith, as
Belloc observed even before World War II. The expansion of Islam is also into
Europe and Africa, as well as in Asia and even in North America.
The
solidity of Islam, its inner coherence, whatever its cause and the methods by
which it was kept, was something that struck Belloc. As he wrote in the same
book,
Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The
so-called Christian governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised.
The ardent and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with
courtesy, sometimes wit fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam.
I think it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which
Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. Its votaries are the one
religious body conversions from which are insignificant.
Belloc
recognized that Islam flourished because it did have some basic truth about God,
however that be interpreted. “Mohammedanism struck permanent roots, developing
a life of its own, and became at last something like a new religion...,” Belloc
wrote in The Great Heresies. “Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the
Catholic truths which it had retained. Its insistence on personal immortality,
on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its
insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator – these
were its strength” (128). Belloc saw the strength of Islam in its
virtues.
It is for this reason alone, the
impregnability of Islam to Catholicism, however, that the Church needs to take
more cognizance of what is this growing force in the world. It is not enough to
condemn violence in the abstract. “Go forth and teach all nations” is not
possible if the nations will not allow themselves to be preached to. The
western theories of freedom of religion, whether secular or religious, have made
no headway in Islam, and only rarely are they criticized for this lack. Those
few who are Christians or members of other religions, in most Muslim lands, in
practice must be content to remain second-class citizens and are constantly
subject to the pressure to convert to Islam.
III.
Belloc’s thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy which retained the
Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of God, but denied all the
Christian aspects – the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, who, as a result,
became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the priesthood, and the
sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own terms, it was a simple
religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few doctrinal and devotional
points. The expansion of Islam was almost always by arms; after each conquest,
the Muslim Califs or Sultans ruled. They were intolerant but they more or less
accepted political submission in return for tribute. At least twice in the
history of the West, Islam almost overran Europe, once at Poitiers in the 8th
Century and once at Vienna in the 17th Century.
Interestingly, the Church since that period has celebrated certain feast days
precisely in memory of these victories, the most notable is St. Pius V’s
establishment of the Feast the Holy Rosary, on October 7, 1571. This feast
commemorated the naval victory at Lepanto. “The name of Lepanto should remain
in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half dozen great
names in the history of the Christian world” (122). In these days of
apologizing for practically everything, one wonders if some pope someday will
not rescind this feast on grounds of good will. The cynic might hope that we at
least wait till Islam first apologizes for the initial slaughter and conquest of
Christian lands from Spain to Africa and Asia.
These
earlier popes, in any case, understood that they had an enemy and that they were
blessed not to have fallen under Muslim army rulers. Urban II’s call to the
Crusades, though much misunderstood, can largely be judged as a belated and
mainly unsuccessful effort of the European Christians to defend themselves
against Islam. Belloc, in fact, thought that the Crusaders were from the
beginning undermanned and rather poorly led, though often with much heroism.
Their final defeat at the hands of Saladin at Hattin in 1187, he considers to
be one of the most significant battles in the history of the world because it
confirmed Muslim rule across a wide stretch of the world, most of which it still
controls.
Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think
that there was something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam’s ever
becoming a major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133).
The fact that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely
an accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute
notion of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki
sees much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to
modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found in
Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with oil
money.
The “new” weapon that Islam has displayed with
September 11, 2001, is a kind of fanatic willingness to use any method of terror
even if it costs the lives of individuals who are often popularly considered to
be “martyrs” for killing Infidels. This method needs little technology. The
West has minimum moral equipment with which to respond to such tactics. Indeed,
as both Aristotle and Machiavelli saw, that if someone does not fear for his own
life, it is very difficult to stop him. But neither of them thought of the idea
of sacrificing one’s life specifically for this purpose. Indeed, in the history
of the West, Islam has always sent a kind of terror through the hearts of those
on its borders who were about to be attacked or in the hearts of those who had
to live under its control. Belloc alludes to this phenomenon:
These
things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror
under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again
fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years,
seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain
complicated machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in
the modern world? (131).
The question seems less rhetorical today because
numbers, in the end, count as does the willingness of people to die using modern
machinery like normal airplanes to carry our what is attested to be a religious
mission, however much we choose to identify it as simply “terrorism” without a
cause. What is also true is that this terrorism, or its threat, is now
everywhere. Thus far, at least, we see within Islam itself little effort to
control its own “terrorists” or to sympathize with those who suffer from tem or
who must defend themselves against them.
The
inconvertibility of Islam leads us to several perhaps radical reflections. It
is a common saying among Christians that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the
faith. There have been many, many Christian martyrs by Islam over the centuries
and currently. As in the case of the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks,
there will always appear some justification – the Christian blasphemed Allah –
in one sense. The very existence of Christianity is a blasphemy in Muslim terms
if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation, that God became man. These
historical martyrdoms have had little or no effect in terms either of conversion
or even acknowledgment, even by ourselves often.
