Hugh Fitzgerald on the Islamic challenge

Hugh Fitzgerald, an independent scholar of Islam who has evidently thought long and hard about issues of concern to us at VFR, posted at another thread a comment on the interesting (I’m using the word in its 18th century sense) strategic question of what America ought to do about Islam. It’s too long and substantive to be a comment, so I’m reformatting it as a new blog entry where it can become the basis of further discussion.

Fitzgerald writes:

Ba’athism is not, I think, the same thing as Kemalism. Kemalism was the result of the efforts of an enlightened despot, one who made war, for 15 years, through a series of acts and laws, against the power of Islam. From the Hat Act (which outlawed the tarboosh), to ending the use of Arabic script in which Ottoman Turkish had been written, to giving women the right to vote decades before they acquired that right in some countries of Western Europe, to ensuring that in the army no one could rise if he exhibited signs of undue Islamic fervor, or had too much Muslim schooling (ditto with government jobs, for which the hijab was outlawed)—all of this was done because Ataturk, and his successor Inonu, realized that Islam was, for Turkey, a weight and a threat. There was no way to change the texts of Qur’an and Hadith and the sacralized biography of Muhammad, the sira. There still aren’t. All this talk about “reformation of Islam” is nonsense; some of it is thrown up by Bright Young Muslim Things, hoping to get tenure for their brave “reforms,” and other such nonsense comes from the Yale Law students and others who propose to do what intelligent people, born into Islam, could not achieve in the last millennium or so—changing Islamic doctrines. Can’t be done, won’t be done.

As for the supposed similarity of both Ba’athism and pan-Arabism to Kemalism, this is, I think, a misreading. Pan-Arabism does not, pace Bassam Tibi and others, stand in contradistinction to pan-Islam fervor; it is simply a subset of it, and arose at a time when the Arab countries were too weak to dream of something still grander, involving Muslims beyond the Arab League.

Nasser wanted to crush the Muslim Brotherhood not because he was against Islam, but because they were a direct threat to him for being not sufficiently Muslim in the way that they wanted. But he did not hesitate to boot out as many non-Muslims as he could, nationalizing their property and leaving them penniless. Over the years, how many Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Jews have I met who were kicked out of Alexandria or Cairo (Bat Ye’or herself had to leave, quickly, as a young girl, in 1959). Nasser was perfectly ready to employ Islamic texts, appeals to Muslim history and Muslim battles, whenever he had too—just look at the rhetoric from May and early June 1967. It is indistinguishable, in its Muslim fervor, from that of any Muslim terrorist group today.

What about Ba’athism? Some suggest that this was a form of Kemalism. I disagree. Ba’athism arose from the desire of mainly Christian Arab “intellectuals” (always an absurd word)in Damascus to come up with an ideology which would allow them something more than a marginal existence in Arab political life. Its main founder, Michel Aflaq, finally converted to Islam—having been an Islamochristian all his dismal life—on his deathbed.

But what is Ba’athism, really? It took root only in Syria and Iraq. Both countries possess ruling classes that needed an ideology that would at least de-emphasize Islam—but that is not the same thing as actively fighting to control Islam, to suppress its practice, to monitor the mosques, and so on, which is what Kemalism did.

In Syria, the Alawite military caste that had been cultivated by the French during their period of dominion had no intention of relinquishing their rule, though as Alawites, they were regarded with deep suspicion by orthodox Muslims. Their worship of Mariam (Mary), is just a bit too syncretistic for the Muslims to take. The Alawites, who were never more than 20% of the population of Syria, and now constitute about 12%, are keenly aware that their main opposition comes from orthodox Muslims (of course, it would have to, for the Christians, such as the nearly 200,000 Armenians who once lived in Aleppo—Haleb—are now emptying out and never could participate in Arab political life in any case). Ba’athism allowed the Alawites to adhere to, and to promote, an ideology that limited political rivals among the Sunni Muslim majority, but did not itself constitute a conscious effort, a la Mustafa Kemal, to tie Islam in knots.

