Is the conversion of Muslims the only answer?

(Note July 18: Be sure to see Josefina’s very interesting follow-up comment.)

Josefina, a student, writes from Argentina:

My thoughts about the Muslim problem which affects all the Christian West:

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way of protecting the Western civilization from Islam is to convert all (yes, ALL) Muslims to Christianity.

I think this solution is better than simply building barriers to protect the West from Islam. Why? Because, though they are useful, no matter how many you build, the threat will still exist.

Many people can say it is impossible to do so, but if primitive Christians would have thought that way, half Europe would still be barbarians, or Mexicans would still be practicing human sacrifice.

If mass conversions were possible in the past why not nowadays?

I think the Muslim conversion has never happened because in the past, Christians have considered Islam and Christianity similar, because of the fact of being both monotheist religions. But nowadays Muslims have prove their religion to be as logical as any form of paganism.

Europe and America were possible, now it’s time for a conversion of the Middle East.

Personally I’ll send economic contribution to any group willing to achieve this aim.

LA replies:

As was said to me by the young man I recently mentioned who is interested in evangelizing Muslims, there are two dimensions to this problem: the material/demographic, and the spiritual. We need to look at both, and also to maintain the proper priorities between them.

First comes the immediate physical protection of the West from the Islam threat, which requires the cessation of the entry of Muslims into the West and the departure from the West of the Muslims already here, and the confining of Muslims within their historic lands.

Once we are on our way to securing the physical safety and freedom of Western societies from Islam by the steps outlined above, we could then also think about the additional great long-term benefit of converting Muslims to Christianity.

However, even if there were a rebirth of great Christian and evangelical zeal in the West, it would not be in our power to convert to Christianity whomever we wanted to convert. By contrast, assuming we have the will to do so, it is in our power to protect ourselves on the physical plane from the Islam threat by changing immigration policy and so on.

So we must focus first and foremost on the external protection of the West from Islam, which is in our power to do and which is the most important thing to do; and then, secondarily, once we are safe from the immediate demographic threat of Islam, on Christian evangelizing.

- end of initial entry -

Philip M. replies:

I suspect from previous comments that Mr. Auster will not agree with this, but I think the suggestion of converting Muslims to Christianity illustrates why the problem of Islam in the West is bound up as much in race as in religion. In truth, the resentment that many Muslims feel toward the West is animated by a sense of racial exclusion and/or conquest as much as it is in religious supremacy. It would be impossible to untangle these threads in the minds of Muslims or in society. Most of the Afro-Caribbeans in the West are from a Christian background, just as most of the Mexicans in America are Catholic. Is having a family of Mexicans moving in next door the same as a family of Austrian or Irish Catholics? Of course not. What is the difference?

Nick Griffin (BNP leader) described Muslims to an audience of Americans as being like Mexicans with a religion that commands them to kill. Take away the religion and you are left with, effectively, Pakistani Mexicans.

LA replies:

First, I believe that Philip is a fairly new reader of VFR, and may not be familiar with my views on immigration, race, and multiculturalism. I’ve just posted a selection of my writings on that subject.

Second, the Islam issue and the immigration issue generally must be dealt with separately. Yes, of course, there is significant overlap between the two, since Islam enters the West via immigration. But the problem of Islam—a political religion commanded by its god to take over the world and subject all of humanity to itself—is sui generis, and must be dealt with on its own terms.

Terry Morris writes:

If it were possible to convert the mass of Muslims to Christianity over the short term, then this might be a viable option for protecting the West from the dangers Islam poses it. But since this is not possible under any circumstances short of the miraculous, then we must approach the Islam problem from a different perspective. As I’ve said many many times before, genuine overnight conversions are very rare occurances indeed. In fact, even when one has actually occured, the affected person generally spends basically the rest of his life trying to eradicate his former dispositions. The life of an individual is a fairly short span of time, but what of the life of a nation, or of an entire people? To expect the Muslim population to be capable of entirely reforming itself in the relatively short period of one hundred years is simply unreasonable, to put it mildly. Such a perspective grants that Muslims and Muslim peoples are endowed with an uncommon allotment of rationality and innate goodness. I think history (including biblical Christianity) teaches a much different perspective on Islamic peoples.