Moreover, we have the parallel phenomenon of the Muslim martyr, the man who
kills in the name of Allah, whether it be in a suicidal attack in a church in
the Philippines, French Trappist monks whose throats were slit in Algeria on
Christmas eve, or the pilots who flew into the World Trade Center. In some
basic sense, these killers are pictured as martyrs. Nor is the notion of “holy
war” unknown in Islam. However much the Church tries to argue that such actions
cannot be considered to be justified, still within at least some branches of
Muslim opinion, they are considered to be genuine martyrs seeking to defend or
propagate the religion and therefore worthy of Allah. When we try to oppose
this position on say natural law terms, we find that our mode of discourse is
itself alien to what much of Islam conceives itself to be. The basis of our
arguments are not admitted to be valid.
Belloc thought
that Islam began as a heresy and became a new religion culturally when it had to
account and explain its successes on the field of battle. The stunning
successes on the field of battle had to be administered. “Mohammedanism was a
heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began
as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the
Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine.
Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but
those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was – not a
denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the Christian thing” (76-77). As most
scholars recognize, the main parts of what Islam took from revelation are from
Judaism rather than Christianity. Islam kept much of what Christianity has in
common with Judaism – the transcendence of Yahweh, creation, divine justice and
punishment, the devotion of the people to God.
But
Islam was itself not like Arianism and other early heresies. It arose from
without the old ancient Christian world. For it, Christ was not God but rather
a human prophet. This is the explicit denial of the root principle of
Christianity. “With the denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental
structure. He (the Muslim) refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its
Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of Mass, and therefore the institution
of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser
heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplicity” (79). Though it is not often
attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, even in private,
and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and constantly hemmed
in by various formal and informal practices. “Freedom of religion” is not a
concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a Western idea, even
largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice of freedom of
religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to Allah, even
where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.
Belloc
thought that Islam expanded rapidly for the very good reason that “it won
battles.” (81). This success should give modern pacifists pause, but it usually
does not. Yet, to call Islam a religion of “simplicity” is, in Belloc’s terms,
rather a compliment. He notes that it freed many people from the complicated
clutch of usury, from the lawyers. It freed slaves if they converted and made
them
brothers within the system (81-82). The brotherhood of faith trumps
other relationships. Belloc distinguished between the character of the spread
of Islam initially in the near East and that expansion into Persian and Mongol
lands – the area from Mesopotamia to India and the Eastern Roman empire (85).
“The uniformity of temper which is the mark of Asiatic society, responded at
once to this new idea of one very simple, personal form of government,
sanctified by religion, and ruling with a power theoretically absolute from one
center” (86). It was from these conquests that Islam learned of Greek
philosophy and other cultures and was the origin of much of its science and art.
“Islam was the one heresy,” Belloc wrote, “that nearly destroyed Christendom
through its early material and intellectual superiority” (88).
Much has been made of the “tolerance” in Islam, especially for religions
of the book. This tolerance was often merely the inability to change large
conquered populations in a short time. Belloc thought that “the Mohammedan
temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty.
It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed.
It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian
culture about it. It still so regards it even today” (90). The practical
compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain but within
very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute. Many were
gradually absorbed into Islam (91).
IV.
This
record of Islam’s own consistency, its closed nature, its remaining itself had
to be reconsidered in some detail, Belloc thought. It has been “the most
formidable of the heresies” (92). The question is now why has it survived?
“Millions of modern people of the white civilization – that is, the
civilization of Europe and America – have forgotten all about Islam” (92).
This could be written in 1938, but not in 2003. The questions must now be
asked not merely “why has it survived?” but “why has it flourished?” Belloc can
only be said to have foreseen the problem: “It is, in fact, the most formidable
and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment
become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past” (93).
Neither our modern culture or the modern Church allows us this
frankness.
Usually, Belloc thought, heresies make an
initial impact then they decline and disappear. Islam did not do this (94-95).
When Islam was defeated, it remained strong in numbers and in convictions
(95-96). How then is Islam different? Some westerners say it is because it is
simple and founded on justice and improves on Christianity. Belloc did not
think that this reason works because every heresy maintains the same thing but
they still fade, not Islam (98). Historically, Islam constantly gained new
recruits: the Turk, the Mongol. “The causes of this vitality (of Islam) are
very difficult to explore, and perhaps cannot be reached. For myself I should
ascribe it in some part to the fact that Mohammedanism being a thing from
outside, a heresy that did not arise within the body of the Christian community
but beyond its frontiers, has always possessed a reservoir of men, newcomers
pouring in to revivify its energies. But this cannot be the full explanation”
(129) Today, I suspect, they gain new recruits largely from their own
population growth which expands to fill the vacuum left by the low birth rates
in the West. The Crusades did not split Islam geographically. Belloc held
that if the Crusades (1095-1200) had cut Africa from Asia, Islam may have
declined (103). It is interesting how many of the advocates of occupation of
Iraq today use this theory of the need to split Islam and hence reduce its
geopolitical power.