The same is true in Iraq. Like the Alawites in Syria, the Sunni Muslim Arabs constitute a very small part of the population—about 20%. It would have been unwise to stress Islam front and center, for that would have guaranteed, amidst the strong sectarian splits, that the Shi’a would have taken power. Ba’athism presented a way for the Sunni Arabs to hold to that power.

But again, like Nasser, Saddam Hussein was perfectly willing to embrace Islamic slogans whenever he needed to. The battles he invoked in his eight-year war against Iran were that of Qadassiya, and other victories against the Persians 1200-1300 years earlier. He put Qur’anic verses on the Iraqi flag. He was a great builder of mosques, each one larger and more lavish and more hideous than the next. He had a Qur’an fashioned by a famous calligrapher; the ink was supposedly Saddam’s own blood. His speeches increasingly were full of Islamic imagery, and appeals. How could it be otherwise? For Arabs, their sense of themselves, their “Arabness,” is so tied up with the idea of Islam that even the least devout find themselves defending Islam, through taqiyya and kitman, and all the wiles of the army of apologists for Islam that we see about us, far more than, say, Turks or Kurds or Berbers who at least may have the sense of an identity that predates, or possibly transcends, Islam and only Islam.

There are many things that can be done. Here are five: 1) shoot down, interfere with, or otherwise put out of commission Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya. If they cannot be put out of commission, then have hackers arrange things so that, randomly, pornographic movies will come on during broadcasts; this should cut down on the number of Muslim families willing to get Al-Jazeera by cable, if only because their sense of female “honor” may be impugned if it is known that they subscribe to Al-Jazeera and that it has some peculiar interruptions.

2) seize, with a small force, the southern Sudan, and hold it until the southern blacks can hold a referendum on independence. Such a seizure, a bold taking back of part of what the Arab Muslims are insisting is part of Dar al-Islam, would establish a fault line and an issue that the Arabs cannot win. Will the Arab League insist that it has a divine right, after 2 million southern Sudanese have been killed, and now that the “mawali” (i.e. non-Arab) Muslims of Darfur are also being harried and murdered (so that even the densest of reporters, such as Nicholas Kristof, has to recognize the horror, even if he has no idea that what is going on in the Sudan is simply classic Jihad—nor would he recognize the relentless siege against Israel as a classic Jihad). Scenes of smiling black faces, truly grateful to their American saviors and protectors, as opposed to the attitude of Iraqis, which ranges from sullen to murderous hostility directed at the Infidels, no matter how many electricity grids, water-treatment plants, roads, schools, hospitals are built or rebuilt, repaired or re-paired, and no matter how many soccer balls are handed out to smiling Iraqi children, who may help to kill soldiers an hour later. And the Christian southern Sudan has oil. A base there, as opposed to one in Kurdistan, will be permanent. Within easy range of both the Saudi oil fields of al-Hasa, and of all of North Africa, with its Salafist Army of Combat and Call (qital and da’wa—they are two ways to achieve the same thing), American protection of Sudanese Christians would hearten black Christians from Nigeria and Togo (where a Christian despot-president nonetheless fulfills the Muslim agenda, and the Francophone Christian elites are leaving Lome for France, Italy, Greece, Germany, anywhere they can go, and as fast as they can go), and Kenya, and Tanzania (which has its own problems with the Muslims of Pemba and Zanzibar, once the main holding-pens for the Arab slavers, who would lead their human cargo first by slave coffle, and then at the coast by dhow, up to Oman, and then into the Arabian interior and to the slave markets of the north. The Sudan, not Iraq—which is at this point a misallocation of men, materiel, money, and above all, of American attention—is the place to seize, and to find a grateful population. Nor will Kofi Annan, responsible for the UN’s complete failure in Rwanda, dare—one supposes—to demand that the Arab Muslims be permitted to keep on with what they have been doing. Nor will the EU, which has allowed itself to be split both from its responsibilities to Israel and its people, and from its natural ally and protector, the United States, have an easy time demanding that the U.S. leave the black Sudanese, of the south or Darfur, to their otherwise grim fate.

