The Sword of the Prophet
Islam: history, theology, impact on the world
312 pages Boston: Regina Orthodox Press (September 11, 2002) ISBN: 1928653111
- What Some Reviewers Say
- Concluding Chapter
- Review by Michael Stenton (Chronicles, November 2002)
- Vox populi
WHAT SOME REVIEWERS SAY
Exceptionally fluid argument against militant Islam… Its most important distinction is Trifkovic’s insistence that “the problem [for the West] is not prejudice about Islam, but folly in the face of its violence and cruelty”… Trifkovic doesn’t endorse war against Islam. Instead, the West must defend itself against Islamic aggression (e.g., by restricting immigration and reducing dependence on Islamic-controlled oil)... Powerful stuff powerfully presented. – Ray Olson in Booklist
Easily the most important (not to mention courageous) book written in response to 9/11 that I've read -- perhaps one of the two or three most important books I've read in my nearly six years as Club editor. – Jeffrey Rubin, Editor, CONSERVATIVE BOOK CLUB
[T]he sort of book which the professional anti-racists, and the British mosques, might try to ban before long. – Frank Johnson, The Spectator (London)
The arbiters of official Islam will not tell us what Islam is, only what they want it to be. For the truth, we must turn to Dr. Serge Trifkovic, a European historian of broad learning, sound philosophy and keen political insight. – Brian Mitchell, Washington Bureau Chief, Investor's Business Daily
Islam, Serge Trifkovic argues, is not a set of beliefs founded on peace, but an imperialistic religion based on an irreverent and historically insupportable rewriting of Old Testament laws and ideas…. [His book] made me wonder why the supremely tragic events of September 11, 2001 had not happened sooner. – Jonathan Butcher in TOWNHALL.COM
[Trifkovic] examines, among many illuminating topics, the powerful anti-Semitism that is constantly promoted in the Islamic press. Like Americans willing to overlook the imagery promoted by the Nazi propagandists, today's establishment media largely gives the Islamist media a pass… He endorses ideas such as more careful immigration policies as vital steps to help defend us from the radical Islamists. - Paul M. Weyrich, The Washington Despatch
In his excellent new book… Serge Trifkovic documents how Muhammad, like a mafia don, put out contracts on those who dared to criticize his august personage. Trifkovic also describes Muhammad’s genocidal campaign against Arabia’s Jewish tribes […] Thus was the precedent firmly established for holy warriors, wars of annihilation, suicide bombers, forced conversions, snipers and those who fly jetliners into skyscrapers. – Don Feder
[It] accuses Muslims of perpetrating unparalleled massacres in India quite similar to genocide of Jews by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Written by Serge Trifkovic, an American magazine editor, the book says that Islam is by no means a religion of peace… Peace, in the Islamic vision, will only come upon the completion of global conquest. The Times of India
Dr. Trifkovic understands Islam, he knows we were knocking on the wrong door in Baghdad, and is devastating on the absence of historical memory. The problem of historical ignorance in today’s English-speaking world, where claims about far-away lands and cultures are made on the basis of domestic multiculturalist assumptions, are hit right on the head by the author. – Taki in The American Conservative
What Muslims, multiculturalists, and the media hope you never find out about Islam. Since 9-11, dozens of books have been rushed to market purporting to “explain” the religion in whose name the terrorists acted. Most of them strike a common theme: “true” Islam – as opposed to the “fundamentalist” variety of the hijackers – is a “religion of peace” that promotes charity, tolerance, freedom, and culture… Such a viewpoint, argues Serge Trifkovic, is not only false but dangerous, since it blinds to the true nature of the enemy that threatens us. Moreover, it betrays a hidden agenda: to discredit Christianity and the West by comparison to a sanitized, idealized Islam that bears no resemblance to its actual teachings or history. – NATIONAL REVIEW Book Service
Trifkovic gives us the unvarnished, “politically incorrect" truth about Islam – including the shocking facts about its founder, Mohammed; its rise through bloody conquest; its sanctioning of theft, deceit, lust and murder; its persecutions of Christians, Jews, Hindus and other “infidels”; its cruel mistreatment of women; the colossal myth of its cultural “golden age”; its irreformable commitment to global conquest by any means necessary; the broad sweep of the military, political, moral, and spiritual struggle that faces us; and what we must do if we wish to survive. – CONSERVATIVE BOOK CLUB
Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that their religion has always been innocuous. What Serge Trifkovic argues in "The Sword of the Prophet," however, is that the raw stuff from which Islam is made is particularly dangerous and unpromising, that the bellicose tradition is worse than admitted by the influential Islamic Studies lobby, that the present threat from Islam is alarming, and that the future demands the vigilance of non-Muslims. In doing so, he challenges the opinion that all religions are equally valid. – Dr. Michael M. Stenton, Chronicles.
This book pulls no punches in identifying the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as the greatest danger to Western values since the end of the Cold War. -- Ambassador James Bissett, former head of Canadian Immigration Service.
