I know that the West’s struggle against communism in the twentieth century was merely a blip on the historical radar, whereas the struggle of Islam against all other cultures has been a constant of human history for almost 1400 years.
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Samizdata quote of the daySeptember 21st, 2006 |
 22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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It just appalls me every single time that I see someone referring to this “blip” in the past tense. Every single time: it reveals someone who simply does not understand the principles at issue, and the ignorance is astounding.
This Islamic thing is a big deal, in the broad stroke of history, but it’s no bigger a deal than the fight between individualism and collectivism (of which the political aspirations of Islam are only a species), and most especially in the context of the Enlightenment. Collectivism under monarchy was simply the ignorant way of humanity forever until then. Since then, there is just no excuse for not understanding this basic political antagonism. And to put the thing in the past tense is just outrageous.
It’s just not true, and anyone who thinks it is, just isn’t paying attention.
But the communist form of collectivism was indeed a blip and it has indeed almost died out. Other forms of secular collectivism remain to be opposed, but that virulent varient is pretty much a curiosity of history (particularly as China is really fascist now rather than communist).
But Islam is a form of collectivism (as organised Christianity once was and no longer is) that survives its many setbacks in ways communism could not and so remains a grave threat… in fact it is historically western civilisations defining threat.
Yeah Perry good quote, can we control the borders now?!
Or do we have to wait for the nuke attack?
Exactly so. Notice that Saint-Andre refers to Communism specifically, not to collectivism in general. The USSR was a unique threat. Remember the mammoth nuclear arsenal, the huge mechanized army poised just a few hundred miles from western Europe’s major cities, the Kremlin-supported subversive groups in countries all over the Third World…..
Islamic jihadism, the Christian Right, academic leftism, etc. are all dangerous collectivist movements, but they are all very different, both from each other and from Communism. And Jihadism is by far the most persistent over time. The distinction is valid.
Only if I get to throw you out.
I don’t think Christianity was ever as collectivist in basic ideology as Islam. It has never had a concept like “the Umma” and has generally tended to focus on personal salvation. I could weel be wrong wrt Eastern, Slavic, Orthodoxy mind.
Perry
I would be wary about writing off Communism so soon. Whilst the collectivists may have lost the economic argument, they remain in the ascendancy in all our major public institutions (schools, universities, media, government, NGOs etc etc).
They no longer preach Marxism but political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity. All much harder to defeat because they all sound so innocent and “nice”.
Islamism would be so much easier to defeat if only we had beaten the Marxists in the West first.
The dark ages and medieval church had pretty similar notions and as for being not being violently collectivist, when was the last time you met a Cathar? Also the idea of ‘Christendom’ before the Reformation was not completely removed from the underpinning ideas of the Umma (though I would not care to push the analogue too far).
The Islamic threat has become so commonplace, sometimes I feel we have lost all perspective as shown here — http://www.purplethink.com/epinion/Different.asp
Indeed. It seems much of the world that should know better is hurrying to adopt the Salafist interpretation of history, even as it correctly identifies that they are ignorant bigots in pretty much every other respect.
Muslim states have usually been aggressive, maybe more so than other states, though history is so full of war that I really doubt the difference is significant. For all the tosh about the Umma spouted at various times by various people (and, yes, cf ‘Christendom’, a similarly wishful concept), Islam has not been a united political or religious entity since – at the very latest – the 650s (CE).
Islamism is a modern phenomenon (or an anti-modern one, perhaps more precisely) and there’s no reason to accept its claims of continuity with antique religious conflict.
To address the original quote: The struggle of all human cultures against all other human cultures they come into contact with, quite frequently genocidal, has been a constant of human history for all the history we’ve got. Indeed most of the history we have from before printing consists of nothing else: who was conquered, enslaved, exterminated, and in what order.
Then surely the answer guy is to limit that ‘contact’ at least to some small degree?
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Islamism is not a modern phenomenon not at all!
“America’s First War on Terror”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22314
Of course we all watch in wonder to see which of the twin black holes of radical Islam and communism will consume the other first, even as each thinks it will use the other to help it wipe out all the stars. If we could just use that to our advantage and run things raw between the two, we might be able to sit back and watch with our bags of popcorn.
