Apocalypse Soon?
This talk was given to The Freedom Association on 23rd May 2006 by AFI patron Revd Dr Peter Mullen.
A few years ago – certainly before 9/11 – I was at a US Liberty Fund conference and we were discussing the Cold War. In the final session someone tried to bring together the various strands of our conversation and said, “Well at least we can be grateful that the longest confrontation in modern times is over”. Whereupon Professor David Martin replied ever so softly, “The longest confrontation in modern times has been going on for 1400 years. 300 years ago the enemy were at the gates of Vienna, and if they get the chance they’ll be there again”.
The enemy he referred to is Muslim imperialism. There are so called moderate Muslims who want peaceful co-existence and co-operation. But there is a predominance of the other sort – of the ideologically-driven certainty which regards the followers of Islam as servants of the truth and the rest of the world as infidel rubbish. These sponsor the policy of “Convert or die”. The world for them is conveniently divided into two halves: the Muslim orthodox and the unbelieving and inferior rest: that’s us.
I’ve just got back from a holiday in Malta where in 1565 there was a notable confrontation. The Muslims were besieging the island and they captured and killed some of the Christian Knights of St John. Suleyman the Magnificent beheaded them and floated them across the harbour on crosses. The Grand Master of the Knights of St John, Jean Parisot de la Valette, cut off the heads of many Turkish prisoners and fired them back at the enemy like cannon balls. Gosh – whatever would the General Synod say! Six years after this 197 ships of the Muslim fleet were destroyed by Don John of Austria at Lepanto and the Muslim insurgency was diminished. It was at the height of the Reformation yet Catholics and Protestants were briefly united in thanksgiving for what was definitely seen as a marvellous deliverance.
Islam is a militant faith. From the start, Muslims believed in expansion by conquest. Efraim Karsh’s recent book Islamic Imperialism describes this policy in detail and he quotes the Founder Mohammad: “Fight all men until they say there is no God but Allah”. As Charles Moore has pointed out, Osama bin Laden quoted those words immediately after the attacks on the twin towers.
As Moore says in his review of Karsh’s book, “Islam provided Muslim leaders not only with a justification for violence, but also with a permanent excuse. They can always blame things on the infidels. Arab nations have again and again avoided helping the Palestinians or coming to terms with Israel, because the settlement of that issue would turn the focus on their own failings. Hamas explicitly rejects a Palestinian state, preferring the pan-Arab state that can never be”
In his book What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East Bernard Lewis sums up the impediments to peaceful co-existence and says that these derive from the fact that Muslim states never developed industrially, so they have for three hundred years pathologically envied the West; they have no science; no democracy; no women’s rights and apart from oil, no exports. So they do not enjoy the ameliorative and co-operative effects of lively free trade.
Lewis also cites what he calls “the blame game” – blaming the West for all the ills of contemporary Muslim states: “For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that rule much of the Middle East, this game serves a useful, indeed an essential purpose – to explain the poverty they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny they have intensified”.
Lewis concludes: “If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region and there will be no escape from the downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression”.
The standoff between Islam and the West has been intensified mightily by President Ahmadinejad of Iran. This man is not an ordinarily ambitious politician. He is a sincere religious fanatic who believes that it is his duty to provoke a conflict with the enemies of Islam – us – so that the supernatural figure the Hidden Twelfth Imam will return to earth as the Mahdi for a final decisive showdown with the forces of evil. Again that’s us. Nothing short of Armageddon. When Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations last September, these were his closing words, “O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace”.
Niall Ferguson, writing last week, implores us: “Are we doomed to grasp the consequences of all this only when the mushroom clouds are rising over Tel Aviv and Teheran?”
Irshad Manji, Fellow of Yale and author of The Trouble with Islam Today writes, “The weapons of mass destruction have been found. They are people with unshakeable faith in the coming showdown between good and evil. Left in their hands, the world is heading for the clash of Armageddon”.
At the time of the Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto, the West was not blind to the Muslim threat. Clear-sighted people have always acknowledged it. In Church and State, published in 1830, Samuel Coleridge is quite explicit Reading it again in 2006, the mind is startled by what might seem to be an example of extraordinary prescience:
“That erection of a temporal monarch under the pretence of a spiritual authority, which was not possible in Christendom but by the extinction or entrancement of the spirit of Christianity, and which has therefore been only partially attained by the Papacy – this was effected in full by Mahomet, to the establishment of the most extensive and complete despotism that ever warred against civilisation and the interests of humanity”.
1600 years ago the Roman Emperor summoned the philosopher Sidonius and told him that he was going to shut the gates of Rome against the enemy. Sidonius replied, “But it’s too late, Sir. The enemy is within”. There are more than 1000 mosques in Britain today and twice as many Muslims as Methodists. Philip Bobbitt reminded us recently, “We must accept that the global centre of Islamic terror is in Europe, not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. The most important cell for 9/11 wasn’t in Jeddah, it was in Hamburg. And I think this will only increase.
“Al Quaeda is not”, says Bobbitt “the mature threat that I worry about. It may sound absurd to say this, but I think these are our salad days”. Melanie Philipps makes the same points in her new book, due out next month, Londonistan.
Meanwhile, we are dying of political correctness and the suicidal politics of appeasement. Osama bin Laden must laugh at the way many in the west accept the Muslims’ paranoid explanation for their present discontents: that it’s all our fault. That’s what the Foreign office puts out. It’s what they believe at the BBC and at The Guardian and The Independent. The left-wing press and the BBC must hate the British way of life very much indeed to have preferred Arafat and now to prefer Hamas. And it’s the same with the Church of England, guided by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his book Writing in the Dust, Williams says this: “Bombast about evil individuals doesn’t help in understanding anything”.