Yet, Belloc maintained that, though
based on the army, Islam did have a cultural force. ‘The success of
Mohammedanism had not been due to its offering something more satisfactory in
the way of philosophy and morals, but, as I have said, to the opportunity it
afforded of freedom to the slave and debtor, and an extreme simplicity which
pleased the unintelligent masses who were perplexed by the mysteries inseparable
from the profound intellectual life of Catholicism, and from its radical
doctrine of the Incarnation” (103). This position is not unlike that of Eric
Voegelin, who argued that the susceptibility of western Christians to modern
ideology was due to the practical disbelief of many Christians in the ultimate
transcendent goal of the faith.7
Belloc, in fact, saw a
relation between the failure of the Crusades and the rise of modern Europe which
at first turned in on itself before finding the technological means of bypassing
Islamic lands with the discoveries of America and the sea route to Asia. Belloc
even held that the success of the Reformation in part was due to the defeat of
Catholic and papal policies in the Crusades (107-09). Belloc’s book on The
Crusades remains one of the most poignant accounts of a failed enterprise. “Had
the crusaders’ remaining force at the end of the first Crusading march been a
little more numerous, had they taken Damascus and the string of towns on the
fringe of the desert, the whole history of the world would have been changed.
The world of Islam would have been cut in two, with the East unable to approach
the West.”(114) North Africa, the old Roman lands, was not recovered. “They
failed ... but they made modern Europe” (115). The Reformation was due to the
weakness at the Center (115).
What Belloc was most
conscious of, however, was that, unlike Islam, that Christianity did not retain
its inner coherence, its faith. “Christian Europe is and should be by nature
one; but it has forgotten its nature in forgetting its religion” (116). Belloc
connected this loss of inner coherence in the West to the opportunity for Islam
to rise again. It is partly the downplaying of the importance of religion in the
West that it has been unable or unwilling to understand the attraction of Islam
in its own inner coherence. “It has always seemed t me possible, and even
probable,” Belloc wrote,
that there would be a resurrection of Islam and
that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle
between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years
its greatest opponent.... The future always comes as a surprise but political
wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that
surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected
thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of
all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion
physically paralysed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an
unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable
(127-28).
It is interesting that even with the return of Islam to the
forefront of our consciousness, we do not want to see this return as a religious
thing explained in terms of Islam itself.
V.
How
are we to assess these potent reflections of Belloc? Stretched half-way across
the world, Islam is divided up into many “nations,” though that concept of
nationalism is not an Islamic idea. The central organs of the Church seem to be
against doing anything radical about any Islamic threat, preferring diplomacy
and not forcefully noting the widespread attacks on Christians throughout the
world. It is interesting that several Vatican officials give as a reason for
not using force is the fear of the rising up of Islam and the potential terror
it can cause everywhere in the world. They are right, the danger is real.
Normally, this view would be an argument for doing something about the problem
when we can, before something more terrible happens, particularly if the problem
lies in Islam itself and its inability to accept the normal peaceful structures
of society. Almost all the minor wars today have some Islamic component.
Within Islam, there are various schools of interpretation from the
well-financed Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia to the more mild versions of
the Shiites.
Geo-politicians and theologians alike
argue that, since we really have no common philosophy, we must seek ways to
reinterpret Islam within itself, using its own texts and traditions to mollify
the extremists who now see an opportunity to establish Muslim dominance all over
the world. At first sight, this seems preposterous. But as Belloc said,
surprising things happen, like the rise of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism in
the first place. It makes us wonder whether there is not something objective to
be said for the reality of salvation history after all.
For Catholics in particular, Belloc’s estimate was sobering. He lived before
“ecumenism,” but he certainly wondered about its effectiveness in the case of
Islam, however politically wise it might be to proceed as the Muslim
philosophers and not mention any truths outside the Koran. “Missionary effort
has had no appreciable effect on it (Islam),” Belloc concluded.
It still
converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time some
European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes a
Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of
morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine. In view of this,
anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not
see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the
old pressure of Islam on Christendom (130).
These words are strong and
historically true. They also today strike us as prophetic. Few paid much
attention to Belloc in his time. No Muslims are converted. No one ever
abandons the book or its ritual.
In the end, I cannot
help but have a gratefulness to the “apparently unconvertible” religion, to
radical Islam for waking us up. We could make the case that all our studies,
all our concern with western ideology and power may have been misplaced. What
we should have been paying attention to are our souls and what is the best
explanation of our existence and destiny. Islam has another soul and another
destiny which it seeks to spread, by its own proven means, to the ends of the
earth, an idea that it probably got, ironically, from the end of the Gospel of
Matthew.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (New York: Sheed & Ward,
MCMXXXVIII), 98.
2Paul Marshall, Roberta Green, and
Lela Gilbert, Islam at the Crossroads: Understanding Its Beliefs, History, and
Conflicts (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002), 107.
3See
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press,
1973, 11-24; Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, “Introduction,” Medieval Political
Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 1-21.
4Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
(Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 59.
5Unless otherwise
indicated, citations from The Great Heresies will simply place the page number
after the citation.
6Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of
Science and the Ways to God (Chicato: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
35-36.
7Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and
Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1968), 109.
Unconvertible Religion
Sunday, March 27, 2011
by James Schall
James
V. Schall, S. J. is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and
one of the most prolific writers on political philosophy and theology now
living. Here in a speech he gave in February 2003, he reflects on the legacy of
the Belgium-born master of English prose Hillaire Belloc in coming to an
understanding of the challenge that Islam poses to Western Civilization and the
Christian Faith. It appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day, LXIX (April 1, 2003),
375-82.