Trifkovic [is] a man of extraordinary intellectual courage… The Sword of the Prophet is indispensable reading. – Paul Eidelberg, FREEMAN CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Print-and-Mail Order Form
THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET
By Serge Trifkovic
Please send me …. copies of The Sword of the Prophet at the price of $20 per copy including postage. Non-U.S. addressees add $5. If you want ithem signed by the author check here: …..…
I enclose check/mo for $.................. (US funds only) payable to The Lord Byron Foundation
Name _______________________________________________________________
Address _____________________________________________________________
City________________________________ State, ZIP ________________________
Phone ______________________________ e-mail ___________________________
Mail to: The Lord Byron Foundation
P.O. Box 1246
Chicago, IL 60690-1246
CONCLUSION TO THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET:
WHAT TO DO?
Before 1914, both the West and the Muslim world could define themselves against each other in a cultural sense. What secularism has done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of “the West,” is to cast aside any idea of a Christian social, geographic, and cultural space that should be protected. Islam, “extreme” or “moderate,” has not softened, however. The consequences will be very serious unless Muslims are either “westernized”—that is to say, made as willing as Christians to see their religion first relativized, then mocked, and its commandments misrepresented or ignored—or else Christianized, which of course cannot happen unless there is a belated, massive, and unexpected recovery of Western spiritual and moral strength.
If neither of those scenarios work, the West faces two clear alternatives: defense, or submission and acceptance of sacred Arab places as its own.[1] Western political leaders have every right to pay compliments to Muslim piety and good works, but they should be as wary of believing their own theological reassurances as they would be of facile insults. Islamic populations and individuals draw very different things from their religion, its scripture and traditions, but anti-infidel violence is a hardy perennial. The challenge remains—how to prevent theocratic intransigence from winning support, and how to prevent it sheltering behind secular-liberal toleration.
While it is proper for democratic government to refrain from legislating the practice of religion in any way, Islam is a special case because it is, on its own admission, much more than “just a religion.” It needs to be understood and subjected to the same supervision and legal restrains that apply to other cults prone to violence, and to violent political hate groups whose avowed aim is the destruction of our order of life.
The collective striving embodied in “We the People” makes no sense unless there is a definable “people” to support it. Most Muslim immigrants have no kinship with the striving and no connection to that “people,” except for the unsurprising desire to partake in its wealth. But their deep disdain for the democratic institutions of the host-countries notwithstanding (and just like the members of communist parties before them), Muslim activists in non-Muslim countries invoke those institutions when they clamor for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs. They demand full democratic privileges to organize and propagate their views, while acknowledging to each other that, given the power to do so, they would impose their own beliefs and customs, and eliminate all others. Once it is accepted that “true Islam” does not recognize a priori the right of any other religion or world outlook to exist—least of all the atheistic secular humanism of the ruling establishment—a serious anti-terrorist strategy will finally become possible.
The current terrorist threat to the United States comes almost exclusively from the members of the Muslim community. Critical to reducing the chance of an attack in the future are an immediate moratorium on all immigration from the risk-nations, an expansion of the Border Patrol to the point of zero-porosity, a radical reduction of visas issued to nationals of states that harbor or produce terrorists, abandonment of amnesty debate and the swift deportation of all illegal aliens from rogue nations that threaten America.
We are being indoctrinated into the dogma that the trend is inevitable, that economically motivated, unceasing immigration on a vast scale is unstoppable because it is due to inexorable global market forces. This is not true. Free citizens must not submit their destiny, and that of their progeny, to a historicist fallacy. Immigration from Islamic nations can, and should, be subject to the democratic will of the American people. They have every right to defend themselves and their way of life.
The struggle against terrorism starts with knowing thy enemy. A new paradigm on Islam, immigration, and Western identity are needed. Then, and only then, will human intelligence assets be usefully deployed to identify, target, and then destroy the individuals and their networks dedicated to our destruction. All will be in vain unless murderous Islamic extremism, manifested on September 11, spells the end of another kind of extremism: the stubborn insistence of the ruling liberal establishment on treating each and every newcomer as equally meltable in the pot.
Reducing and gradually ending unnecessary and harmful dependence on Middle Eastern oil is probably the easiest to achieve of all prerequisites for the policy of survival. Greed has always blinded power-wielders to danger, however, and it still does: The greed of the business tycoons promoting globalism is far greater in scale and its impact on humanity than any greed history has known—and just as blind. It has nurtured an enemy who cares more about land than about money and has a profound religious urge to prove his superiority to the infidel. The message of history is that the United States will be unable to stem the tide of Islam in the twenty-first century unless it abandons globalism and begins to treat Moslem states as potential enemies whose strategic assets and importance must be reduced before it is too late.
From September 11 on, designating “threats to national security” should finally start to follow some clear determination of America’s national interests. In longer-term strategy, a wider paradigm shift is needed, based on the need for a genuine Northern Alliance of Russia, Europe, and North America. The prerequisite is to revise Samuel Huntington, who mistakenly puts Orthodoxy in the same league with Islam vis-à-vis “the West.” Far from being treated as a threat, Russia should be helped on the road to recovery. In the short term, its recovery may help it develop democratic institutions that would make its aggressive comeback unlikely. In the longer term, Russia needs our help so that it can become the West’s bulwark against the real threat to our common security stretching along the West’s vulnerable eastern flank from the Caucasus to the Pacific as we enter the century that is certain to see a renewed assault of militant Islam on an enfeebled Europe.