3) end all military aid to Muslim countries. No Muslim country, in the end, is a ‘friend’ to Infidels. It is not possible to trust Muslim countries with major weaponry for several reasons. One, the governments themselves cannot be trusted. Two, within the governments, even if there may be elements that actually are temporarily to be trusted, there are many others in that same government whose overriding loyalty will be to the umma al-islammiyya, the community of Islam. Many high-ranking Egyptians, it has been discovered through documents found in Baghdad, were being paid by Saddam Hussein. That is not surprising; perhaps they are now being paid by the Saudis. They cannot be trusted. Three, even if the government of a particular Muslim country were simon-pure, they cannot be relied on not to allow certain weapons to be acquired, from government stores, by determined members of the Muslim population.

This is not a question of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons alone. Muslim countries cannot, it is now obvious, be entrusted with Stinger missiles, or anything that could cause major casualties among Infidels.

Rifles and jeeps—that’s about it.

4) Begin to educate large numbers of people about Jihad: what are the sources in Qur’an and Hadith? What is the history of Jihad in time and space? What is the institution—Dhimmitude—which, post-Jihad, defines the status of all non-Muslims who remain alive, and still unconverted—what precisely are its elements? When, and where, were some of those elements modified or mitigated, and why? And what is the current evidence as to how non-Muslims are treated in the Muslim world—using Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq (the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Mandeans), Saudi Arabia—as places to examine in detail.

5) Attempt to arouse publics in the cretinized world of “Eurabia”—that is, a demoralized Western Europe that now has a horrific problem with its Muslim population, a population that the criminally negligent elites (especially in France) allowed in to the country, without understanding, or even attempting to study, the tenets of Islam, and the reason why this kind of immigration was completely different from all other kinds, given the inculcated hostility toward all non-Muslims, and the uncompromising war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.

In other words, a campaign similar to that waged by the United States after World War II in Western Europe, to win back Europeans from the siren-songs of Communism (the largest political parties were the Communist parties of France and Italy, but Thorez and Togliatti eventually were defeated by the artful deployment of money and propaganda), must be waged against the forces of Islam, that are already well-ensconced, through the “Euro-Arab Dialogue,” in the corridors of power at the EU, and of course at the United Nations itself (just look at Edward Mortimer, chief speechwriter for Annan, who is most famous for his praise of the ascent of Khomeini—”quite the most glorious morning in the history of mankind” is how he put it, and for his equally noteworthy embrace of the left-wing Lonni Brenner’s “theories” about the close collaboration between Nazis and Zionists—Mortimer even wrote an enthusiastic review of the book, one which Brenner has subsequently used as the foreward to his second edition).

There is much more that one could add. But the main point is that this war of self-defense, against a Jihad that ranges from the Philippines to Portland, Oregon, from Nigeria to New York, from Madrid to Madras, is a war to be waged not merely, not even mainly, through military might. Those pushing the Jihad use far more than military means, and in self-defense, the same methods must be used. Muslim migration must not only be halted, but the mental ground prepared among Western Europeans for reversing the Muslim presence in their countries; at the moment, one out of every three babies now born in France is Muslim. In 20 years, every third 20-year-old will be Muslim; in 30-40 years, France will be a country with a Muslim majority. This is not absurd extrapolation, but absolutely the driest of statistics. What will that mean for France? For control of the Force de Frappe? For the Venus de Milo and the paintings in the Louvre? For the very idea of the West, and of Western civilization? Anything? Nothing?

Shall we think this through now, or wait another decade?

Since, after France, Holland and Italy will follow soon after, and I cannot imagine Western civilization without Italy (nor, as Israel has been invoked, can I imagine Western civilization if Israel is thrown to the wolves, and Islam again reigns in the Holy Land).

I prefer to think about these things now.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 01, 2004 12:08 AM | Send