Zarathustra Speaks

Is Islam a, or the, “religion of peace”? There can be no answer to that question that does not dissolve into semantics on the one hand or propaganda on the other. The question partakes of the essentialist or logocentrist fallacy: what is the “essence” of a thing as distinct from the thing itself? One suspects that when people offer their opinion on the “essence” of Islam, whether peaceful or not, what we are really hearing is merely their favorite part. The question seems important because some people think we need to answer it before we can decide whether the Great War against Terror is a war against Islam. The Jihadi terrorists insist that it is a war between pure Islam and the decadent West. Western diplomats insist that the issues are political and economic in nature and that the mullahs and suicide bombers are essentially secular criminals, even madmen, who happen to be confused about their own reasons for killing us and themselves. This seems preposterous, a refusal to listen to the Other, a lingering Colonialist condescension. But we persist in it so as to blunt the Jihadist call for rank and file Muslims to join the killing spree. One side is calling a war, and the other side, in line with the kindergarten banner of the early seventies, is not showing up to fight. But that’s not stopping the terrorists.

Let me show you how useless a question it is, whether Islam is an inherently peaceful religion. Ask the same about Christianity. Is it inherently peaceful, so that violent aggression must be judged inconsistent with it? Most Christians are not absolute pacifists and would agree as to the propriety of secular, defensive war against, say, the Nazis or Japanese Imperialism. As Christians, they would regret the violence inevitably done to one’s nation’s enemies, but it would not stop them using force in such situations. They would no doubt also believe that God is on the side of liberty and liberation. But there is nothing specifically Christian about that. Christians are in most cases glad brothers in arms with Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Deists, against Nazis and Communists.

But there is a type of Christianity, Christian Reconstructionism (also known as Dominionism) which one might call Taliban Christianity. As you know, fundamentalists always say our country is a Christian country and should return to biblical values. But in their minds this seems tantamount to the public, secular values of the 1930s or (for some) even the Victorian Era. That plus free public displays of Christian faith on the part of citizens and institutions. It is Reagan’s “Morning in America.” It is Bedford Falls. That vision leaves something to be desired in the way of diversity and free expression. Many of us would have qualms. But it is a bad mistake, one often made by my secularist pals, to think Christians who espouse that kind of rhetoric are the same as Reconstructionists, who want the fine print of Old Testament law codes to become the law of the land in America. Such laws, remember, stipulate slavery, the execution of adulterers, heretics, even kids who sass their parents. The problem with bone-headed politicians who want the Ten Commandments posted in public classrooms is not that they are witting Dominionists, but that they fail to notice the Dominionist implications of what they are doing: commanding that all Americans worship Jehovah! That’s the very first commandment. Do they even know that? They don’t actually mean to forbid little Hindu kids worshipping Krishna or Siva. They are just too stupid to realize that is what the Ten Commandments say.

But what about the real, genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Reconstructionists? People like Gary North, Southern Baptists Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, Pat Robertson, the late Bill Bright of Campus Crusade and Rousas John Rushdoony (the father of the movement)? Some (like North) advocate a Christian seizure of power, while others, like his father-in-law Rushdoony, believe the electorate would have to be persuaded to vote for such a theocracy. Me, I can imagine that the ultra-right wing evangelical militants honeycombing the US military might stage a “Seven Days in May” style takeover and enact some sort of Christian Bible junta. Not that I’m expecting it. .

Would there would be a doubt in anyone’s mind that these zealots would be honest and accurate in their claims to be religiously motivated? Would it serve any purpose to deny the religious character of their movement, their aggression, their oppression? I cannot see how. Nor would admitting that their endeavor was altogether religious imply in any way that Christianity was “essentially” a religion of bigotry or tyranny. The bigots and tyrants would be genuinely religious bigots and tyrants, but they wouldn’t own the copyright on Christianity. Just about everybody else under the Christian umbrella would feel the Taliban-Reconstructionists were misinterpreting Christianity. But no one would doubt it was the fanatics’ Christianity that motivated them. There would be no reason to think they were secretly or subconsciously motivated by something else. And we would feel no need to condemn Christianity as a whole.

