|
|
|
|
The
crescent and the
conclave
By Spengler
Now that everyone is talking about
Europe's demographic death, it is time to point
out that there exists a way out: convert European
Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner
at the Vatican conclave that began on Monday,
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few
Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject. [1]
Hedonistic dissipation well may have condemned the
existing Europeans to infecundity and extinction,
but that does not prevent Europe from getting new
ones. It has been done before.
Europe in
the 8th century was a depopulated ruin. The loss
of half the Roman Empire's population by the 7th
century left vast territories open to Islam, which
rapidly absorbed the formerly Christian Levant,
North Africa and Spain. By converting successive
waves of invading pagans - Lombards, Magyars,
Vikings, Celts, Saxons, Slavs - Christianity
reinvented Europe, and held Islam at bay.
Now that John Paul II has been buried,
Catholic voices are sounding the alarm about the
coming Islamicization of Europe. In the future
imagined by John Paul II's biographer George
Weigel, "The muezzin summons the faithful
to prayer from the central loggia of St
Peter's in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been
transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine - a
great Christian church become an Islamic museum."
[2]
Misjudging the impact of Islamic
immigration upon Europe may have been the signal
error of John Paul II's reign. Against the bitter
opposition of Catholic traditionalists, John Paul
II visited mosques, kissed the Koran for the news
cameras, and held more than 50 audiences with
Muslim representatives. The late pontiff saw
Muslims as prospective allies against secularism,
and believed that the popular piety of Islam
offered something of a bulwark against the
soulless direction of the modern world. [3] In
particular, John Paul II seemed impressed by the
fact that the Koran acknowledges the Virgin Mary,
a point emphasized in the Second Vatican Council's
ecumenical statement, Nostra Aetate. No
pope in recent history identified more with the
popular folk-religion of Catholicism. He canonized
more saints than any of his predecessors, and lent
papal authority to the Cult of Fatimah.
Not just sympathy, but also fear, guided
the Vatican's caution with respect to radical
Islam. As Father Richard John Neuhaus observes,
"L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper,
regularly reports on terrorist acts around the
world but assiduously avoids mentioning that they
are almost all associated with radical Islam.
There are several reasons for this: the Holy See
wants to resist any suggestion that we are engaged
in a war of religions; as the chief institutional
representative of world Christianity, it has a
unique role in developing any future dialogue with
Islam; and it is keenly aware of the precarious
position of Christians in Muslim countries." [4]
In that respect, John Paul II recalled the
sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce
publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi
occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews -
for fear that the Nazis would react by killing
even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions
of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at
some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can
be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Islam surrounds traditional society with a
spear-wall, and proposes to extend the realm of
traditional society, the ummah, by
dominating the world around it through jihad (see
Islam: Religion or political
ideology?, August 10, 2004). Christian
missionaries will get nowhere in Muslim countries
except into trouble. But Muslims in Europe no
longer live in traditional society, much as they
might attempt to re-create it on European soil. As
long as they are strangers on European soil, they
are vulnerable to Christian proselytizing, if
there exist a Christian agency with the temerity
to attempt it.
The last public discussion
of the Church's stance toward Islam took place at
an October 1999 bishops' synod in Rome. Belgian
Cardinal Godfried Danneels enunciated the dominant
view: "We have much to learn" from Muslims, such
as "the transcendence of God, prayer and fasting,
and the impact of religion on social life".
Danneels is a leading "liberal" candidate for the
papacy.
Dissident voices such as Professor
Alain Besancon became persona non grata at
the Holy See. Besancon still writes on Islam,
although his views are known to English-language
readers principally through a 2004 article in the
neo-conservative monthly Commentary (see Has Islam become the
issue?, May 4, 2004).
So
impassioned was John Paul II's commitment to
ecumenical embrace of Islam that one finds
dissenting opinion only on the reactionary right
of the Church. The closest thing to an
anti-Islamic manifesto to emerge from Catholic
circles during the past decade came from a
supporter of the heretical Archbishop Lefevre, who
refused to accept the Vatican II reforms. He is
Hans-Peter Raddatz, a German scholar and co-author
of the Encyclopedia of Islam. [5] Like
Besancon, Raddatz presents the classical Catholic
view, formulated in the 13th century by St Thomas
Aquinas, that Allah is a different entity
altogether from the Christian God.
Raddatz' work is not available in English,
although its tone is not much different from that
of Ibn Warraq, a widely read secularizer. [6] It
contains an exhaustive survey of Church politics
with respect to Islam. The villains of Raddatz'
drama are "the founding pair in the re-creation of
faith identity after Vatican II, Wojtyla, pope
since 1978, and Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the
Congregation of the Faith since 1981".
