by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>n 636 A.D., the caliph Umar gave these instructions to the commander he sent to Basra during the conquest of Iraq: \u201cSummon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept if from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly fourteen centuries later, another Muslim leader, President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad \u2014 who like Umar is fulfilling the Prophet\u2019s injunction to \u201cfight those who believe not in Allah\u201d \u2014 has issued a similar summons to President Bush, leader of the most powerful nation in what once was called Christendom: \u201cUndoubtedly through faith in God and the teaching of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question to you is: \u2018Do you want to join them?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As for the \u201csword\u201d awaiting those who refuse the call, Iran has been forging it for decades by supporting terrorist jihadists like Hezbollah and Hamas, and by relentlessly pursuing nuclear weapons. And of course, those who have already made their de facto \u201csubmission,\u201d that is most of Europe, daily demonstrate their \u201chumiliation and lowliness\u201d by appeasing the jihadists in their midst, by paying a \u201cpoll tax\u201d disguised as \u201chumanitarian aid\u201d and \u201csocial welfare\u201d transfers, and by anxious protestations of their own culture\u2019s sins and the superior glories of Islam.<\/p>\n Once again, we see the continuity and coherence of Islamic jihadist tradition across fourteen centuries. Yet here in the West, we refuse to listen to what the jihadists tell us and take them seriously in their own terms. We dismiss this continuity as an illusion masking the \u201creal\u201d causes, which must be material and psychological. No, no, we are told, the pursuit of jihad is not the fulfillment of a spiritual command, the expression of belief sanctified by Allah. Rather, it is the distorted rationalization for political dysfunction, lack of jobs and economic opportunity, distress over the absence of a Palestinian homeland, anger over the occupation of Iraq, self-esteem wounded by intrusive globalization, or lingering resentments of Western colonialism and imperialism.<\/p>\n B<\/span>y refusing to take the jihadist at their word, we Westerners are indulging our own superstitions and received wisdom. We have accepted the unscientific assertion that all reality is material, and so we dismiss the spiritual as a superstitious fantasy, a hold-over from less enlightened times necessary for those benighted folks still mired in exploded beliefs and incapable of accepting the hard reality of God\u2019s death. Afraid of facing the truth of their own repressions and neuroses, believers cling to these fantasies as bulwarks against all the changes they fear, especially the liberating progress and utopian boons that are mankind\u2019s destiny once these old illusions are discarded.<\/p>\n This view of religious faith is on display everywhere in our culture, from television and movies and \u201chigh\u201d art to the ruminations of \u201cprogressive\u201d intellectuals and media pundits. The great irony is that this interpretation of religious faith is itself not a scientific truth but mere prejudice at best, bigotry at worst. And it is a stale clich\u00e9, the remnant of old Western ideas long discredited. With every expression of this received wisdom, we hear the ghost of Marx telling us that religion is \u201cthe opiate of the people,\u201d the \u201cillusory sun\u201d we must discard, the instrument of oppression invented by the oppressor to keep his victims in check. We hear Nietzsche\u2019s cry of liberating joy at God\u2019s death: \u201cWe philosophers and \u2018\u2019free spirits\u2019 feel, when we hear the news that \u2018the old god is dead,\u2019 as if a new dawn shone for us . . . . At long last the horizon appears free to us again.\u201d And we hear another antitheist (because like the other two, he doesn\u2019t so much disbelieve in God as dislike and resent Him), Freud, telling us that \u201creligious ideas\u201d are \u201cillusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n Armed with these old materialist prejudices, we then treat the Muslim as one sick or confused, a victim of Western crimes, a neurotic who resorts to misunderstandings and distortions of his own faith in order to cope with events whose causes he doesn\u2019t understand. Or, as the press has done with Ahmadinejad\u2019s letter, we explain away his belief as a Machiavellian political tactic. Either way, in the guise of rationalizing jihadist violence we display a curious Western arrogance that sweeps away the most cherished beliefs, that asserts we Westerners better understand Islam than do millions of its adherents, and that reduces Muslims to the status of children and dupes, the passive prey to material and psychological forces they can\u2019t comprehend. How superior we are, we Westerners who see the true reality disguised from others by superstition and tradition!