BELLOC ON THE “APPARENTLY UNCONVERTIBLE” RELIGION
“Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts made by
great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans
into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed. We have in
some places driven the Mohammedan master out and freed his Christian subjects
from Mohammedan control, but we have had hardly any effect in converting
individual Mohammedans....” – Hillaire Belloc, The Great Heresies,
1938.1
“Muhammad’s monotheism began, no doubt, as a
rejection of paganism; yet it was highly positive. It was, as he never ceased
repeating, the monotheism of Israel. The god of Islam was Yahweh, without those
truths about Him revealed by Christ. ... The Qur’~n denies the Incarnation:
‘God is one, eternal. He did not beget and was unbegotten’ (Qur’~n, 112.3).
For Muhammad there was no redeemer, no need for redemption, no original
sin.”
– J. Kritzeck/C. Wilde, “Islam,” New Catholic
Encyclopedia (2d Edition, 2003), V. 7, 608.
“But there
is no hiding the fact that bin Laden, his lieutenants, and his foot soldiers
have repeatedly stated their aim to impose their values of Islam on, first, the
Muslim world and, then, the rest of the world. They want each country to accept
or be forced into submission to their version of Islamic Shari’a law.... Their
public statements, their strategy and recruitment, the notes and prayers left by
the airplane hijackers, all show a deep religious commitment. They do not
lament inequality; decry poverty, or call for democracy. They do not rant about
globalization or consumerism or capitalism. They explicitly name and target
Christianity, Judaism, and moderate Islam. By all means let us call this
inauthentic religion, perverted religion, hijacked religion. But, at the cost
of blinding ourselves, let us never forget that it is religion.”
– Islam at the
Crossroads, 2002.2
I.
One of the most difficult
exercises in political prudence, I think, is philosophically to describe
accurately a regime in which one is visiting or in which one lives or in which
one finds a formidable adversary. For, to delineate a regime correctly, we must
have some criterion of judgment according to which we can decide whether any
regime is good or bad. Without this standard, without a universal philosophy
and political philosophy in other words, we are engaged merely in name-calling
without substance. This possibility of describing regimes as they are implies a
universal political philosophy based on foundations independent of, though not
unrelated to, actual regimes, with enough civic freedom to articulate them,
hopefully without fear of prison or death for doing so.
As philosophers, beginning with Socrates, have led us realize, this effort to
examine the nature of a regime can be a dangerous exercise. Deviant princes and
rulers, whatever we call them, do not like to know what they actually are. And
citizens do not like to articulate the real nature of their rulers, often
themselves agreeing with the principles of regime, a truth Plato taught us long
ago when he spoke about the relation of our souls to our regimes. Princes and
people prefer to be told that they themselves already embody the highest of
moral norms, that they do God’s will or are the “best regime,” whatever it is
they embody in fact according to classic philosophic standards. This endeavor
to identify the type of polity before us becomes doubly difficult when the
regime is also directly or indirectly said to be a regime that arises from or is
devoted to the implementation of a rule rooted in a revelation or religion. We
no longer, in this case, deal with a regime as a mere political entity, but with
one that claims transcendent origins or justifications. The grounds for the
truth of any revelation cannot be avoided.
Leo Strauss
has noted that medieval Muslim philosophers, aware of this particular difficulty
in pronouncing in public the theoretic character of a regime in which they
lived, chose, for safety’s sake, to do their philosophy in private. The
philosopher externally did what was expected of him in terms of devotion and
pious practices. But, even though he dissembles about religion in public, he
preferred in private philosophy to religion as an explanation of the truth of
things. Indeed, that alternative to choose privacy in Islam was the
philosophers’ only viable alternative if they wanted to live and philosophize,
albeit cautiously.
This move to philosophy meant, in
Strauss’ view, that the philosopher had to come up with a theory in which the
presumed revelation that ruled the public order was itself subordinated to
philosophy. Philosophy judged revelation. This judgment meant that the
philosopher had to explain the purpose and content of the revelation’s terms on
rational grounds alone. The explained terms of religious credibility, the
political theology of the religion, in other words, were unsustainable
intellectually because they could be fully understood by philosophy. The notion
that the Koran, for example, is a book, the text of which is directly spoken to
Mohammed in Arabic with no intermediary is, even without examining its content
for contradictory or false teachings, unbelievable on any rational
grounds.
This task of letting the public life be
whatever it is, even if not credible, was accomplished by treating the way of
life depicted in the Koran to be a “myth” specifically and artfully designed to
enable rulers to keep the intransigent masses in line. This understanding of
myth was an ancient formula dating back at least to Epicurus. Aristotle himself
said that the tyrant, if he wants to stay in power, should observe the local
pious customs; he should keep the masses busy, exhausted, and entertained, while
not allowing anything to be spoken in private. A similar position occurred in
late medieval Europe in what is known as Latin Averröism. This was the position
that there were two “truths,” one of revelation and one of reason. The two
could contradict each other, what ever that view might eventually do to the
unity of the human soul. We need not “reconcile” them. If everyone played the
game, this theory allowed the philosopher to philosophize and the believer to
believe with no worry about evident contradictions.