The alternative is to open the gates and turn the Remnant into a reeking Camp of Saints. In the functionally nihilistic Western world, the temptation to give up will only grow stronger in the aftermath of America’s Black September, and Islam’s proselytizers know how to play the game. Ostensibly rejecting the act itself, but not the goals of its perpetrators, they act as if Islam were just another competitor in the marketplace of ideas and lifestyles. They enter the new millennium with a strong hand. For starters, Islam is “non-white,” non-European, and non-Christian, which makes it a natural ally of the ruling Western elites. At the same time, it has an inherent advantage over the tepid ideology of multicultural mediocrity in that it offers Allah in the place of nothing. It also has an advantage over most established Christian denominations, since the latter do not offer God as an alternative. All too happy to abandon their ancient sanctuaries to any mosqueless newcomer who asks politely, they are, at best, the Social Workers at Therapy.
A surge in conversions to Islam in the Western world after September 11, especially among affluent, young whites, attests that the strategy of reliance on the spiritual Death of the West is sound. It also fits a pattern set by recent history; similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict, and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Perhaps there is, after all, no such thing as bad publicity. The “Green Brigades” of the not-too-distant future will be increasingly composed of Johnny Walker Lindh clones. To a self-hating nihilist, Bin Laden is willy-nilly an admirable figure: a man with a cause for which educated people are ready to die. “Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and Original Sin, they ask, when the alternative proved to them so much more satisfying?”
By contrast, Christianity seems cluttered and its meaning obscure, its once powerful symbols wrapped up in ritual and hidden away. The starkness and terror of the Cross have been forgotten. Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not hate it, nor ban it. We should, however, blame ourselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts of the case and failing to take stock of our options. People did not take Mein Kampf seriously, at their own peril.
The Kuran’s exhortations to the believers to annihilate the non-believers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are equally frank, and the fruits visible through the centuries. In the present state of Western weakness, this firmness may appear attractive to the legions of cynical nihilists and lead further millions to the conclusion that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually and demographically. Those of us who do not cherish that prospect should at least demand that our rulers present that option fairly and squarely. To pretend, as the ruling elite does, that Islam is “a religion of peace,” rather like Episcopalianism, is stupid or deeply dishonest.
A chronic pseudo-war of American secular wealth against Islamic religious poverty is an ominous outcome, the contest presumably desired by the minds behind the atrocities. The American foreign policy establishment wants a “civilization” that includes Saudi Arabia and pays only lip service to the world’s largest country, Russia, or the world’s largest democratic society, India. Their coalition is too close to what went wrong in Afghanistan. Terrorism was factored into their political equations and their balances of power. They tried to ride the tiger: they are conspicuously unqualified to lead a defense against it.
If the Saudis have the right to travel to Western countries and build mosques, then we should have the right to engage in open missionary activity in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. We have every right to proclaim our ideas of Western freedom and an open society, whether this offends other countries’ rulers or not. We have no obligation to “respect other cultures” and ideas when those cultures and ideas lead to human suffering, misery, and servitude. We have every right to protect our ideas and way of life by openly proclaiming the superiority of our principles.
Our second task after defending ourselves is to help our fellow humans trapped in Islam to become free. The Islamist campaign of violence in Algeria has turned some Muslims, especially Berbers, away from Islam and toward Christianity. The massacres and killings in the name of Islam have prompted converts to declare: “Christianity is life, Islam is death.”[4] For their sake, and for that of the yet unknown and unenlightened millions of others, we must reject the absurd notion that we have no right to try and convert Islamic nations and peoples to a more humane, and more rewarding world outlook. The allied nations did not shirk their duty to convert Germany and Japan into democracies after defeating them. In the same way, we have every right to openly evangelize the Islamic nations with not only the gospel of Christianity, but also the “gospel” of secular democratic thought.
Some critics may object that this account of Islam in the modern world does not pay much attention to Islamic moderation, to the everyday wish of everyday Muslims for a quiet life. This is not because such moderates are rare, but because they are rarely important. Religions, like political ideologies, are pushed along by money, power, and tiny vocal minorities. Within Islam, the money and the power are all pushing the wrong way. So are the most active minorities. The urgent need is to recognize this. Our problem is not prejudice about Islam, but folly in the face of its violence and cruelty. And in any case, the willingness of moderates to be what are objectively bad Muslims, because they reject key teachings of historical Islam, may be laudable in human terms but does nothing to modify Islam as a doctrine.
Islam might have been made much less threatening if the West had not conciliated or sponsored its most threatening exponents. Islam was exposed to a devastating collapse in credibility within the Arab world itself in the middle of the twentieth century. The forces of secularity were very strong indeed. But America opposed them at every turn because they were socialist or communist or simply not “in the national interest.” America gave whole-hearted support to the worst fascist nation on earth: Saudi Arabia. As the economies of real states faltered and halted, the Saudi petrodollars were poured into establishing violent fanaticism as the big alternative. Gradually, the people who could moderate Islam have been pushed aside by raving sheiks congratulated by U.S. diplomats. The main reason for hailing Islam as a “religion of peace” is to cover this fact up.
