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2 Israel, the hope of the Muslim
world By Spengler
The
state of Israel embodies the last, best chance for
the Islamic world to come to terms with the modern
world. Received wisdom in the foreign ministries
of the West holds that relations with Muslims
would be ever so much easier without the annoying
presence of the Jewish state, which humiliates the
Muslim world. Just the opposite is true. The
Israeli presence in the territory of the ancient
Jewish commonwealth, on land that once belonged to
the Dar al’Islam, offers the single, slender hope
for the future of
the
Muslim world, precisely because it constitutes a
humiliation.
The premise of Western policy
is to tread lightly upon Muslim sensibilities.
That is an error of first magnitude, for Muslim
sensibilities are what prevents the Islamic world
from creating modern states. Islam cannot produce
the preconditions for democracy in the Western
sense out of its own resources.
Free
elections in Muslim lands tend to hand power to
fanatical despots. Why should that be true? The
first premise of Western democracy, that the
rights of the weakest and most despised citizens
are sacred, stems from the Judeo-Christian notion
of divine humility. The creator of the universe
suffers along with his creatures, and bears a
special love for the weak and helpless, a belief
that appears absurd in Islam. Islam has no
inherent concept of humility; it can only be
imported to Muslim countries from the outside.
Democracy in its modern form is the almost
exclusive province of Christian (and in the single
case of Israel, Jewish) countries. I have argued
that it is the Judeo-Christian experience of
divine love that makes it possible for
representative democracy to flourish, because
imitation of God reveres the rights of the weak
and helpless. “Almost exclusive” is the operative
term, for democracy functions well in some Asian
countries. Next to love is humility, which
acknowledges the limits of one man to impose his
will upon another. For example, Japanese culture
contains no concept of divine love in the
Christian sense, but it does know humility, thanks
to the instruction of the United States during
1941-1945 and the succeeding occupation.
No concept of intermediate cause, or
rational ordering of the universe, is to be found
in mainstream Islam. Allah personally and directly
orders every event, from the trifling to the
grandiose. The Muslim submits to Allah, the
absolutely transcendent ruler of the universe, in
return for his mercy and beneficence. That is why
Muslim faith hinges upon success. As I observed in
a 2004 essay, Horror and humiliation in
Fallujah, the Muslim call to prayer
begins,
Allah is the Greatest. I bear
witness that nothing deserves to be worshipped
except Allah. Come to prayer. Come to
success.
No injunction to "turn the
other cheek" is found in the Koran, no reflection
on how to learn from defeat. Something like the
Book of Lamentations, which tradition attributes
to the Prophet Jeremiah after the fall of
Jerusalem, is unimaginable in Islam. Jeremiah
tells defeated Israel, "It is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a
man to bear the yoke while he is young ... Let him
offer his cheek to one who would strike him, and
let him be filled with disgrace."
The
words "humble" and "humility" occur rarely in the
Koran, and in most cases (7:206 and 17:109) refer
not to Muslims but rather to Jews or other
conquered peoples, as in "And [the children of
Israel] fall down on their faces weeping, and it
adds to their humility", or "We sent [apostles] to
nations before you then We seized them with
distress and affliction in order that they might
humble themselves." There are a few references to
the virtue of being humble before Allah, but not
one suggestion that it is good to show humility to
other human beings. Nothing like Hannah's praise
of YHWH, (I Samuel 2:28), "You save the humble,
but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them
low," occurs in Muslim scripture.
In the
October edition of First Things, I published an
extended treatment of Franz Rosenzweig's view of
Islam, now available online. [1] The great
20th-century Jewish theologian considered Islam
not a revealed religion, but a species of
paganism. In pagan society, he argues, the
individual is completely absorbed by the
collective, by reference to Aesop's fable of the
aged lion and the fox:
People, State, and whatever else the
societies of antiquity may have been are lion’s
caves before which one sees the tracks of the
Individual entering, but not leaving. In fact,
the individual human stands before society as a
whole: he knows, that he is only a part. These
wholes, with respect to which he is only a part,
these species, of which he is only a
representative example, have absolute power over
his ethical life ...
In the thoroughly
organized State, the State and the individual do
not stand in the relation of a whole to a part.
Instead, the state is the All, from which the
power flows through the limbs of the individual.
Everyone has his determined place, and, to the
extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All
of the State ... The individual of antiquity
does not lose himself in society in order to
find himself, but rather in order to construct
it; he himself disappears. The well-known
difference between the ancient and all modern
concepts of democracy rightly arise from this.
It is clear from this why antiquity never
developed the concept of representative
democracy. Only a body can have organs; a
building has only parts.
The pagan
state, Rosenzweig observes, considers the
individual only as an extension of itself, not as
the child of a higher power that stands above
every state and culture. Pagan societies
acknowledge no higher power than themselves. Their
gods are an apotheosis of their own character.
Allah, the absolutely transcendent ruler of the
universe whose whimsy sets the spin on every
electron at every moment, stands in sharp contrast
to the Judeo-Christian God, whose humility in the
form of love for his creatures sets inherent
limits upon his powers.
In the democracy
of the ancient Greek polis, or the assembly of the
Germanic tribes, every individual stood in direct
and
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