Josefina writes:

Reply to your reply: Of course the protection of the West is the top priority, but to achieve something such as “cessation of the entry of Muslims into the West and the departure from the West of the Muslims already here, and the confining of Muslims within their historic lands,” it is necessary to do something nearly as difficult as converting Muslims to Christianity, and this is: to make the Western political elites conscious of the threat Islam means to the West. [LA replies: interesting way of putting it! To convert liberals to non-liberalism would be as hard as converting Muslims to Christianity.]

Reply to Philip M.’s Reply: He wrote:

“Nick Griffin (BNP leader) described Muslims to an audience of Americans as being like Mexicans with a religion that commands them to kill. Take away the religion and you are left with, effectively, Pakistani Mexicans.”

As much as I, being a Hispanic, would like to deny this description, it is actually true. The way in which the Muslim and the Latin-American civilizations originated and evolved were similar in many ways, therefore our ways of thinking have much in common. Both civilizations were started by military conquest with religious aims. In both cases conquerors and conquered intermarried creating a culture of mixed people, where there is not a racial identity but colorism exists. Muslims still have their sharia, we use to have the Spanish Inquisition (the use was the same). They now have their extremist groups, we have guerrillas, now weakened (both groups of fanatics, one religious, the other political). We are a group of countries with language and religion in common and so are they. Familism and distrust for the government is another characteristic we share. I’ve read some people from Lebanon and Syria talking about their experiences in Latin-American countries, many say they felt more comfortable here than in Europe or the USA, they really couldn’t tell why, they feel like home they say. I think the cultural similarities are the explanation. I also think it would be easier for a Muslim to assimilate to a Latin American country than to an European one (but I’m just guessing, there).

John L. writes:

The West has already had two chances to attempt to convert Muslims en masse, and both failed. The Crusader kingdoms between 1095 and 1291 were explicitly Christian states ruling large numbers of Muslims. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles was written in response to a request from a friend engaged in debating Muslims in Antioch.

More recently, the 19th-century European colonial empires included most of the Muslim lands. Although the European states were secular, they still suspended the sharia law punishing Christian proselytism with death and Christian missionaries were free to circulate and preach. [LA asks: is it correct to describe 19th century European states as secular?]

Islam is far more robust than the vague polytheism of those nations which accepted Christianity. Even where sharia is not officially in force, individual Muslim converts to Christianity were and are still either murdered or shunned by their own families.

Neither the armed and militant Christianity of the Crusader era nor the robust and masculine Christianity of the 19th century were able to effect a mass conversion. For this reason I am pessimistic about these hopes prior to the Second Coming.

On the other hand, my personal experiences suggest that a good deal of quiet conversion is going on among the Kabyles of Algeria. I had the impression they were converting partially to spite the Arabs, who mistreat them. I also have heard that these missionary efforts explicitly target whole families instead of individuals, alleviating the problem for the converts of being murdered or shunned by one’s immediate relatives. This supports Hugh Fitzgerald’s proposal of portraying Islam as a vehicle for Arab cultural domination in order to encourage the non-Arab Muslims to abandon it.

So, I agree completely with your political proposals. Separation from the Muslim world and then policing it from a distance are in my mind the only path that will allow Western civilization to survive without committing genocide.

LA replies:

I like John’s summary of the separationist policy so much I just want to repeat it:

Separation from the Muslim world and then policing it from a distance are … the only path that will allow Western civilization to survive without committing genocide.

Stephen T. writes (July 18):

Josefina writes: “I also think it would be easier for a Muslim to assimilate to a Latin American country than to an European one (but I’m just guessing, there).”

On the other hand, it’s almost a certainty that you’d never see Mexicans migrating to Muslim countries, even to “do jobs Muslims won’t do.” One of the interesting things about Mestizo culture is that they venture virtually no place else on earth but the United States, which they are hostile to and bear an enormous grudge against. There are many people in Europe who have literally never seen a Mestizo Mexican (until they visited California.) Nor, more interestingly, is there any meaningful influx of Mexicans down into the big South American countries—governed by their fellow Hispanics and having a common language—many of which are no more distant geographically from Mexico than areas of the U.S. which have been totally inundated by Mexicans. Even Hawaii has a mushrooming population of illegal Mexicans, yet you don’t see any in other countries similarly remote across a vast ocean and requiring an equally long, expensive airplane ride.