<\/p>\n Even though some in the Islamic world, when dealing with Westerners, will tactically repeat such ideas, the true believer sees in them nothing more than ignorant insults reflecting our own materialist prejudices, and signs of our spiritual bankruptcy. He sees our spiritual sickness manifested not just in our philosophical and economic materialism, but in our self-loathing, our groveling guilt over presumed imperialist and colonialist sins, our flabby tolerance, and our multicultural idealizations of dysfunctional cultures. And this confession of our loss of spiritual certainty convinces the jihadist that he is right to pursue a war against such infidels, whom Allah wishes to convert to the true faith in order to cure them of the cultural pathologies that result from materialism and secularization.<\/p>\n In short, the jihadist sees a culture of seeming power and magnificence, but one whose foundations are rotten, needing only some well-placed kicks to send the whole edifice tumbling \u2014 just like the grand civilization of the Byzantines that the first jihadists invaded and devoured fourteen centuries earlier. Unlike in the seventh century, however, today the weapons of the jihadist are not swords and scimitars. They are demography, propaganda, disinformation, and WMDs in the hands of terrorists. But their most potent weapon is our own failure of nerve, what George Weigel has called in\u00a0The Cube and the Cathedral<\/i>\u00a0a \u201ccrisis of civilizational morale\u201d that will ensure the West ends not with a bang but with a whimper:<\/p>\n Were something similar [to the eighth-century destruction of Christian North Africa by Islam] to happen in Europe in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century, it might not be \u2014 indeed it likely would not be \u2014 because an Islamist army marched into western Europe and conquered it. It wouldn\u2019t have to. Europe \u2014 in the sense of the civilizational enterprise we identify with the interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, a civilization whose modern democratic public life was prepared in the Christian high culture of the Middle Ages \u2014 would have handed itself over to its new populations. In significant parts of Europe, the drama of atheistic humanism would have played itself out in the triumph of a thoroughly nonhumanistic theism. The crisis of civilizational morale that Europe is experiencing today would have reached its bitter end in a Europe in which the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St. Peter\u2019s in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine \u2014 a great Christian church become an Islamic museum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Whether or not Weigel\u2019s analysis applies to America remains to be seen. But the choice is clear: the path of the subjected dhimmi who with their humiliation and protection money buy a little transitory security for their hedonistic lifestyle, or the path of those great Christian warriors of old \u2014 Don John, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, Sobieski \u2014 who fought against an imperialist jihad and in the process created the conditions that allowed Europe, and perforce America, to exist in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The West must scuttle arrogant materialism and take jihadists at their word by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers In 636 A.D., the caliph Umar gave these instructions to the commander he sent to Basra during the conquest of Iraq: \u201cSummon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept if from them, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,774],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1ld","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2825,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-world-likes-us-it-really-likes-us\/","url_meta":{"origin":5159,"position":0},"title":"The World Likes Us, It Really Likes Us!","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com Watching Obama\u2019s recent journeys to Europe and Latin America, I was reminded of actress Sally Field\u2019s embarrassing acceptance speech at the 1985 Academy Awards: \u201cI've wanted more than anything to have your respect,\u201d she gushed to her colleagues, adding in the same needy vein, \u201cI\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3823,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dumbing-democracy-down\/","url_meta":{"origin":5159,"position":2},"title":"Dumbing Democracy Down","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society Many in the west are interpreting the demonstrations in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak as populist expressions of \u201caspirations for a democratic future,\u201d as a spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron put it. So too President Obama, who spoke of the \u201cuniversal\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-unexamined-president-and-his-media-enablers\/","url_meta":{"origin":5159,"position":3},"title":"The Unexamined President and His Media Enablers","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate. In the liberal-left narrative, the \u201cbirther\u201d issue was always evidence of the Republican Party\u2019s fringe kookiness: as the\u00a0Daily Kos\u2019s Markos Moulitsas crowed, \u201cWhat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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