There is a huge problem for all Muslims—the violent message of the Kuran. We cannot solve it for them, and we should not be asked to deem the problem solved by pretending that the Kuran is a pacifist tract. Humans are perfectly capable of reinterpreting scripture when absolutely necessary, but until the petrol dollars support a line of Islamic exegesis that can renounce the ideals of jihad, terror, tax, and subjugation we must have the guts to call a religion of war by its right name. After the Bolshevik revolution, the liberal response was to regret its excess but to allow that its idealism was somehow for the best. If this line had persisted, Communism would have triumphed. America supplied Europe with the stamina it needed to dismiss all the claims of Communism comprehensively. Once this was done, the corner was turned, and the Cold War could not be lost.
“As a man thinketh, so is he.” The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural resources or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it—a quarter of a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later—by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”
Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to compromise with such madness is to become part of the madness oneself. No one who believes that jihad is the right or duty of all Muslims, or who promotes adoption of Shari’a law or reestablishment of the caliphate, should be allowed to settle in any Western country, and every applicant should be asked. The passport of anyone preaching jihad should be revoked. This may be called discrimination but the quarrel is not of our choosing.
Islam, in Muhammad’s texts and its codification, discriminates against us. It is extremely offensive. Those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves. Islam discriminates against all “unbelievers.” Until the petrodollars support a Kuranic revisionism that does not, we should go for it with whips and scorpions, hammer and tongs. Secularists and believers of all other faiths must act together before it is too late.
[1] V.S. Naipaul (1998).
[2] Ramati, op.cit.
[3] “Allah came knocking at my heart” by Giles Whittell, The Times, Monday, January 7, 2002.
[4] “Christianity Is Life,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2001, www.mequarterly. org/article.php?id=104.
*******************
Islam: The Score
Review of The Sword of the Prophet by Michael M. Stenton
From Chronicles, November 2002
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way – divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed – and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” – Hilaire Belloc
Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that their religion has always been innocuous. What Srdja Trifkovic argues in The Sword of the Prophet, however, is that the raw stuff from which Islam is made is particularly dangerous and unpromising, that the bellicose tradition is worse than admitted by the influential Islamic Studies lobby, that the present threat from Islam is alarming, and that the future demands the vigilance of non-Muslims. In doing so, he challenges the opinion that all religions are somehow equally valid (or invalid). All theocracy, equipped with a scriptural license for violence, is dangerous, and Islam is--and has been, almost continuously--more theocratic than rival religions. The men and women born into this religion may deserve our sympathy, but they are not aided by a blanket respect for Islam. The assumption that there is no such thing as false religion is not a concession that Muslims would make.
Trifkovic will be accused of missing the essential point, which is that Muslim majorities do not want what the violent minorities want, that peaceful integration has a track record and a future, and that our immediate requirement is to divest ourselves of Christian prejudice. This is, at best, evasive. Christian prejudice is little more than a trace element among Westerners. The record of peaceful coexistence is too short, and it is outweighed by the record of human catastrophe where Islam and other religions have come together. Moreover, it is in the nature of religion that it is the minorities who take it seriously, and it is in the nature of serious people that they can be effective in leading ordinary people. Still, many Westerners will dismiss Trif- kovic's account of Islam simply because they refuse to take religion seriously.
Today, religion offers identity in a world whose leading powers have turned against nationality. Preaching, the example of personal sacrifice, and the threat of violence--by Muslims against Muslims--can impose new disciplines. Muslim communities, even when they are quiet, remain vulnerable to well-funded proselytizing that draws on sacred ideals. The myth--and, indeed, the history-- of religious expansion and conquest achieved as a militant response to persecution is unalterably fixed in the standard narrative of Islam.
Islam is a religion born in battle and formed by war. Its adherents nourish their faith and their imagination with this story and derive a sense of manifest destiny from it. The faithful have no notion of the damage Islamic conquest did to Christian civilization, which, thanks in part to the impact of Islam, became Latin, not Greek, at the center. The destruction of the Byzantine Empire was a catastrophic loss that deprived many young nations of their patrimony and potential. By contrast, the pro-Islamic account of Islamic expansion--the advance of toleration at the expense of a Christian world that was probably unwilling to resist--is an amusing exercise in Islamo-Whiggery. An explosive mixture of poverty, lust for plunder, and religious excitement drove Islamic expansion--and that combination is by no means extinct. This force tore into the vital organs of three civilizations. Islamic arrangements followed a very secular logic: Islam was legally supreme because the Arab elite needed social advantages and a special solidarity, and it was tolerant because the conquering elite could not have retained power without toleration. Jerusalem was worth a Mass. Both the tolerance and the intolerance of the Islamic recipe served the goals of power and expansion.
Perhaps Islamic civilization flourished best when Islam was a minority religion and slaves were cultured, cheap, and diverse. After centuries of vigor, Islamic civilization declined. Many Western commentators argue that the religion poisoned its own civilization, even though this leaves open the question of why it was compatible with high culture and wealth-making at first. There could, theoretically, have been a different kind of Islamic polity than the ones that became moribund, but they all did become moribund. The Ottoman Empire grabbed a great deal of territory and power but, subsequently, decayed so deeply that the Christian nations whom it oppressed developed an overpowering urge to rid themselves of Islamic civilization as well as of Ottoman political tutelage.
