The Civilizational Struggle

A Canadian friend wrote recently to ask if it were not “terrifying” to be living in the Middle East. He noted that more and more Canadians—especially his Jewish friends--were beginning to suspect that Islam had a plan to take over the world.

My friend is a good man; but he labours under some unfortunate misconceptions common in the West currently.

It is not at all terrifying to live in the Middle East. Arabs are extremely hospitable and tolerant towards resident foreigners. And no, they are not all terrorists. Statistically, one seems to be in greater danger of being attacked by terrorists in London, Stockholm, Madrid, or New York. (An American friend says “Yeah, of course. Because in the Middle East they are all terrorists. Why would they attack themselves?” Maybe so, but the fact of relative security remains.) In the meantime, the countries of the Gulf have some of the lowest rates of violent crime anywhere in the world. So, on balance, I feel more secure day by day in the Gulf than I do in Canada or the US.

The big worry is a sudden war with Iran. That seems possible, and possibly devastating.

Islam does indeed have a plan to take over the world. Ironically, though, it is the same plan the Jews have. The only difference is that the Jews see the world as being ultimately ruled from Jerusalem, and the Muslims from Mecca. It's what the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah is all about. He will be a political and military leader, there will be a great battle at Armageddon, and he will subjugate all nations. His capital will be Jerusalem.

It is fundamental to Judaism and to Islam that the laws of the religion, the Mosaic law, are also supposed to be the laws of the state. The separation of church and state is a specifically Christian idea.

This obviously sets up a certain conflict—the rest of the world may have mixed emotions about being run by Islam and by Muslims.

But the matter is not one-sided. There is another doctrine, prominent in the modern world, that also makes claims to world domination. One can understand, surely, if Muslims have similar misgivings about being ruled by it. It is, roughly, the doctrine of liberal democracy and of human rights. When the US Declaration of Independence calls human equality and human rights “self-evident” and “inalienable,” this is a claim as absolute and universal as that of religion.

So we have not one ideology making a lunge for world conquest, but two competing ideologies. And, to be fair and honest, it was liberal democracy that fired the first shots in the current contest, not Islam. The United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were introduced in the 1940s; Islam became militant in the same way only in the 1980s.

Are these two competing creeds irreconcilable? Are we doomed to a struggle to the death?

Perhaps not. While Islam has pushed hard in the past, with little fiestas like the Battle of Roncesvalles, the Siege of Vienna, and the Battle of Lepanto, it has been rather quiescent of recent centuries. This is probably for the same reason that the International Jewish Conspiracy has not been taking itself terribly seriously over the last couple of millennia—the practical difficulties have seemed too great. Compromise might have been necessary.

And, in fact, Islam and Liberal Democracy can agree on a number of things—one might even see them as all the essentials.

Democracy, per se, is not a problem—not for Islam, in any case. Note that theocratic Iran is at least nominally a democracy—more democratic, actually, than most Muslim states. Early Islam was also democratic; the prophet and the first few Caliphs were all elected. In a sense, all the Gulf states, though nominally monarchies, even absolute monarchies, are model democracies as well. Because they are small and culturally identical, dissidents here have always been free to simply vote with their feet.

Human equality too is not contentious with Islam. Just the reverse: Islam believes categorically in human equality, for all the same reasons Christianity does. The doctrine is based on the understanding that all men are equally children of God, and so of equal value in His sight.

The liberal doctrine of a social contract is a problem; it assumes that government is a contract among men. For Islam, as for Judaism, government is a covenant with God, and God gets a veto. But this problem is probably of only theoretical, not practical, importance.

Human rights, too, are not a problem—for Islam, just as for Christianity, they derive automatically from the doctrine of human equality, and the dignity of all being God's handiwork. “Endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights”? Check; no problem, in concept.

The problem is with the specific interpretation the doctrines of human equality and human rights are being given currently; since, indeed, about the 1980s. This is why the conflict between Islam and the West showed up only at about that time.

It was when feminism went international.

Unlike all conceptions of human rights before its time, feminism sets itself against religion and religious traditions, and against established morality. In a fundamental way, this is actually destructive of human rights and human equality, because both are based on religious premises. In the West, feminism looked at the Bible, noted that it was incompatible with the current doctrines of feminism itself, and declared that the Bible must therefore change or be discarded. Feminism then decided that abortion was a woman's right, and conventional morality must therefore change or be discarded as well.

