Lewis, Spencer, Sowell & Decline of the West Part Quatre

The Florida Masochist gets a hat tip which I was unable to link in my previous truncated blog on Islamofascism as seen by Kobayashi Maru, who specializes in situations that appear unwinnable or even without a value-neutral outcome. Bernard Lewis was way back in the pre-marital day one of my most delightful interlocutors and we had a couple of epicene wassail events where sudden brilliant insights abounded and were just as quickly forgotten. Lewis was a great admirer of the Turkish ascendancy throughout Central Asia and into Asia Minor, giving them great credit for having maintained what he considered a relatively fair hegemony in their Ottoman phase, for several centuries imposing rough and ready justice to their subject peoples [who beg to differ, vociferously]. Be that as it may, KM gives Lewis the following slice of reverence in his Wednesday review of Lewis's and Robert Spencer's recent oeuvres on the subject of Islam:


"Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith", by Robert Spencer (who blogs at Jihad Watch) provides a tight analysis of Islam itself as it's currently practiced. I.e., what do the Koran and the Hadiths actually say? How did Mohammed live his life? How are these things commonly interpreted and prioritized? What Judeo-Christian (aka, 'Western') values and assumptions are lacking in Islam? How do key tracts in Islam contrast with Christianity?

Yes, as some commenters have noted, the 'fastest growing' claim is highly disputable. Once one reads Spencer, it's clear that the question of growth warrants even more scrutiny. I.e., when one can never really leave Islam without the very real threat of being killed, all claims of freely chosen, heartfelt adherence as we think of it in the West must be questioned.

Both books were written after 9-11 but before the invasion of Iraq. With only a few exceptions, they hold up extremely well (in some ways even better) given subsequent developments. That said, they do cause me to question for the first time how naive or at least impatient we may be in our efforts at instilling democracy and Western values quickly - the proverbial suckers' game being, as Lewis puts it: "one man, one vote... once".

Both books are well worth reading - the kind that one wonders why one didn't read sooner and which leave one feeling much better educated for having spent the time. Both are also scrupulous and compelling (IMHO) in addressing criticisms easily thrown by their opponents that they are motivated by racism or religious bigotry. One of the key points in both books is simply that the Western world, including virtually our entire political, military, economic and social dialogue and that of our leaders is woefully ignorant of Islam and its history.

To that point, Lewis' entire oeuvre should be required of every post-9-11 politician and student of world history. (Alas, his highly prescient What Went Wrong?, originally published circa 1990, might have saved everyone a lot of trouble, or at least left fewer of us surprised when the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon).

Spencer's book is an essential bulwark to any conversation about a clash (or lack of clash) between civilizations, providing fodder for addressing questions such as:

Are Islam and the West ultimately compatible?
Must essential aspects of Islam 'lose' in order for Western values (freedom, tolerance, democracy, basic human rights as we think of them, women's rights, etc.) to prevail?
Is Islam still Islam (in the eyes of true believers) if those values do triumph?
Is there anything within Islam that would help to enable such moderating influences?
Another major takeaway from both is that we in the West (including Muslim converts such as Mohammed Ali and Cat Stevens) routinely assume into Islam things that simply aren't there. Christ's admonition to "turn the other cheek" is a classic example but Spencer makes many others. It's a kind of wishful Judeo-Christian hangover that leads one into the kind of "red-team, blue-team" morally blind thinking that plagued U.S.-Soviet relations until Reagan (an image minted by William F. Buckley, Jr.) .

Other key points which, while likely familiar to this audience nonetheless bear repeating:

The Crusades were a late, limited and relatively mild response to five centuries of violent Islamic expansionism. To view them as a blanket excuse for the current behavior of Islamofascists is ignorant.

Islam, particularly as reflected in the life of Mohammed, but also as preached and frequently practiced in current mainstream doctrine - and in sharp contrast to modern Judaism or Christianity - is a religion not only unfriendly to women, but in which the status of women is somewhat below that of domestic animals. I'd really love to debate anyone who can answer the question (as a commenter at Belmont Club noted yesterday): "Where are the feminists [on this]?"

There is nothing within Islam that would enable one to make the case that it is merely going through it's own "Dark Ages" and will grow up given time... to say nothing of the added urgency of WMD and asymmetric warfare that render such arguments moot in practice even if they were worthy in theory. Examining the broad sweep of Islamic history, the greatest aberration has been an 80-year interlude of relative political moderation. In the eyes of many true believers, violent jihad is not the perversion but rather the secularist, pluralistic, post-colonialist experiments such as mid-20th century Turkey and Egypt.

The West's way of looking at the world as a bunch of countries within each of which it is hoped that various religions might coexist is wholly at odds with an Islamic view of individual states as of secondary if not tertiary importance within the societal construct that is greater Islam.