Islam has played a role in legitimating the imperialism of Islamic states and their resistance to the imperialism of the West. Even where resistance has failed, Islam has still offered shape and identity to anti-imperialism. The cry of jihad is common; the real thing, however, is not. Anticolonialism after 1945 gave every appearance of owing more to secular nationalism than to religion, although their uneasy combination was inevitable. The British were perhaps being unduly cautious when they refused to intervene in 1924 to protect Mecca and Medina from Saudi war bands seizing the holy places in the name of Wahabi puritanism. To a secular-minded great power, the newly extended Saudi Arabian kingdom must have seemed an event of local importance. But the Wahabi ulema, and the al Saud, had been a danger to the peace and safety of the entire region since 1801, when they sacked the Shiite city of Kerbala and desecrated its shrine. No other Islamic regime has been as menacing and ambitious. However, not until after 1945, when the American oil companies paid for fabulous opportunities with huge royalties and favorable publicity, did the Saudis have good connections and serious financial resources to support them; and not until Presidents Kennedy and Nasser decided that they were, on balance, against each other did America really get behind the Saudis.
The West ended up surrendering to OPEC in 1973--a surrender partly engineered by American diplomacy--and so provided Saudi Arabia with immense sums to invest in Wahabi proselytism and Islamic prestige. America was backing Islam, in its most unattractive variant, because it was convenient when the strategic problem seemed to be communism. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran made this support seem even more urgent, and the real jihad in Afghanistan led to military and organizational backing by the United States. Washington's patronage of Wahabi fanaticism tells us a great deal not just about Western raison d'etat but about the docility of the mainstream press and TV in modern society. Europe paid for OPEC oil with a political discretion--at times a servility--that ultimately meant funding Saudi Arabia's palaces, airports, fountains, conspicuous consumption, and very costly weapons.
It might be argued that the problem of Islamic radicalism does not stem from Islam itself but merely reflects the nature of great powers and the opportunism of fanatics. But Islam has outgrown its origins and cannot be answered if we are too polite or frightened to see ideology in religion. Considering the attack on the Soviet Union, the challenge to the United States, and the continuing attacks on Russia, China, and India, we must conclude that Islamic jihad poses a significant threat to the world. Islam is much closer to world dominance than ever before. The Muslim world is experiencing a resurgence of Islamic proselytism, at a time when it is still in a vulnerable and suggestible state: After generations of marginality, Islamic agitation has become the central story in many countries. The work of Islamic charities is very important: The mosques in the West do not build themselves. What has been done in Algeria and Egypt, as well as in America and England, will now be difficult to undo.
Among the world's great powers, there are no Christian states anymore and no instinctively secular states except China. The Western powers are confused about religion and toleration; they are trapped by formulas and traditions they cannot manipulate with the confidence of true belief. But any state with Muslim citizens must assert the right to intervene in religion, to be a filter against theocratic fanaticism and to be the sponsor of moderation. The Chinese may go too far in this respect, but they do understand the terrific price of religious warfare, and they are rightly vigilant.
The problem of Islam in the West raises questions that we mostly contrive to leave undecided: whether, for example, our public and educational values are strictly secular; what to think and do about blasphemy; whether the pulpit can be censored; and what is the legitimate power of foreign money. The presence of Islam forces us to resolve these conflicts. We are perfectly capable of harassing Muslims at the level of crude policing while being overly tolerant of religious fanaticism. There is no Western consensus--and there is certainly no wise magistracy--for settling disputes that politicians will flee and governments will refuse to adjudicate.
Western Christians and secularists form two sects subservient to the dominant post-Christian religion. Intermittent belief in an enigmatic deity is an optional part of this faith, which includes some obligatory respect for selected aspects of Christianity, expressed by upbeat assessments of democracy, truth, beauty, openness, and the hatred of cruelty. This post-Christianity's antitraditional origins, its unfinished status, its intuitions, and its evangelical hunger for new problems make it, in principle, a radical religion. It has even penetrated Christian denominations with its infectious humanism. And its proselytizers would not readily concede that they could fail with "ordinary Muslims," given half a chance. The liberal, post-Christian cry has already gone up: Islamophobia is the new McCarthyism. The last thing that the modern-minded latitudinarian wishes to do is to pick a fight with that which he believes should be tamed and embraced.
Post-Christianity and Islam share roughly the same theological view of Christ. The attraction of Islam for ideological post-Christians is that its existence implies, more strongly than any argument, that traditional Christianity is unnecessary even if you wish to be monotheistic, pious, and mindful of a judgment day. The very existence of a plausible religious rival to the universality of the Church supplies a subversive argument of enduring force, which, though very old, is still being absorbed into the bloodstream of the West as Western parochialism and particularism are dismantled.
The post-Christian faith cherishes the notion of a friendly symbiosis with Islamic communities. But this desire for accommodation, and the difficulties that go with it, will lead to moral confusion absent an educated awareness of Islam's bag of tricks. In particular, it should be clearly understood that Islam does not have the same distinction between religion and society as does the West (if, indeed, it has one at all), so the offer to tolerate Islam will be understood by some Muslims as going beyond what Westerners conventionally regard as "tolerating" religion. While it is still not controversial to say so, we must insist that sharia cannot be available in Western societies as a body of law applicable to Muslim citizens, let alone non-Muslims.