The
myth of religion, thus, is useful politically but it is not true or compatible
with philosophy. The philosopher lived a secret or private life, as Socrates,
in his Apology, affirmed that he also did, lest he be killed sooner. It is
taken for granted that no vocal philosopher accused in the mythic religious
polity will survive. These are the rules of the game. It was thus not possible
that more than a few philosophers would know the falsity of the myth explaining
the particular revelation. On the surface, all would be calm. This difficulty
in knowing the truth about our being conformed more or less to what we know
about the opaqueness of human nature, with or without the notion of The Fall.3
Religion was in effect a useful way to control the inevitable turmoils in the
masses, those who did not know or rule themselves. Philosophy and truth are
not intended for everyone. It is instructive to recognize that when we come to
St. Thomas, it was first necessary for him to establish that revelation and
philosophy were not contradictory to each other before the truths of revelation
and reason could be coherently seen to belong to the same world of truth and
reality. Unavoidably, this position also required some position on the very
truth of the respective revelations.
II.
Considering that, in many ways, Islam has been the oldest and most persistent
enemy of Christianity, the one from which there is rarely a return if we look
back at the lands once conquered by Muslim armies or traders in whatever
century, it is surprising how little the official Church has said about Islam.
St. Thomas’ Summa Contra Gentiles still seems like the major Christian effort
to define what Islam is. Though Islam is a huge historical fact, the fastest
growing religion in the world today, including at least a fifth of the world
population, with new mosques regularly appearing wherever they are permitted, we
have, for example, no encyclical or letter on “What Is Islam?” We have nothing
that parallels Mit Brennender Sorge or Divini Redemptoris, no Syllabus of
Errors, or Canons of the Council of Trent. It is almost as if the Church has
never considered the truth claims of Islam important. From a theological point
of view, we trace multiple Christian heresies in our documents, but not Islam,
which was, in a way, itself a Christian heresy. On the surface, this lack seems
curious almost as if Islam was not important enough to take seriously or that
there was a certain danger in doing so.
We do have, to
be sure, recent exhortations about what we have in common with Islam and other
religions. Our contemporary mode of approach is liberal and irenic, dialogue,
when and if that is possible, never any confrontation, even when provoked. We
are loathe to mention any problem, including the vast numbers of Christians
killed in Islamic countries in the past century, except when it is posed in the
most general terms that often make the problems sound to be caused by western
ideology, not Muslim belief or practice. We impose western philosophical or
ideological methods of analyses on Islamic lands and expect this formula to
explain their inner ethos. We use scientific method that blind ourselves to
what is going on. In short, we do not really dialogue with Muslims but with
ourselves. It frightens us to hear ourselves called “infidels” by Muslims
because of what we believe about God and Christ. It is not merely a case of
exaggerated rhetoric but the definition of what seems to threaten Islam, namely,
another understanding of God, particularly the Trinitarian God and the
Incarnation. Much of the appeal of Islam seems to depend directly on the denial
of this complex understanding of the Deity which we are bound to hold and
propagate.
The 21st Century, it seems clear, will more
likely be a century of confrontation with world religions rather than with world
ideologies, as was the 20th Century. Few intellectuals expected this event. In
terms of morals and vitality, the West has already declined. Roger Scruton’s
remark strikes home: “The intrusion of the media into the battlefield has had a
shattering effect on the perception of war. And the declining birthrate and
increasing longevity of the population have made Western societies ever more
reluctant to risk in combat their dwindling supply of sons.”4 An abundant
supply of sons is something that Islam has, many of whom seem surprisingly
willing to die defending or expanding it. Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist
movements seem to have grown stronger not weaker during the supposedly skeptical
20th Century.
Christian populations are under pressure
in India, China, in Buddhist and Muslim lands. Many Christians in these lands
leave voluntarily, usually under pressure to do so. Most of Christians once in
Arab lands are now in the West. They voted with their feet. Meanwhile, the
Muslim presence, due in part to their comparative increase in numbers, is found
everywhere in Europe and America, along with Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and other
representatives of various world religions. The modern secularist seems almost
like a cultural oddity confined to small academic enclaves in small corners of
the world. It is ironic that much of modern political philosophy was premised
on the notion of reducing the importance of religion to prevent religious and
civil wars. In the light of the stringent closure of these religions in on
themselves in their historical locations, together with their lack of any real
sense of religious freedom based on the dignity of the person, the alternative
of skepticism or atheism almost seems healthy in comparison to the lands in
which there is no escape, except perhaps inwards, as in the case of the medieval
Muslim philosophers.
III.
In this light, it may
be of some merit to take a further look at Belloc’s discussions of the future of
Islam made back in the 1930's. What is remarkable about Belloc’s comments on
Islam, as we read them today, is his ability to judge historical trends on the
basis of a spiritual force or power. Though he was a soldier and a military
historian who loved the knowledge of battles and battlefields, generals and
soldiers, Belloc never thought that it was material power that ultimately
determined what would happen among men and civilizations. “Cultures spring from
religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its
philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves
the decay of the culture corresponding to it – we see that most clearly in the
breakdown of Christendom today”5 (132). He is aware that, for some three
hundred years after the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, the Muslim
lands had gradually dropped out of the modern picture as serious threats. They
were seen to be backward lands and in fact were backward. In spite of the oil,
the cause of whose value they had little or nothing to do, this is still largely
the case.
