John Quincy Adams on Islam

It is instructive to compare Norman Podhoretz’s lunatic notion of “World War IV,” in which we must seek forever to reform and democratize the Islamic world, with John Quincy Adams’s view of Islamic-Western relations. In the late 1820s, after his departure from the presidency and before his election to Congress, Adams wrote a brief essay comparing Christianity and Islam. In the first section, he describes Christianity, of which he says, “The essence of this doctrine is, to exalt the spiritual over the brutal part of [man’s] nature.” Then he speaks of Islam (his opening words paraphrasing the opening words of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*):

In the seventh century of the Christian era a wandering Arab [in fact Muhammad was a city Arab, not a Bedouin], of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting, from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God, he connected indissolubly with it the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting, from the new revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust; to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.

Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of more than twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extincture of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute are encouraged to furnish motives to human action, there never can be peace on earth and good will toward men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.

Do we need to ask what Adams would have thought of a supposed “war” by America against Islamic extremism that involves making friends with Muslims, admitting them en masse into our country, and giving them full rights here? On hearing of such a thing, would he not have thought that America had gone insane?

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* Gibbon’s work begins:

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 15, 2007 01:52 AM | Send