Well, of course, bombast about anything is pretty futile; but there is a world of difference between bombast and the true judgement that lets us see evil for what it is. The Archbishop wants to “understand” the terrorists’ motivation. He reckons they had no choice. He says: “We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option”. This is a high-grade sample of the drivel we have heard these last few years from those in the west who despise the civilisation which is their inheritance. Of course the suicide bombers had “other options”: not every impoverished Muslim thinks that the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York.
Dr Williams’ conclusion is the complete inversion of the truth: “It is hard to start any sort of conversation when your conversation partner believes, in all sincerity, that your aim is to silence them”. So Muslim terrorists are our conversation partners are they! But it was these “conversation partners” who successfully silenced more than 3000 of us in New York on 11th September.
Meanwhile, you can tell that Doomsday is just round the corner when the drowsy sophisticates at The Spectator use the editorial to speak of “western Christian nations”. And to urge, “We must defend our own traditions and our own religion”. There are only two possible comments on this: there are no western Christian nations; and consequently we have no Christian traditions. The reality is as follows:
Muslims in Britain desire to promote their moral and religious standards among us. We say, “It’s kind of you, but actually we have our own standards”
And the Muslim asks, “What are they?”
And we reply, “Take a look for yourself. Practical atheism in our schools where teachers are bound to teach that any god is as good as any other – or none. Anarchy in personal and sexual morality, as any coupling between any two (or more) pieces of flesh is celebrated. The consequent near abolition of marriage and the family.
“Abortion used as a form of contraception and amounting to 200,000 every year. A mass media which sexualises young children. An absurd and offensive proselytising “Gay” culture in which the love that once dare not speak its name now shrieks at us in high camp from coloured floats in the high street. A debauched consumer culture of mingled celebs, Big Brother – who would have thought Orwell so right and yet so wrong? - cocaine, clubbing, TV nuts ‘n’ sluts shows wall-to-wall and hyper-shopping.
“All this uneasily hitched to a totalitarianism-lite and bullying political correctness which everywhere seeks to curtail our natural freedoms – from foxhunting to smoking, from the sorts of games allowed in the playground to what’s written on packets of sweeties.
“Yes, Britain has standards all right. And if your Muslim hordes attack our way of life, be certain we shall fight back. We intend to fire salvos of condoms and identity cards at you”.
The decadent godlessness we now inhabit is generally agreed to have begun with the permissiveness of the 1960s when we sang “All you need is love” and let it all hang out, debauching our institutions in the process. There is some truth in this and certainly the 1960s was the decade in which the Church of England effectually resigned – throwing out the real Bible and the real Prayer Book and replacing them with unspeakable modern parodies which obscured the fact of sin and so rendered all the promises of redemption worthless.
Sin is not something mystical and so old fashioned you couldn’t believe: it is just the old religious word for a constant human characteristic – that we have a capacity to foul things up, to act against our own best interests. If anyone doubts that the notion of progress is just plain stupid, let him look at Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Vietnam, Rwanda. Sudan, Somalia – take your pick from the repertoire of genocides. The mass media loves to derogate the middle ages and everything in the past as medieval: but the middle ages were a paradise compared with the slaughter perpetrated in modern times
But the rot started at the so called Enlightenment, for the Enlightenment philosophers believed it impossible that any modern, reasonable person would ever wish to perpetrate evil. Rousseau is very explicit about this:
“Man is naturally good, loving justice and order. There is absolutely no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always right”.
It is astonishing that anyone with half an eye on the course of human history – or even with the occasional inward glance – could have written such rubbish. It is the denial of the reality of Original Sin. And this was the message of the Enlightenment philosophers who made it plain that there was no use for religion in the modern world – that, in fact, religion is precisely the thing which always holds back human progress.
Voltaire said,
“Religion must be destroyed among respectable people and left to the mob for whom it was made”.
The great evils of our time have come about through the misplaced attempt to explain the world on the basis of Descartes’ mistake and the other mistake which was the Enlightenment philosophers’ assertion of humankind’s innate goodness. Once people abandon their fundamental belief in the being of God and the metaphysical and moral perspective which that belief gives, then disastrous consequences are bound to follow. This is simply because false perspectives cannot produce truth and goodness. Here is the brutal working out of all those biblical sayings about a house being built on sand not being able to stand and the Devil as the Father of Lies.
The truth is that the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century, their gulags and their genocides, were built on the very notion of Enlightenment and Progress. They were based on the false belief that man is the origin of his own being and the arbiter of his own morality. The godlessness of these tyrannies was not accidental: their crimes were perpetrated in the name of atheism.
We are flawed creatures, but we are not totally depraved. In our better moments we recognise our weakness and we create institutions in order to defend us from our worst failings. Institutions are above politics. You might say that we have institutions so that we don’t die of politics. But as we look around at our institutions today – as I did in an earlier booklet I produced for the Freedom Association, The Twilight of Our Institutions, we see that like Sidonius’ Rome, they have all been undermined from the inside: the law, education, the established church, the monarchy. Our neglect or worse our destruction of our institutions reveals our self-contempt.
Is it possible that even at this late stage we can recover our sense of what really matters, reconstruct our national identity, revive our institutions and summon the courage to defend ourselves? It is possible. All things are possible. But I confess I do not think it likely. Even if we had the will, we perhaps do not have the time. It’s later than you think.