Yet, Belloc was aware that Islam did not
change in spite of centuries of western influence. When it came to the
fundamentals, it was utterly unaffected by western occupation. As Belloc wrote
in Survivals and New Arrivals:
we thought of its (Islam’s) religion as a
sort of fossilised thing about which we need not trouble. That was almost
certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the
near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will arise. For after this
subjugation of the Islamic culture by nominally Christian nations had already
been achieved, the political consequences of that culture began to notice two
disquieting features about it. The first was that its spiritual foundation
proved immovable; the second that its area of occupation did not recede, but on
the contrary slowly expanded (1929)..
Suffice it to say, we are reckoning
with Islam today. Europe and much of America did largely lose the faith, as
Belloc observed even before World War II. The expansion of Islam is also into
Europe and Africa, as well as in Asia and even in North America.
The
solidity of Islam, its inner coherence, whatever its cause and the methods by
which it was kept, was something that struck Belloc. As he wrote in the same
book,
Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The
so-called Christian governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised.
The ardent and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with
courtesy, sometimes wit fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam.
I think it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which
Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. Its votaries are the one
religious body conversions from which are insignificant.
Belloc
recognized that Islam flourished because it did have some basic truth about God,
however that be interpreted. “Mohammedanism struck permanent roots, developing
a life of its own, and became at last something like a new religion...,” Belloc
wrote in The Great Heresies. “Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the
Catholic truths which it had retained. Its insistence on personal immortality,
on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its
insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator – these
were its strength” (128). Belloc saw the strength of Islam in its
virtues.
It is for this reason alone, the
impregnability of Islam to Catholicism, however, that the Church needs to take
more cognizance of what is this growing force in the world. It is not enough to
condemn violence in the abstract. “Go forth and teach all nations” is not
possible if the nations will not allow themselves to be preached to. The
western theories of freedom of religion, whether secular or religious, have made
no headway in Islam, and only rarely are they criticized for this lack. Those
few who are Christians or members of other religions, in most Muslim lands, in
practice must be content to remain second-class citizens and are constantly
subject to the pressure to convert to Islam.
III.
Belloc’s thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy which retained the
Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of God, but denied all the
Christian aspects – the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, who, as a result,
became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the priesthood, and the
sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own terms, it was a simple
religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few doctrinal and devotional
points. The expansion of Islam was almost always by arms; after each conquest,
the Muslim Califs or Sultans ruled. They were intolerant but they more or less
accepted political submission in return for tribute. At least twice in the
history of the West, Islam almost overran Europe, once at Poitiers in the 8th
Century and once at Vienna in the 17th Century.
Interestingly, the Church since that period has celebrated certain feast days
precisely in memory of these victories, the most notable is St. Pius V’s
establishment of the Feast the Holy Rosary, on October 7, 1571. This feast
commemorated the naval victory at Lepanto. “The name of Lepanto should remain
in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half dozen great
names in the history of the Christian world” (122). In these days of
apologizing for practically everything, one wonders if some pope someday will
not rescind this feast on grounds of good will. The cynic might hope that we at
least wait till Islam first apologizes for the initial slaughter and conquest of
Christian lands from Spain to Africa and Asia.
These
earlier popes, in any case, understood that they had an enemy and that they were
blessed not to have fallen under Muslim army rulers. Urban II’s call to the
Crusades, though much misunderstood, can largely be judged as a belated and
mainly unsuccessful effort of the European Christians to defend themselves
against Islam. Belloc, in fact, thought that the Crusaders were from the
beginning undermanned and rather poorly led, though often with much heroism.
Their final defeat at the hands of Saladin at Hattin in 1187, he considers to
be one of the most significant battles in the history of the world because it
confirmed Muslim rule across a wide stretch of the world, most of which it still
controls.
Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think
that there was something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam’s ever
becoming a major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133).
The fact that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely
an accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute
notion of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki
sees much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to
modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found in
Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with oil
money.
The “new” weapon that Islam has displayed with
September 11, 2001, is a kind of fanatic willingness to use any method of terror
even if it costs the lives of individuals who are often popularly considered to
be “martyrs” for killing Infidels. This method needs little technology. The
West has minimum moral equipment with which to respond to such tactics. Indeed,
as both Aristotle and Machiavelli saw, that if someone does not fear for his own
life, it is very difficult to stop him. But neither of them thought of the idea
of sacrificing one’s life specifically for this purpose. Indeed, in the history
of the West, Islam has always sent a kind of terror through the hearts of those
on its borders who were about to be attacked or in the hearts of those who had
to live under its control. Belloc alludes to this phenomenon:
These
things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror
under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again
fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years,
seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain
complicated machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in
the modern world? (131).
The question seems less rhetorical today because
numbers, in the end, count as does the willingness of people to die using modern
machinery like normal airplanes to carry our what is attested to be a religious
mission, however much we choose to identify it as simply “terrorism” without a
cause. What is also true is that this terrorism, or its threat, is now
everywhere. Thus far, at least, we see within Islam itself little effort to
control its own “terrorists” or to sympathize with those who suffer from tem or
who must defend themselves against them.