Because our values demand tolerance for personal religious conviction, rhetorical and political deference to Islam render us unable to make essential distinctions between the exception that proves the rule (e.g., Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing) and the large and increasing volume of religiously-motivated violence rendered by Islamic 'jihad' (small 'j'). This conundrum may prove the ultimate paradox of this clash.

Through exposure to the West over the past century or so, Islam has been reinforced in its view of the West as decadent and weak.

Ominously, both books conclude (as does Thomas Sowell in "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" - another review for another day) that the West is weak, ignorant, extremely late to the party, wholly unsure of what it stands for and unwilling to confront the truth of who the enemy is, what they seek and what they are willing to do to get it. The West is also confused (in the eyes of all three authors) in its estimation of what it will take for deeply cherished and widely shared Western values to continue in the West, much less to spread into and take root in the Islamic world.
Actually, Christianity is reportedly outpacing Islam in sub-Saharan Africa with close to 100 million Catholic and 80 million Anglican converts within the last quarter century. Islam is up at the 150 million level, though all these figures are questionable, to say the least.

But please refer to my own Wednesday blog below entitled "Decline of the West, Part Deux or is it Trois?" for more thoughts on just how the West has tricked itself mentally out of its own perceived advantages in a sort of self-inflicted nihilistic ju-jitsu. The West remains supreme both materially and culturally, but believes itself "guilty" in some sort of Kafka-court procedure where its academic and cultural intelligentsia does a reverse alchemic magic of converting gold into dross.

Sowell is another writer whom I have not read, but should. However, Lewis remains one of the major trans-cultural geniuses of our era, fluent in over a dozen languages and humanistic to the core---a Renaissance polymath anti-Nietzsche. [Or perhaps he is Nietzschean in the American school or the Japanese school of the Ueber-Philosophe of the nineteenth century. There are almost as many schools of Nietzsche as there are interpreters of the man.]

Yes, tolerance for others' beliefs often translates, when seen from an inferior, as weakness. I have listened to Israelis over the decades say this, but did not believe. However, the pullout from Gaza and South Lebanon reinforced what the Israelis had been telling me for decades, that any Israeli retreat would be regarded as a defeat, even were it to consolidate one's position. Read a good summary of reasoning in the paper on Al-Qaeda thusly:

We know that there are many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but as far as al-Qaeda is concerned, there was only one explanation. By carrying out 'raids' against 'Mecca' (in the form of the Soviet Union), they had destroyed it, and only then had they been able to follow through on the destruction of the local regime. This led to the paradoxical doctrine of the "Destruction of the Myth of the Superpower", in which the problem of being unable to defeat weak, local regimes is solved by defeating their Superpower sponsors through Salafi raids. This is the model al-Qaeda is applying now in its terrorist attacks against the West, which it almost exclusively calls by the name ghazwah, raids. The goal of these raids is to destroy America and its judeo-christian allies, as a Superpower, by first eliminating foreign influence in Muslim countries, which will then be ripe for civil war and revolution.

The ghazis of course were border raiders who were the subject of song and poetry all throughout Islamic history, and the Song of Roland was a sort of European analogy of the mode glamorizing the incessant chipping away that eventually led to the fall of Byzantium in 1453, par exemple. Later the Australian writer notes:

One of the Bali bombers, walking out of court, told reporters that within ten years Australia will "cease to exist" and Indonesia will descend into civil war. Jamaah Islamiyya is applying al-Qaeda's model to Southeast Asia. 13 John Miller interview with Bin Laden, question 15.
After twenty years of an "Egypt first" policy, meaning that jihadi Salafi terrorist attacks only targetted home regimes, the doctrines of the new hijra, international jihad and the Destruction of the Myth of the Superpower led to a new targetting policy - "America First". Note that when al-Qaeda refers to America, it means the non-Muslim world in general. It became anathema for al-Qaeda and its affiliates to attack supposedly apostate Muslim home regimes at this stage in the process. The home regimes were far more familiar with the jihadis than the Superpowers, and were therefore more capable of carrying out mass arrests and surveillance. On the other hand, al-Qaeda sees America and the West as weak - weaker than the Soviets. They point to other defeats, such as the withdrawal of American-French forces from Lebanon following a Hizbullah truck bombing in 1983, the withdrawal from Somalia after the death of eight servicemen, and also to Vietnam. Al-Qaeda's leaders constantly refer to the Vietnam Syndrome as evidence that the Americans can be eliminated as sponsors of Middle Eastern regimes.

Ah, I hear the siren song of my sweet beloved calling me from the antiquated Sony hybrid VAIO that only operates on safe mode to a pre-midnight snack. Hope to continue thoughts along these lines later when blogger.com isn't on its own safe mode.