Burckhardt on what Islam does to the cultures it dominates

Mark E. writes:

At FrontPage today, there is a critique of Bernard Lewis by Andrew Bostom. In the course of the piece, Bostom quotes some Islam scholars from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Bostom’s quote of Jacob Burckhardt, describing the nature and effects of Islam, jumped out. Burckhardt cited as (in Bostom’s words) the “strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam,” the fact that Islamic realms had been able

… to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to [Islam]. [Islam] accomplished this only by instilling into them a new religious arrogance which was stronger than everything and induced them to be ashamed of their past.

What jumped out at me is—well, just substitute “liberal” for “Islam” in this quote, and you have the Lawrence Auster description of liberalism.

Great catch by Mark E.: Islam and liberalism as liquidators of historic cultures and identities! Sometime we need to list together the many striking parallels between Islam and liberalism that have been pointed out over the years. .

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Ken Hechtman writes from Canada (12/21):

The similarity between Islam and liberalism is there. Both Muslims and liberals are ashamed of their pre-Islamic/pre-liberal histories. And “ashamed” really is the right word for it. Talking to a Talib about the Bamiyan Buddhas, I asked “Don’t you have any pride that your ancestors created a great work of art the whole world cares about preserving?” And he said, “Pride? We are embarrassed that our ancestors prayed to a piece of stone.”

But here’s the difference. Muslims want to erase their shameful history. Iranians are the one exception to this. They think of Cyrus and Xerxes and Darius as “their people” with a different religion. More typical is the way Egyptian Muslims dismiss the pharaohs’ Egypt as “some other people who used to live here.” There are hotheads in Gama’a and Al Jihad who want to destroy the pyramids the same way the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. When they attacked tourist groups in the 1990s, part of the motivation was economic—shutting down the government’s major source of hard currency. But the other part was cultural. They find it humiliating that Egypt’s biggest industry is selling its unbeliever past to foreign unbelievers.

Liberals, on the other hand, want to flagellate ourselves forever and ever with the embarrassing parts of our history. Think of the recent Abolition of Slavery anniversary, the spread of Holocaust memorial museums, Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” etc. Another difference is that liberalism includes an empathy for more primitive cultures that Islam decidedly does not. A liberal can look at some god-awful act of third-world barbarism and say, “OK, maybe they’re ten steps back in the jungle. But we’re only five steps out so who are we to judge? I mean, not 50 years ago we still had separate water fountains.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2007 11:14 AM | Send