The most striking claim in The Sword of the Prophet is that the American elite's extreme version of post-Christian religion is bent more aggressively against historic Christianity than any other religion in the West and could even enter into a partnership with Islam. A cultural process of this sort may already be at work. To laugh at the idea is to forget our recent history: a U.S.-directed jihad in Afghanistan; the covert U.S. alliance with Islamic revolutionaries in Bosnia; and U.S. support for the Taliban until 1998. The motives for these interventions have been ostensibly secular, but there was something excessive and intense behind them. Even if the motives of Islamic revolutionaries are not exclusively religious, can we say that the moral instinct of Washington globalists is exclusively secular? It is legitimate to wonder whether some premonition of a new religiosity affected the don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts rectitude of the crusaders who dragged NATO to war in Kosovo.
One final point: Those Muslims who are outraged that the violent West should accuse the Islamic Other of intrinsic violence have a point. The Islamic world has reason to be worried by the West's post-Cold War lurch toward high-tech crusades. Once a fatwa-opinion is issued in Washington, the media effervesce with moral fervor and military relish, the satellites and academics adjust their orbits and careers, and the bombs start to fall. This is the modern West riding the high horse of its supremacy. It is precisely because crusading globalism is likely to become more violent and better armed than ever, spurred by the attack on New York, that it is urgent to think defensively about Islam.
Of course, our alternative is to act more modestly in the world. But we are told that this would be immoral, that crime must be punished anytime and anywhere, so that no tyrant may sleep soundly in his bed for fear of the advancing banners of the New World Order, in which smart bombs and smart lawyers ring in the Reign of Justice. The new gospel destroys the old law: Let the nations tremble before the New Truth and its missiles! Global fundamentalism, lightly salted with American self-interest, is capable of being both sinister and religious.
Some may say, "But this is not Christianity!" It is more true to say so than it is to say, in the parallel case, "But this is not Islam!" But we are dealing not with Christianity but with what Christian civilization has become. The pacesetters in the West have expressed their post-Christian religion by casting off wisdom and any sense of geographic limits in their renewed willingness to make the world a better place at gunpoint. Islamic revolutionaries have done the same. The refusal to be prudent in dealing with a dangerous religion has condemned Western soldiers to wage strange wars far from their homelands and has all but forced us to tolerate global ambitions, whether we want them or not.
This is the modern jihad, the Western jihad, which has formed and swollen since 1989, and it has its own growing corps of political janissaries, military-industrial ghazis, and fundamentalist jurisconsults. If President Bush cannot achieve the goals he has set, the gaudy globalists will reappear--during his presidency or afterward--as the men and women with solutions. The recommendation of Srdja Trifkovic's book--a severe view of Islamic militancy and of Islam's political agenda--does not give Westerners any license to subscribe to the myth of their own perpetual innocence.
*************
WHAT SOME READERS SAY:
IN THE U.K.:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sword-Prophet-Serge-Trifkovic/dp/customer-reviews/1928653111
WIKIPAEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_the_Prophet
PUBLISHER:
http://reginaorthodoxpress.stores.yahoo.net/swordofprophet.html
Print-and-Mail Order Form
THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET
By Serge Trifkovic
Please send me …. copies of The Sword of the Prophet at the price of $20 per copy including postage. Non-U.S. addressees add $5. If you want ithem signed by the author check here: …..…
I enclose check/mo for $.................. (US funds only) payable to The Lord Byron Foundation
Name _______________________________________________________________
Address _____________________________________________________________
City________________________________ State, ZIP ________________________
Phone ______________________________ e-mail ___________________________
Address _____________________________________________________________
City________________________________ State, ZIP ________________________
Phone ______________________________ e-mail ___________________________
Mail to: The Lord Byron Foundation
P.O. Box 1246
Chicago, IL 60690-1246
[1] V.S. Naipaul (1998).
[2] Ramati, op.cit.
[3] “Allah came knocking at my heart” by Giles Whittell, The Times, Monday, January 7, 2002.
[4] “Christianity Is Life,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2001, www.mequarterly. org/article.php?id=104.
*******************
Islam: The Score
Review of The Sword of the Prophet by Michael M. Stenton
From Chronicles, November 2002
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way – divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed – and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” – Hilaire Belloc
Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that their religion has always been innocuous. What Srdja Trifkovic argues in The Sword of the Prophet, however, is that the raw stuff from which Islam is made is particularly dangerous and unpromising, that the bellicose tradition is worse than admitted by the influential Islamic Studies lobby, that the present threat from Islam is alarming, and that the future demands the vigilance of non-Muslims. In doing so, he challenges the opinion that all religions are somehow equally valid (or invalid). All theocracy, equipped with a scriptural license for violence, is dangerous, and Islam is--and has been, almost continuously--more theocratic than rival religions. The men and women born into this religion may deserve our sympathy, but they are not aided by a blanket respect for Islam. The assumption that there is no such thing as false religion is not a concession that Muslims would make.
Trifkovic will be accused of missing the essential point, which is that Muslim majorities do not want what the violent minorities want, that peaceful integration has a track record and a future, and that our immediate requirement is to divest ourselves of Christian prejudice. This is, at best, evasive. Christian prejudice is little more than a trace element among Westerners. The record of peaceful coexistence is too short, and it is outweighed by the record of human catastrophe where Islam and other religions have come together. Moreover, it is in the nature of religion that it is the minorities who take it seriously, and it is in the nature of serious people that they can be effective in leading ordinary people. Still, many Westerners will dismiss Trif- kovic's account of Islam simply because they refuse to take religion seriously.