Dave,
Violence in the name of Islam is not new at all. Of course not.
But that’s not the same as Islamism, which is a specific globalising ideological rejection of the existing authority of “corrupt” Muslim states and claim to originalist interpretation of scriptures. It is akin to the post-modern left and to other religious fundamentalisms, in being a modern reaction against modern world values.
Old style Islamic aggression (still seen in Iran, I’d suggest) operated in the real world, and was an expression of military and economic power; the Islamist cult appeals to a power-fantasy of instant total revolution, and springs from a cultural inferiority complex. Hence its appeal to the same spoiled rich kids that have staffed all the other (now burnt out) permanent revolutions.
There have been many efforts to purify Islamic rule by destroying “corrupt” governments and setting up ones that claimed to be more Islamic. For example the destruction of the Omayyad Caiphate by the Abbasides in 750 A.D. (although one of the Omayyads escaped the extermination and founded a new Caliphate in Cordoba – the relavtively tolerant Caliphate that the B.B.C. love to cite). The Omayyads were accused of being more Arab tribal rulers than true Islamic rulers.
In recent centuries the Sunni Wahabi movement (founded by Abd-el-Wahhab in the 18th century) is best known – for example the support offered to the movement offered by the Saud family (later rulers of most of Arabia) and other supporters such as “the Mahdi” in the Sudan (although he raided well outside the Sudan) or O.B.L. in our own day.
Wahabis reject the “corrupt” Pact of Omar where, subject to various humilations, nonMuslims are allowed to live indeed even (to a limited extent) to worship, and wish to return to pure evil as practiced by “the Prophet”. Of course Wahabis do not favour tolerating non Wahabi Muslims either – but mostly they favour going slow on such things as the extermination of the Shia at least till those people who actually deny the authority of Mohammed are destroyed.
Of course one should keep in mind that the Shia also have their own radical movements – sadly one of them is in charge in Iran at the moment (and has been since 1979). This Shia movement holds as one of its main duties is the destruction of all nonMuslim powers (although perhaps not the extermination of their populations) although special hatred is reserved for Britian and the United States, due to a correct belief that these powers have most limited their power in the past (by supporting the Monarchy) and because they judge that these powers are still the most likely to resist them today.
Not just the supreme religious leader, but the President of Iran has a long record of talking of the utter destruction of the United States – the President going all the way back to when he was one of the hostage takers in the American embassy in Iran, but his aims have not changed). Of course the radical Shia (such as the President) believe that the “hidden one” will emerge during their own lifetimes to help with the violent conquest of the nonMuslim world.
The present leadership in Iran is not motivated by love of ancient Persian culture (something they hate) or by Iranian expansionism in the sense of nation state politics. For example, if to achieve the victory of his type of Islam the President of Iran had to sacrifice the entire population of Iran this would not bother him (remember he is one of the men who handed out “keys to paradise” to little boys before sending them on suicide missions during the Iraq-Iran war).
Of course Christianity has had its own disgusting movements, the differences is that Christians wishing to justify murder, rape, enslavement (and so on) by pointing to the life of Jesus have a difficult problem – Muslims who wish to do these things have no problem finding justifcation in the life of Mohammed.
As for communism (equality and the common shareing of all goods) this is indeed an ancient idea and practice. F.A. Hayek even suggested that most of the hunter-gatherer packs that made most of the history of human race practiced something like this and that social developement came from the few that did not. Which would explain why collectivist ideas keep comming back although they are totally illogical in a complex society – basically we are “hard wired” by our genetic past to believe in some formof “social justice” -and our reason has to struggle against this “fair shares” concept – our reason is not enough (according to Hayek) to win this struggle against our collectivist pack animal instincts) so we need cultural traditions to help us fight the beast within.
Of course socialism (the control of all resources collectively) need not mean communism (equality) indeed I would suspect that many of the hunter gatherer packs were very unequal indeed.