No more must we declare war on all Islam in order to acknowledge that the people we are fighting are Muslims who are upset because of their Islam. The great Sufi scholar Sayyed Hosein Nassr recently estimated that a minority of Muslims are active supporters of Jihad against the West. His estimate was a tenth of all Muslims. Gee, by my reckoning, that still makes one hundred million Muslims who detest our permissive way of life, our lack of an orthodoxy, our equal esteem for women along with men. As one radio pundit put it right after 9/11, they hate the fact that American women wear bikinis and speak their minds. How far does this sort of prickly sensitivity go? Remember the reports that, a few years ago, guys were getting gunned down in Baghdad barber shops for getting Western-style hair cuts and shaves?

These people are not willing to live and let live. This should be no surprise to any one familiar (and who isn’t?) with Christian missionary ideology: the faith must be spread worldwide! All must accept it or go to hell! The only difference is that historically Muslims have been more than willing to help you get there. Nowadays ecumenical apologists for Islam (like the contemptible Karen Armstrong) like to praise Islam for not simply converting people at sword point. Sometimes they did, but even when they didn’t, they viewed their task as conquering nations and imposing Islamic law (the now-infamous Shari’ah law) on them. For Islam to rule, as Allah commanded, does not necessarily require everyone believe in the religion. Special tolerance is reserved for predecessor religions Judaism and Christianity. But Islam must govern. And plenty of Muslims feel this way today.

One group of Muslims who do not are Nietzsche’s “good Europeans” who have imbibed the spirit of the Enlightenment. They are genuinely willing (even glad) to live in a pluralistic modern society where they can embrace what they love in Islam and leave the rest aside, much like Hellenistic-era Jews living scattered in the Roman Empire. They believe in Allah and in Muhammad his apostle, but they are mighty happy not to have to submit to Shari’ah courts! One feels that such Muslims have effectively demythologized their faith’s historic call to Jihad and conquest. This is a healthy reaction to the repeated humiliations of Islam as Muslims over the ages have lost their massive empire (caliphate) and then lost war after war to Jews and Hindus, i.e., Israelis and Indians. Why does Allah not come to their aid and cause them to defeat Pakistan, win the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War? The situation is, I judge, precisely parallel to the repeated disappointments among first- and second-century Christians when the oft-predicted Parousia failed to materialize on schedule. In that day, when Jesus should reappear, Christians would be vindicated, their persecutors destroyed. Christians should judge fallen angels and assume theocratic rule over the whole earth. Eventually most Christians (without saying so) demythologized this apocalyptic fanaticism and came to believe the world would just go on into an ever-receding future. Christ would one day return, but until he did, the individual hoped to meet him in heaven after death and leave it at that. That is in effect what moderate, assimilated Muslims have done: dropped the apocalyptic imperialism and decided to come to terms with the real world.

But by no means all. At least one hundred million Muslims are pursuing three strategies to establish Islam in its proper position of world hegemony. The first is colonization. This is how Europe will certainly morph into “Eurabia” before too long. The decadent European population had better things to do than replenish itself. So for many years they have been happy to receive immigrants from Arab and Islamic countries to fill their work force and to take care of them. These Muslims are the next generation. They will inherit the earth, just as Anna Nicole Smith was entitled to the fortune left her by the old zillionaire whose loathsome embraces she endured for a few years. The Netherlands and France are making too-little, too-late gestures to stem the tide of Islamicization. No burkhas in public schools. No more drive-by murders of film makers critical of Islam. Yeah, that ought to do it. Personally, I don’t want Jesus to come back. I want the second coming of Charles Martel.

The second tactic is raw, terroristic violence. Islamist acts of violence can and have had severe impacts on Western economies, e.g., air travel. A microcosm of the strategy may be studied in the case of Israel versus its implacable enemy, the Palestinians, effectively a population of Orcs raised with anti-Semitic hysteria and a death-wish for all Jews. If Muslims keep pounding away, they hope, they can finally get the West to blame Israel: they could stop all the violence if they would just roll over and  die. “While you live your troubles are many, my poor Jerusalem! To conquer death you only have to die.”