The
inconvertibility of Islam leads us to several perhaps radical reflections. It
is a common saying among Christians that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the
faith. There have been many, many Christian martyrs by Islam over the centuries
and currently. As in the case of the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks,
there will always appear some justification – the Christian blasphemed Allah –
in one sense. The very existence of Christianity is a blasphemy in Muslim terms
if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation, that God became man. These
historical martyrdoms have had little or no effect in terms either of conversion
or even acknowledgment, even by ourselves often.
Moreover, we have the parallel phenomenon of the Muslim martyr, the man who
kills in the name of Allah, whether it be in a suicidal attack in a church in
the Philippines, French Trappist monks whose throats were slit in Algeria on
Christmas eve, or the pilots who flew into the World Trade Center. In some
basic sense, these killers are pictured as martyrs. Nor is the notion of “holy
war” unknown in Islam. However much the Church tries to argue that such actions
cannot be considered to be justified, still within at least some branches of
Muslim opinion, they are considered to be genuine martyrs seeking to defend or
propagate the religion and therefore worthy of Allah. When we try to oppose
this position on say natural law terms, we find that our mode of discourse is
itself alien to what much of Islam conceives itself to be. The basis of our
arguments are not admitted to be valid.
Belloc thought
that Islam began as a heresy and became a new religion culturally when it had to
account and explain its successes on the field of battle. The stunning
successes on the field of battle had to be administered. “Mohammedanism was a
heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began
as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the
Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine.
Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but
those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was – not a
denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the Christian thing” (76-77). As most
scholars recognize, the main parts of what Islam took from revelation are from
Judaism rather than Christianity. Islam kept much of what Christianity has in
common with Judaism – the transcendence of Yahweh, creation, divine justice and
punishment, the devotion of the people to God.
But
Islam was itself not like Arianism and other early heresies. It arose from
without the old ancient Christian world. For it, Christ was not God but rather
a human prophet. This is the explicit denial of the root principle of
Christianity. “With the denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental
structure. He (the Muslim) refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its
Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of Mass, and therefore the institution
of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser
heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplicity” (79). Though it is not often
attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, even in private,
and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and constantly hemmed
in by various formal and informal practices. “Freedom of religion” is not a
concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a Western idea, even
largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice of freedom of
religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to Allah, even
where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.
Belloc
thought that Islam expanded rapidly for the very good reason that “it won
battles.” (81). This success should give modern pacifists pause, but it usually
does not. Yet, to call Islam a religion of “simplicity” is, in Belloc’s terms,
rather a compliment. He notes that it freed many people from the complicated
clutch of usury, from the lawyers. It freed slaves if they converted and made
them
brothers within the system (81-82). The brotherhood of faith trumps
other relationships. Belloc distinguished between the character of the spread
of Islam initially in the near East and that expansion into Persian and Mongol
lands – the area from Mesopotamia to India and the Eastern Roman empire (85).
“The uniformity of temper which is the mark of Asiatic society, responded at
once to this new idea of one very simple, personal form of government,
sanctified by religion, and ruling with a power theoretically absolute from one
center” (86). It was from these conquests that Islam learned of Greek
philosophy and other cultures and was the origin of much of its science and art.
“Islam was the one heresy,” Belloc wrote, “that nearly destroyed Christendom
through its early material and intellectual superiority” (88).
Much has been made of the “tolerance” in Islam, especially for religions
of the book. This tolerance was often merely the inability to change large
conquered populations in a short time. Belloc thought that “the Mohammedan
temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty.
It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed.
It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian
culture about it. It still so regards it even today” (90). The practical
compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain but within
very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute. Many were
gradually absorbed into Islam (91).
IV.
This
record of Islam’s own consistency, its closed nature, its remaining itself had
to be reconsidered in some detail, Belloc thought. It has been “the most
formidable of the heresies” (92). The question is now why has it survived?
“Millions of modern people of the white civilization – that is, the
civilization of Europe and America – have forgotten all about Islam” (92).
This could be written in 1938, but not in 2003. The questions must now be
asked not merely “why has it survived?” but “why has it flourished?” Belloc can
only be said to have foreseen the problem: “It is, in fact, the most formidable
and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment
become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past” (93).
Neither our modern culture or the modern Church allows us this
frankness.
Usually, Belloc thought, heresies make an
initial impact then they decline and disappear. Islam did not do this (94-95).
When Islam was defeated, it remained strong in numbers and in convictions
(95-96). How then is Islam different? Some westerners say it is because it is
simple and founded on justice and improves on Christianity. Belloc did not
think that this reason works because every heresy maintains the same thing but
they still fade, not Islam (98). Historically, Islam constantly gained new
recruits: the Turk, the Mongol. “The causes of this vitality (of Islam) are
very difficult to explore, and perhaps cannot be reached. For myself I should
ascribe it in some part to the fact that Mohammedanism being a thing from
outside, a heresy that did not arise within the body of the Christian community
but beyond its frontiers, has always possessed a reservoir of men, newcomers
pouring in to revivify its energies. But this cannot be the full explanation”
(129) Today, I suspect, they gain new recruits largely from their own
population growth which expands to fill the vacuum left by the low birth rates
in the West. The Crusades did not split Islam geographically. Belloc held
that if the Crusades (1095-1200) had cut Africa from Asia, Islam may have
declined (103). It is interesting how many of the advocates of occupation of
Iraq today use this theory of the need to split Islam and hence reduce its
geopolitical power.