As for history. There have been many collectivist experiments some of them radically unequal (such as the Inca Empire), but some of them trying for equality.
Some years before the Islamic conquest the Persian Empire was convulsed by one of these movements – preaching that all goods (and all women) should be held in common – basically a demand to legalize robbery and rape. Whilst this movement was eventually defeated (at one time it had Imperial support – collectivist Emperors have existed in many cultures) it (along with the wars with the Byzantines) fatally weakened the Persians in the time before the attack by the Muslims.
But Guy, this kind of Islamism has happened before, I give another quote from the link I posted before.
When Muslims in the past lacked a strong state to fight for or with, they decentralized and continued in organic formations, ie terrorism, like what is happening today.
Excellent quote – I didn’t know he was such a thoughtful chap. Is he still going out with Jordan ?
Thanks to Paul Marks for such excellent contextual information. An ancient enemy dressed up in a new ideological or rhetorical costume is still the same foe.
The aspect of all this that is the most critical to our intelligient understanding and response is a recognition of the relentless nature of the threat.
If basic freedoms of speech, the press, religious belief, (or the lack of it), and others that the Anglosphere recognizes as fundamental elements of our culture are to survive, we must give up this delusional pretense that all difficulties will fade away if we just say the right things, apologize abjectly enough, ignore enough provocations, absorb enough punishment—in short, if we are pliant and non-assertive enough, everyone will like us, and stop trying to kill us.
That way lies not only madness, but our destruction.
very retired,
Agreed about protecting our (modern) institutions and their classical heritage, and having absolutely no truck with ideological appeasers. (That I am against ideological appeasement does not mean I am in favour of total war: some commentators seem to think that follows.)
What I am specifically denying here is that this is an “ancient enemy”, however. It is not only that the old Islamic empires were not the same as contemporary states in the same regions; the West they fought was nothing like the modern West, and is not a society I’d much like to live in either.
Paul is right to identify the importance of Wahab. Fundamentalisms derive their force and identity from rejection of liberalism, and arose contemporaneously with it. But the battle we fight against Islamism is of now. It is informed by reference to historical and cultural features of the past – but it is a relatively new movement, fostered by modern communications, that has created and fostered Islamism. What I find so frustrating about all such discussions is that the very foundation of Islamism is a spurious claim to privileged connexion with the time and meaning of the Prophet, and a true continuity. When you accept that absurd proposition, you give them the most important victory of all.
Dave, your analogy is weak. Uncentralised raiders are a feature of all pre-modern and many more recent population shifts. There’s nothing specifically Islamic about any of the events you cite except that the raiders were from Islamic lands and brought their religion and its justifications with them. Heard of the peoples of the sea, the classical barbarian invasions, the Vikings, the Northern Crusades, the Mongol invasions (uniquely coordinated, but only to begin with), the mahrattas, how the West was won? All those plunders and expansions of territory proceeded by informal, low-intensity conflict. “Terrorism” in any meaningful sense requires political goals pursued against a formal political power by terrorising the population under its control – it supposes a modern state and modern motivations.
Saying Muslims have always X, and then producing examples of Muslims doing the same thing as lots of other people have done, really is as worthless as the ranted assertions of the Islamists themselves about “what Muslims are” or should be.
Dave writes “this sort of Islamism”, which strikes me as odd. Perhaps he uses “Islamism” and “Islam” as interchangeable, which they aren’t.
Since maybe it is not clear to others, I am using “Islamism” as a term to refer to that fundamentalist ideology that classifies most Muslims as heretics, corrupted by the cultures of unbelievers, and demands the establishment of pure “Islamic states” (with secular law and governance excluded) in predominantly Muslim countries.
Guy, are you sure that Islamism isn’t Islam+Globalism?
You keep saying these Wahhabists, etc are strictly a new phenomenon, yet at the same time you call them “fundamentalists”. By nature of the word, fundamentalists adhere or revert to the fundamental precepts.
If you were to place a knowledgeable “modern” Muslim and a knowledgeable “fundamentalist” Muslim together to debate the true nature of Islam, the fundamentalist ideology will win. Because what they say of Islam is true.