Today, religion offers identity in a world whose leading powers have turned against nationality. Preaching, the example of personal sacrifice, and the threat of violence--by Muslims against Muslims--can impose new disciplines. Muslim communities, even when they are quiet, remain vulnerable to well-funded proselytizing that draws on sacred ideals. The myth--and, indeed, the history-- of religious expansion and conquest achieved as a militant response to persecution is unalterably fixed in the standard narrative of Islam.
Islam is a religion born in battle and formed by war. Its adherents nourish their faith and their imagination with this story and derive a sense of manifest destiny from it. The faithful have no notion of the damage Islamic conquest did to Christian civilization, which, thanks in part to the impact of Islam, became Latin, not Greek, at the center. The destruction of the Byzantine Empire was a catastrophic loss that deprived many young nations of their patrimony and potential. By contrast, the pro-Islamic account of Islamic expansion--the advance of toleration at the expense of a Christian world that was probably unwilling to resist--is an amusing exercise in Islamo-Whiggery. An explosive mixture of poverty, lust for plunder, and religious excitement drove Islamic expansion--and that combination is by no means extinct. This force tore into the vital organs of three civilizations. Islamic arrangements followed a very secular logic: Islam was legally supreme because the Arab elite needed social advantages and a special solidarity, and it was tolerant because the conquering elite could not have retained power without toleration. Jerusalem was worth a Mass. Both the tolerance and the intolerance of the Islamic recipe served the goals of power and expansion.
Perhaps Islamic civilization flourished best when Islam was a minority religion and slaves were cultured, cheap, and diverse. After centuries of vigor, Islamic civilization declined. Many Western commentators argue that the religion poisoned its own civilization, even though this leaves open the question of why it was compatible with high culture and wealth-making at first. There could, theoretically, have been a different kind of Islamic polity than the ones that became moribund, but they all did become moribund. The Ottoman Empire grabbed a great deal of territory and power but, subsequently, decayed so deeply that the Christian nations whom it oppressed developed an overpowering urge to rid themselves of Islamic civilization as well as of Ottoman political tutelage.
Islam has played a role in legitimating the imperialism of Islamic states and their resistance to the imperialism of the West. Even where resistance has failed, Islam has still offered shape and identity to anti-imperialism. The cry of jihad is common; the real thing, however, is not. Anticolonialism after 1945 gave every appearance of owing more to secular nationalism than to religion, although their uneasy combination was inevitable. The British were perhaps being unduly cautious when they refused to intervene in 1924 to protect Mecca and Medina from Saudi war bands seizing the holy places in the name of Wahabi puritanism. To a secular-minded great power, the newly extended Saudi Arabian kingdom must have seemed an event of local importance. But the Wahabi ulema, and the al Saud, had been a danger to the peace and safety of the entire region since 1801, when they sacked the Shiite city of Kerbala and desecrated its shrine. No other Islamic regime has been as menacing and ambitious. However, not until after 1945, when the American oil companies paid for fabulous opportunities with huge royalties and favorable publicity, did the Saudis have good connections and serious financial resources to support them; and not until Presidents Kennedy and Nasser decided that they were, on balance, against each other did America really get behind the Saudis.
The West ended up surrendering to OPEC in 1973--a surrender partly engineered by American diplomacy--and so provided Saudi Arabia with immense sums to invest in Wahabi proselytism and Islamic prestige. America was backing Islam, in its most unattractive variant, because it was convenient when the strategic problem seemed to be communism. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran made this support seem even more urgent, and the real jihad in Afghanistan led to military and organizational backing by the United States. Washington's patronage of Wahabi fanaticism tells us a great deal not just about Western raison d'etat but about the docility of the mainstream press and TV in modern society. Europe paid for OPEC oil with a political discretion--at times a servility--that ultimately meant funding Saudi Arabia's palaces, airports, fountains, conspicuous consumption, and very costly weapons.
It might be argued that the problem of Islamic radicalism does not stem from Islam itself but merely reflects the nature of great powers and the opportunism of fanatics. But Islam has outgrown its origins and cannot be answered if we are too polite or frightened to see ideology in religion. Considering the attack on the Soviet Union, the challenge to the United States, and the continuing attacks on Russia, China, and India, we must conclude that Islamic jihad poses a significant threat to the world. Islam is much closer to world dominance than ever before. The Muslim world is experiencing a resurgence of Islamic proselytism, at a time when it is still in a vulnerable and suggestible state: After generations of marginality, Islamic agitation has become the central story in many countries. The work of Islamic charities is very important: The mosques in the West do not build themselves. What has been done in Algeria and Egypt, as well as in America and England, will now be difficult to undo.
Among the world's great powers, there are no Christian states anymore and no instinctively secular states except China. The Western powers are confused about religion and toleration; they are trapped by formulas and traditions they cannot manipulate with the confidence of true belief. But any state with Muslim citizens must assert the right to intervene in religion, to be a filter against theocratic fanaticism and to be the sponsor of moderation. The Chinese may go too far in this respect, but they do understand the terrific price of religious warfare, and they are rightly vigilant.