The third tactic is Finlandization. This piece of jargon stems from the Cold War. Finland, a barnacle on the gigantic hull of the USSR, accommodated the Soviets in every way they could. Better than getting invaded! Better pink than extinct! Save the bullies the trouble: become Da-men! Knuckle under for free. We see the West Finlandizing all over the place today, only they are kowtowing not to the Communists but to the Muslims. The blithering archbishop of Canterbury advocated parallel Shari’ah counts for the growing British Muslim population. Book and magazine publishers self-censor the content of their publications for fear of Muslim reprisals. Muslim women seek to have photos of themselves completely swathed in masks and robes on their driver’s licenses. Public universities install new foot-washing fixtures all over the campus to accommodate ritual ablutions by Muslim students. Christian witnesses are expelled from Muslim events not by Muslim organizers but by municipal police. The more we accommodate our free expression to spare Muslim prickliness, the more we are simply allowing ourselves to be bullied—and giving them their way. It is becoming more and more difficult to issue public criticism of Islam and Muslims. The fact that it can come to this only illustrates the decadence of the dithering West, more concerned with etiquette than freedom and survival. If we one day collapse into a gutless, Shari’ah-compliant state, we will have deserved conquest. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I began this essay with a title recalling a contemporary subgenre of horror films, all descended from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in which resuscitated corpses walk the earth in shambling mobs, their preternatural reanimation maintained by devouring the flesh of the living who cannot (re-)kill enough of them to reverse the tide. Eventually the dead outnumber the living. Pockets of resistance count their days till the plague strikes them, too. Military leaders, with less and less force at their command, weigh one terrible alternative after another, until there is no recourse. Human life as we know it must succumb to the shuffling hordes of barely sentient stiffs. That, I dare say, is the eventual prospect we face. Resurgent Islam, militant Islam, Jihadi Islam, Islamism, whatever you want to call it, is an active threat bidding to tear down civilization as we know it. Once Muslim culture led the way. But those days are long gone. The scientific, artistic, and philosophical achievements of the Abbasid Caliphate in Syria all fell victim to the flood tide of Koran-fundamentalist barbarism.

And maybe the biggest irony in the whole damn thing is that the supposed revelation of the Koran, dictated to Muhammad by the whispering angel Gabriel, offers us nothing new or better in the way either of religion (it is filled with tendentiously garbled Bible stories) or legislation (merely giving divine authority to local, tribal Arab legal traditions). The Shari’ah added oceans of Talmud-like embellishments to this code, eventuating in four distinct schools of Islamic jurisprudence, again demonstrating that the Muslims simply toss a canonical halo over their cultural baggage like a Frisbee over a peg. Taliban code is more of the same, just derived from more recent local Afghan tradition.

Not that the Bible is any more original. It appears that much of the Torah was simply adapted (sometimes more humanely) from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. There is no legislation as such in the New Testament, since it originated in a sectarian community within a larger society in which Christians did not yet possess political power. But the ethics of the New Testament are equally derivative, borrowed from the Rabbis and the Cynic and Stoic philosophers current in their day.

To claim divine revelation as the origin of any of this stuff is simply to bypass the rational responsibility of individuals and societies to form their own laws and mores as they deem appropriate. But as soon as we realize this, mustn’t we also admit what I denied above: that the essence of the thing is really secular, the religious veneer merely poisonous icing on the political-economic cake? Aha! Just here is the point: It is the very elevation of the mundane to the status of the sacred that constitutes the special business of religion! That is to claim imaginary divine authority for the opinions of mere mortals. That is mystification and priestcraft in the name of a god who has been concocted precisely to bully us into conformity with the decrees of those clever enough to have cooked up the whole scheme to begin with. You see? This elevation of human opinions into divine commandments is what makes Islamic jihad truly religious. That is what justifies calling those who rejoice to sacrifice their mental and moral autonomy “zombies.”

By contrast, the Founders of our republic preferred to construct (then to scrap, then to reconstruct) a charter that was self-consciously merely human, a Constitution with the possibility of revision and renewal always ready to hand. And I must say I prefer that option, freedom issuing from free thought, to the mailed fist of dogma that declares it right to kill and to die over a hair cut. Let us stave off the Zombie Apocalypse as long as we can. Or at the very least let us not hasten it through our politically correct cowardice.

So says Zarathustra.