Yet, Belloc maintained that, though
based on the army, Islam did have a cultural force. ‘The success of
Mohammedanism had not been due to its offering something more satisfactory in
the way of philosophy and morals, but, as I have said, to the opportunity it
afforded of freedom to the slave and debtor, and an extreme simplicity which
pleased the unintelligent masses who were perplexed by the mysteries inseparable
from the profound intellectual life of Catholicism, and from its radical
doctrine of the Incarnation” (103). This position is not unlike that of Eric
Voegelin, who argued that the susceptibility of western Christians to modern
ideology was due to the practical disbelief of many Christians in the ultimate
transcendent goal of the faith.7
Belloc, in fact, saw a
relation between the failure of the Crusades and the rise of modern Europe which
at first turned in on itself before finding the technological means of bypassing
Islamic lands with the discoveries of America and the sea route to Asia. Belloc
even held that the success of the Reformation in part was due to the defeat of
Catholic and papal policies in the Crusades (107-09). Belloc’s book on The
Crusades remains one of the most poignant accounts of a failed enterprise. “Had
the crusaders’ remaining force at the end of the first Crusading march been a
little more numerous, had they taken Damascus and the string of towns on the
fringe of the desert, the whole history of the world would have been changed.
The world of Islam would have been cut in two, with the East unable to approach
the West.”(114) North Africa, the old Roman lands, was not recovered. “They
failed ... but they made modern Europe” (115). The Reformation was due to the
weakness at the Center (115).
What Belloc was most
conscious of, however, was that, unlike Islam, that Christianity did not retain
its inner coherence, its faith. “Christian Europe is and should be by nature
one; but it has forgotten its nature in forgetting its religion” (116). Belloc
connected this loss of inner coherence in the West to the opportunity for Islam
to rise again. It is partly the downplaying of the importance of religion in the
West that it has been unable or unwilling to understand the attraction of Islam
in its own inner coherence. “It has always seemed t me possible, and even
probable,” Belloc wrote,
that there would be a resurrection of Islam and
that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle
between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years
its greatest opponent.... The future always comes as a surprise but political
wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that
surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected
thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of
all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion
physically paralysed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an
unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable
(127-28).
It is interesting that even with the return of Islam to the
forefront of our consciousness, we do not want to see this return as a religious
thing explained in terms of Islam itself.
V.
How
are we to assess these potent reflections of Belloc? Stretched half-way across
the world, Islam is divided up into many “nations,” though that concept of
nationalism is not an Islamic idea. The central organs of the Church seem to be
against doing anything radical about any Islamic threat, preferring diplomacy
and not forcefully noting the widespread attacks on Christians throughout the
world. It is interesting that several Vatican officials give as a reason for
not using force is the fear of the rising up of Islam and the potential terror
it can cause everywhere in the world. They are right, the danger is real.
Normally, this view would be an argument for doing something about the problem
when we can, before something more terrible happens, particularly if the problem
lies in Islam itself and its inability to accept the normal peaceful structures
of society. Almost all the minor wars today have some Islamic component.
Within Islam, there are various schools of interpretation from the
well-financed Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia to the more mild versions of
the Shiites.
Geo-politicians and theologians alike
argue that, since we really have no common philosophy, we must seek ways to
reinterpret Islam within itself, using its own texts and traditions to mollify
the extremists who now see an opportunity to establish Muslim dominance all over
the world. At first sight, this seems preposterous. But as Belloc said,
surprising things happen, like the rise of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism in
the first place. It makes us wonder whether there is not something objective to
be said for the reality of salvation history after all.
For Catholics in particular, Belloc’s estimate was sobering. He lived before
“ecumenism,” but he certainly wondered about its effectiveness in the case of
Islam, however politically wise it might be to proceed as the Muslim
philosophers and not mention any truths outside the Koran. “Missionary effort
has had no appreciable effect on it (Islam),” Belloc concluded.
It still
converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time some
European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes a
Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of
morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine. In view of this,
anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not
see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the
old pressure of Islam on Christendom (130).
These words are strong and
historically true. They also today strike us as prophetic. Few paid much
attention to Belloc in his time. No Muslims are converted. No one ever
abandons the book or its ritual.
In the end, I cannot
help but have a gratefulness to the “apparently unconvertible” religion, to
radical Islam for waking us up. We could make the case that all our studies,
all our concern with western ideology and power may have been misplaced. What
we should have been paying attention to are our souls and what is the best
explanation of our existence and destiny. Islam has another soul and another
destiny which it seeks to spread, by its own proven means, to the ends of the
earth, an idea that it probably got, ironically, from the end of the Gospel of
Matthew.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (New York: Sheed & Ward,
MCMXXXVIII), 98.
2Paul Marshall, Roberta Green, and
Lela Gilbert, Islam at the Crossroads: Understanding Its Beliefs, History, and
Conflicts (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002), 107.
3See
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press,
1973, 11-24; Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, “Introduction,” Medieval Political
Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 1-21.
4Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
(Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 59.
5Unless otherwise
indicated, citations from The Great Heresies will simply place the page number
after the citation.
6Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of
Science and the Ways to God (Chicato: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
35-36.
7Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and
Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1968), 109.