John L. writes:

I called the colonial powers “secular” in contrast to the Crusader kingdoms, because colonialism was motivated by nationalist motives such as wealth and power. Also, the missionary activities in the colonies were a private activity, not necessarily supported by the colonial administrators.

LA replies:

My issue with the word secular in this context is that the European nations never called themselves “secular” per se until very recent decades. To say, “We are a secular society,” is to say we are not a Christian society.

Now certain countries, like Spain under the Republic, were explicitly anti-Christian and could be called secular, or, in the case of the USSR, atheist. And of course the papacy refused to recognize the new Italian state in the 19th century because it did not officially recognize the Church. (The Church in fact opposed modern democratic states through much of the 19th century.) But despite its conflict with the Church, Italy was still obviously a Catholic society. And France, though it had left-wing governments and the state was officially non-Catholic starting in early 20th century I believe, was still very largely a Catholic society and would not have described itself as secular. That at least is my general impression.

This discussion of the word secular is a separate issue from the division between the “secular” and “spiritual” powers that was articulated in the Middle Ages. When men in the Middle Ages referred to the “secular” powers as distinct from the Church, they were speaking of kings and governments as being responsible for this-worldly, i.e., secular, affairs. They didn’t mean that they were non-Christian. The medieval kings and governments were operating within the Christian order.

By contrast, over the last 30 or 40 years (or perhaps it’s only the last 15 years), when Europeans (and liberal Americans) call their societies secular, they mean that the society has (or, in the case of the U.S., they want it to have) nothing to do with Christianity. They mean that it’s not a society under God. It’s a society in which meaningful (as distinct from pro-forma) speech about God and religion are not allowed in the public square. So when you say that “the 19th century European states were secular,” to a contemporary reader that is going to sound as though the 19th century European states were as anti-religion as the European states of today, which of course is not the case.

Ron K. writes:

Your Argentine correspondent is correct to bring up similarities between Hispanics and Moslems. But there are more, which are no doubt due to the influence of Arab rule on the formation of Hispanic culture.

For example, J (as in Josefina) is pronounced J in Italian (as GI-), Catalan and English, and ZH in French, Portuguese, Provencal and Galician. So why is it a throaty H in Spanish, if not from Arab influence? The SH sound has also disappeared from Spanish, except in some local dialects, e.g., the one whence “sherry.”

The throaty H is also found in Paris and Rio, but there it’s more appropriately used for R.

In addition, Spanish speakers are alone (correct me if I’m wrong) in Christendom in naming their sons directly after Jesus. That is an Arab practice—not only plenty of Mohammeds, but quite a few Jesuses among them as well.

LA replies:

It is known for a fact that the throaty “J” in Spanish comes from Arabic?

The similarity of using Jesus for personal names as with Muhammad is fascinating and it seems a reasonable guess that it is due to 500 years of Muslim rule in Spain. Is it known that this is true, however?

When I first studied Spanish in my freshman year of college, knowing nothing about Arabic, I was struck by Arabic “feel” of the Spanish language. I wouldn’t be able to pin down what I meant by this. It was just something I felt and sensed.

Kristor writes:

Re the Spanish pronunciation of “Jesus” as “He-soos,” it should be remembered that in Latin the word was pronounced—and spelled—iesous, “ye-soos,” a transliteration of the Hebrew y’shua with a Latin masculine ending added. The French and Italians moved the initial “y” sound forward along the tongue, toward “zhye-soos,” eventually dropping the “y” sound altogether. The Spaniards moved backward along the tongue, toward “hye-soos,” eventually dropping the “y” altogether. Meanwhile the sturdy British stuck with the original Latin pronunciation—when they were speaking Latin, anyway.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 17, 2008 01:53 AM | Send