David Warren’s second thoughts about Islam

Writing at Tech Central Station, Canadian columnist David Warren says that he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent democratization policy. His support was based on his agreement with President Bush’s assumptions that

the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

I wrote the following e-mail to Mr. Warren:

Dear Mr. Warren,

This is a good article, you’re getting to the key point about Islam—it is inherently incompatible with and dangerous to the West—that liberal Westerners (i.e., virtually all Westerners including conservatives) cannot allow themselves to face.

You’ve gotten to the mountain top and you see the Promised Land of truth, but, in your last paragraph, you shrink from crossing over to it, you veer away from drawing the logical and practical corollaries of what you see:

My own views on the issue have been aloof. More precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so “post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.

But I want to say to you that it’s not so bad. Seeing the truth is good, it means we can start dealing with realities instead of killing ourselves by imagining that our mortal enemies can be our friends. It means recognizing that the “post-Christian West” is indeed incapable of dealing with Islam. That is not bad, it’s good, because the more people who realize this, the more chance there is that the post-Christian West will repent and cease being the post-Christian West.

At my website, View from the Right, I am continually dealing with these issues and laying out an alternative approach to Islam.

Best regards,
Lawrence Auster

P.S. I’m impressed that Tech Central Station has published your piece, which goes against their own basic position.

A couple of days after posting the above, I noticed another thing about Warren’s article that reflects his confessed inability to come to a full accounting of Islam. He writes:

The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism.

Warren is claiming that it’s only multiculturalism, i.e., only the left, that insists on seeing Islam through rose colored glasses. But of course it’s not just the left, it’s the “center” and the “right” as well. After all, President Bush is the one who has repeatedly called Islam a “religion of peace” and has repeatedly claimed that Muslims want exactly the same things that we want. Why didn’t Warren point this out? Why did he just blame “multiculturalism”? It appears that Warren and so many other conservatives, even five years after 9/11, are still holding on to the self-comforting conservative illusion that our inability to defend ourselves from our enemies is solely the work of the left.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2006 03:39 PM | Send