You will perhaps have noted that this did not go down well among religious people in the West at the time. Up to that point, to be Catholic in North America almost automatically meant to be “liberal" or “progressive.” After that time, to be Catholic in North America has meant to be “conservative” or “right wing.” Evangelical Protestants have traced a similar, if less obvious, trajectory—Baptist pastors and laymen like Tommy Douglas or Jimmy Carter used to be prominent on the left. More recently, it has become a safe assumption that all serious Evangelical Protestants are on the political right.

The inversion this involved is historic and striking. It was, after all, generally the religious who were in the forefront of the universal struggle for human rights up to this point: in the fight against slavery, in the fight against segregation. As in, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that the attempt to export these new ideas of human rights set up exactly the same conflict with Islam. The demands of “liberal democracy” were now, for the first time, directly opposed to the demands of Islam, Shariah, and the Qur'an.

Why on God's earth would anyone not expect a fight? The amazing thing is that so few were prepared to defend the Bible, Christianity, or the accepted moral law in the West.

Adding a "human right" to homosexual sex added another major attack on Islam, just as on Catholicism or Evangelical Protestantism.

The celebrated cause of “oppressed” Muslim woman, supposedly forced to wear concealing clothing against their will, has been a standard complaint against Islam in the West—long before Muslim terrorism became a going concern. Long before Bush invaded Afghanistan because of the Taliban's refusal to cooperate against al Qaeda, as some with good memories may recall, feminists were persistently demanding just such an invasion, expressly for the sake of supposedly oppressed Afghan women—and that has apparently been a cause carried forward eagerly by the current NATO presence.

I submit that the war in Afghanistan should have been and was over, and won, in 2001; and would have stayed won were it not for this fact.

Afghans in general, males as much as females, are saddled with poverty, official corruption, ethnic strife, and bad, mostly inoperative government. The last thing in the world they need, men or women, is someone coming in and tearing apart the only honourable and relatively trustworthy institutions they have and the last shreds of peace, order, and happiness: the mosque, their prayer life, and the family. That is exactly what the Western “reformers” are doing, and it is exactly what the Soviets were trying to do before them. The Taliban arose as a predictable backlash the first time, and revived the second time for the same reason. A bad lot, no doubt, the Taliban, but in the end purely a defensive measure, and quite possibly for the average Afghan better than any available alternative. They were not and are not the aggressors.

Women in Afghanistan are not oppressed. Women in traditional Islam are not oppressed. It is illogical to imagine that women were oppressed always and everywhere before the present day and the West. By what conceivable mechanism could one half of humanity oppress the other half, for tens of thousands of years, consistently, in all known human societies? Yet that is what feminism requires us to believe.

Muslim women are simply following their cultural norms and traditions, the more fiercely right now because they seem threatened, and their consciences, as they have a right to do. As do Muslim men.

Men in the West, on the other hand, currently are oppressed, systematically. The fact that we depart from the historical norm ought to be understood as evidence that this is so.

Not incidentally, feminism is also destroying any society it has infected, by demographic decline. In feminist countries, women have broadly stopped having children. No surprise if Afghan or Muslim cultures do not particularly want to commit suicide.

As a Christian, all I can say is, God forbid that Islam fade away. For one thing, if it does, under the present circumstances, with it we will lose both Christianity and Liberal Democracy into the bargain.

There are of course other issues between Islam and Liberal Democracy, centring on the important matters of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. On these, I'd agree with Liberal Democracy. There should be freedom of worship, and no laws against apostasy, in Muslim countries as in Christian/Liberal Democratic countries. If there are to be laws against evangelizing, they should apply equally to Muslims and non-Muslims.

I am not a Muslim, so it is not my place to say whether these changes are ultimately compatible with Islam. They seem to me no more than the application of the Golden Rule, which Muslims endorse just as Christians do. This is not true of feminism or homosexual rights.

I dislike personally the idea of laws against blasphemy, as currently urged by Muslim nations; and fear that in practice we would end up with something as despicable and iniquitous as the current Canadian “human rights” tribunals. But blasphemy laws are in fact demonstrably historically entirely compatible with liberal democratic traditions. The British criminal code included the offence of blasphemy right up until 2008. It remains on the books, if not commonly enforced, in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and parts of Australia. The trick is to ensure that prosecutions are even-handed, that the law apply equally to all religions, and cover only egregious insults.