As
the late pope's adviser, Cardinal Ratzinger shares
responsibility for past Vatican policies, but his
tone has changed during the past six months. He
opposed Turkey's entry into the European Union.
Last week he published a tract titled Werte in
Zeiten des Umbruchs ("Values in Times of
Upheaval"), calling for Europe to return to its
core Christian values. He denounced Europe's
"incomprehensible self-hatred", adding that if
Europe wants to survive, "it must consciously seek
to rediscover its own soul". He wrote,
"Multiculturalism cannot survive without common
constants, without taking one's own culture as a
point of departure."
Ratzinger deplored
the exclusion of Christianity from the proposed
European Constitution. Unlike the United States,
where politicians of both parties agree that
revelation is the source of virtue, secular Europe
insists upon an entirely secular approach to
ethics. In this regard I sympathize with
Ratzinger, and refer readers to an extensive
debate on the subject of Kant's Categorical
Imperative in the Asia Times Online Forum. Kant
initiated the modern attempt to derive ethics from
reason. His approach (oversimplified) is to ask,
"What if everybody did?" You are not supposed to
do something to which you would object were
someone else to do it. This approach has some
obvious weaknesses. Bertrand Russell observed in
his History of Western Philosophy that a
depressive very well might wish for everyone to
commit suicide, and thus commit suicide himself
with perfect justification. Just that attitude
describes the mindset of today's Europeans, who
naturally prefer a Kantian approach to a religious
one.
Precisely how the Church might go
about proselytizing Muslims is a different matter,
and a dangerous one, considering that Islam
decrees the death penalty for apostates (see Muslim anguish and Western
hypocrisy, November 23, 2004).
It is
clear that Cardinal Ratzinger has been thinking
about this for some time. "Islam has no
magisterium," that is, official teaching
authority, Ratzinger observed in a 2001 newspaper
interview. [7] But the Catholic world can count on
the services of scholars such as Alain Besancon,
Hans-Peter Raddatz, and perhaps the pseudonymous
Cristoph Luxenberg, who showed that the sloe-eyed
virgins promised to Islamic martyrs actually were
raisins. [8] If the Church were to devote its
shrunken but still formidable intellectual
apparatus to such matters as Koranic criticism,
all heaven would break loose, if I mix my
metaphors right.
Years ago I argued that
Koranic criticism "yet may turn out to be the worm
in the foundation of radical Islam" (You say you want a
reformation?, August 5, 2003). Unlike the
Christian and Jewish scriptures, revealed to men
who heard the revelation in their own voices, the
Archangel Gabriel dictated every word of the Holy
Koran to the Prophet Mohammed. As Toby Lester
reported in the January 1999 edition of The
Atlantic Monthly:
"To historicize the Koran would in
effect delegitimize the whole historical
experience of the Muslim community," says R
Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic
studies at the University of California at Santa
Barbara. "The Koran is the charter for the
community, the document that called it into
existence. And ideally - though obviously not
always in reality - Islamic history has been the
effort to pursue and work out the commandments
of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a
historical document, then the whole Islamic
struggle of 14 centuries is effectively
meaningless." Koranic criticism has
disappeared from the radar screen. No news outlet
has so much as mentioned the name of Professor
"Luxenberg" in recent months. That simply might
indicate that the entire establishment of the
West, from the democracy-obsessed administration
of US President George W Bush to the timid
mandarins of the Vatican, do not want to tread
upon Islam's sore toe. Or it might mean that such
weapons are being held in reserve. One wants to
exclaim, like an Italian taxi driver, "Cosa
sperate? La morte dal prossimo papa?"
Notes:
1. Ian Fisher, "Issue for
Cardinals: Islam as Rival or Partner in Talks",
April 12, 2005.
2. George Weigel, The Cube
and the Cathedral (Basic Books: New York
2005).
3. See Recognize the Spiritual Bonds
which Unite Us: 16 Years of Christian-Muslim
Dialogue; Pontifical Council for
Inter-religious Dialogue, Rome 1994.
4. In
First Things, February 2005.
5. Hans-Peter
Raddatz, Von Gott zu Allah? (Herbig: Munich
2001).
6. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim
(Prometheus: New York 2005).
7. Le Figaro,
November 17, 2001.
8. Christoph Luxenberg (ps),
Die syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran; Ein
Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Qur'ansprache.
Berlin, Germany: Das Arabische Buch, First
Edition, 2000.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