The problem of Islam in the West raises questions that we mostly contrive to leave undecided: whether, for example, our public and educational values are strictly secular; what to think and do about blasphemy; whether the pulpit can be censored; and what is the legitimate power of foreign money. The presence of Islam forces us to resolve these conflicts. We are perfectly capable of harassing Muslims at the level of crude policing while being overly tolerant of religious fanaticism. There is no Western consensus--and there is certainly no wise magistracy--for settling disputes that politicians will flee and governments will refuse to adjudicate.
Western Christians and secularists form two sects subservient to the dominant post-Christian religion. Intermittent belief in an enigmatic deity is an optional part of this faith, which includes some obligatory respect for selected aspects of Christianity, expressed by upbeat assessments of democracy, truth, beauty, openness, and the hatred of cruelty. This post-Christianity's antitraditional origins, its unfinished status, its intuitions, and its evangelical hunger for new problems make it, in principle, a radical religion. It has even penetrated Christian denominations with its infectious humanism. And its proselytizers would not readily concede that they could fail with "ordinary Muslims," given half a chance. The liberal, post-Christian cry has already gone up: Islamophobia is the new McCarthyism. The last thing that the modern-minded latitudinarian wishes to do is to pick a fight with that which he believes should be tamed and embraced.
Post-Christianity and Islam share roughly the same theological view of Christ. The attraction of Islam for ideological post-Christians is that its existence implies, more strongly than any argument, that traditional Christianity is unnecessary even if you wish to be monotheistic, pious, and mindful of a judgment day. The very existence of a plausible religious rival to the universality of the Church supplies a subversive argument of enduring force, which, though very old, is still being absorbed into the bloodstream of the West as Western parochialism and particularism are dismantled.
The post-Christian faith cherishes the notion of a friendly symbiosis with Islamic communities. But this desire for accommodation, and the difficulties that go with it, will lead to moral confusion absent an educated awareness of Islam's bag of tricks. In particular, it should be clearly understood that Islam does not have the same distinction between religion and society as does the West (if, indeed, it has one at all), so the offer to tolerate Islam will be understood by some Muslims as going beyond what Westerners conventionally regard as "tolerating" religion. While it is still not controversial to say so, we must insist that sharia cannot be available in Western societies as a body of law applicable to Muslim citizens, let alone non-Muslims.
The most striking claim in The Sword of the Prophet is that the American elite's extreme version of post-Christian religion is bent more aggressively against historic Christianity than any other religion in the West and could even enter into a partnership with Islam. A cultural process of this sort may already be at work. To laugh at the idea is to forget our recent history: a U.S.-directed jihad in Afghanistan; the covert U.S. alliance with Islamic revolutionaries in Bosnia; and U.S. support for the Taliban until 1998. The motives for these interventions have been ostensibly secular, but there was something excessive and intense behind them. Even if the motives of Islamic revolutionaries are not exclusively religious, can we say that the moral instinct of Washington globalists is exclusively secular? It is legitimate to wonder whether some premonition of a new religiosity affected the don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts rectitude of the crusaders who dragged NATO to war in Kosovo.
One final point: Those Muslims who are outraged that the violent West should accuse the Islamic Other of intrinsic violence have a point. The Islamic world has reason to be worried by the West's post-Cold War lurch toward high-tech crusades. Once a fatwa-opinion is issued in Washington, the media effervesce with moral fervor and military relish, the satellites and academics adjust their orbits and careers, and the bombs start to fall. This is the modern West riding the high horse of its supremacy. It is precisely because crusading globalism is likely to become more violent and better armed than ever, spurred by the attack on New York, that it is urgent to think defensively about Islam.
Of course, our alternative is to act more modestly in the world. But we are told that this would be immoral, that crime must be punished anytime and anywhere, so that no tyrant may sleep soundly in his bed for fear of the advancing banners of the New World Order, in which smart bombs and smart lawyers ring in the Reign of Justice. The new gospel destroys the old law: Let the nations tremble before the New Truth and its missiles! Global fundamentalism, lightly salted with American self-interest, is capable of being both sinister and religious.
Some may say, "But this is not Christianity!" It is more true to say so than it is to say, in the parallel case, "But this is not Islam!" But we are dealing not with Christianity but with what Christian civilization has become. The pacesetters in the West have expressed their post-Christian religion by casting off wisdom and any sense of geographic limits in their renewed willingness to make the world a better place at gunpoint. Islamic revolutionaries have done the same. The refusal to be prudent in dealing with a dangerous religion has condemned Western soldiers to wage strange wars far from their homelands and has all but forced us to tolerate global ambitions, whether we want them or not.
This is the modern jihad, the Western jihad, which has formed and swollen since 1989, and it has its own growing corps of political janissaries, military-industrial ghazis, and fundamentalist jurisconsults. If President Bush cannot achieve the goals he has set, the gaudy globalists will reappear--during his presidency or afterward--as the men and women with solutions. The recommendation of Srdja Trifkovic's book--a severe view of Islamic militancy and of Islam's political agenda--does not give Westerners any license to subscribe to the myth of their own perpetual innocence.
*************
WHAT SOME READERS SAY:
IN THE U.K.:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sword-Prophet-Serge-Trifkovic/dp/customer-reviews/1928653111
WIKIPAEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_the_Prophet
PUBLISHER:
http://reginaorthodoxpress.stores.yahoo.net/swordofprophet.html