Author: Spengler
Publication: Asia Times
Date: April 19, 2005
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GD19Aa01.html
Now that everyone is talking about
Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a
way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner
at the Vatican conclave that began on Monday, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject. [1] Hedonistic
dissipation well may have condemned the existing Europeans to infecundity
and extinction, but that does not prevent Europe from getting new ones.
It has been done before.
Europe in the 8th century was a
depopulated ruin. The loss of half the Roman Empire's population by the
7th century left vast territories open to Islam, which rapidly absorbed
the formerly Christian Levant, North Africa and Spain. By converting successive
waves of invading pagans - Lombards, Magyars, Vikings, Celts, Saxons, Slavs
- Christianity reinvented Europe, and held Islam at bay.
Now that John Paul II has been buried,
Catholic voices are sounding the alarm about the coming Islamicization
of Europe. In the future imagined by John Paul II's biographer George Weigel,
"The muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of
St Peter's in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia
on the Seine - a great Christian church become an Islamic museum." [2]
Misjudging the impact of Islamic
immigration upon Europe may have been the signal error of John Paul II's
reign. Against the bitter opposition of Catholic traditionalists, John
Paul II visited mosques, kissed the Koran for the news cameras, and held
more than 50 audiences with Muslim representatives. The late pontiff saw
Muslims as prospective allies against secularism, and believed that the
popular piety of Islam offered something of a bulwark against the soulless
direction of the modern world. [3] In particular, John Paul II seemed impressed
by the fact that the Koran acknowledges the Virgin Mary, a point emphasized
in the Second Vatican Council's ecumenical statement, Nostra Aetate. No
pope in recent history identified more with the popular folk-religion of
Catholicism. He canonized more saints than any of his predecessors, and
lent papal authority to the Cult of Fatimah.
Not just sympathy, but also fear,
guided the Vatican's caution with respect to radical Islam. As Father Richard
John Neuhaus observes, "L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, regularly
reports on terrorist acts around the world but assiduously avoids mentioning
that they are almost all associated with radical Islam. There are several
reasons for this: the Holy See wants to resist any suggestion that we are
engaged in a war of religions; as the chief institutional representative
of world Christianity, it has a unique role in developing any future dialogue
with Islam; and it is keenly aware of the precarious position of Christians
in Muslim countries." [4]
In that respect, John Paul II recalled
the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of
Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews
- for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard
to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament,
but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have
prevailed over St Peter.
Islam surrounds traditional society
with a spear-wall, and proposes to extend the realm of traditional society,
the ummah, by dominating the world around it through jihad (see Islam:
Religion or political ideology?, August 10, 2004). Christian missionaries
will get nowhere in Muslim countries except into trouble. But Muslims in
Europe no longer live in traditional society, much as they might attempt
to re-create it on European soil. As long as they are strangers on European
soil, they are vulnerable to Christian proselytizing, if there exist a
Christian agency with the temerity to attempt it.
The last public discussion of the
Church's stance toward Islam took place at an October 1999 bishops' synod
in Rome. Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels enunciated the dominant view:
"We have much to learn" from Muslims, such as "the transcendence of God,
prayer and fasting, and the impact of religion on social life". Danneels
is a leading "liberal" candidate for the papacy.
Dissident voices such as Professor
Alain Besancon became persona non grata at the Holy See. Besancon still
writes on Islam, although his views are known to English-language readers
principally through a 2004 article in the neo-conservative monthly Commentary
(see Has Islam become the issue?, May 4, 2004).
So impassioned was John Paul II's
commitment to ecumenical embrace of Islam that one finds dissenting opinion
only on the reactionary right of the Church. The closest thing to an anti-Islamic
manifesto to emerge from Catholic circles during the past decade came from
a supporter of the heretical Archbishop Lefevre, who refused to accept
the Vatican II reforms. He is Hans-Peter Raddatz, a German scholar and
co-author of the Encyclopedia of Islam. [5] Like Besancon, Raddatz presents
the classical Catholic view, formulated in the 13th century by St Thomas
Aquinas, that Allah is a different entity altogether from the Christian
God.
Raddatz' work is not available in
English, although its tone is not much different from that of Ibn Warraq,
a widely read secularizer. [6] It contains an exhaustive survey of Church
politics with respect to Islam. The villains of Raddatz' drama are "the
founding pair in the re-creation of faith identity after Vatican II, Wojtyla,
pope since 1978, and Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation of the
Faith since 1981".
As the late pope's adviser, Cardinal
Ratzinger shares responsibility for past Vatican policies, but his tone
has changed during the past six months. He opposed Turkey's entry into
the European Union. Last week he published a tract titled Werte in Zeiten
des Umbruchs ("Values in Times of Upheaval"), calling for Europe to return
to its core Christian values. He denounced Europe's "incomprehensible self-hatred",
adding that if Europe wants to survive, "it must consciously seek to rediscover
its own soul". He wrote, "Multiculturalism cannot survive without common
constants, without taking one's own culture as a point of departure."
Ratzinger deplored the exclusion
of Christianity from the proposed European Constitution. Unlike the United
States, where politicians of both parties agree that revelation is the
source of virtue, secular Europe insists upon an entirely secular approach
to ethics. In this regard I sympathize with Ratzinger, and refer readers
to an extensive debate on the subject of Kant's Categorical Imperative
in the Asia Times Online Forum. Kant initiated the modern attempt to derive
ethics from reason. His approach (oversimplified) is to ask, "What if everybody
did?" You are not supposed to do something to which you would object were
someone else to do it. This approach has some obvious weaknesses. Bertrand
Russell observed in his History of Western Philosophy that a depressive
very well might wish for everyone to commit suicide, and thus commit suicide
himself with perfect justification. Just that attitude describes the mindset
of today's Europeans, who naturally prefer a Kantian approach to a religious
one.
Precisely how the Church might go
about proselytizing Muslims is a different matter, and a dangerous one,
considering that Islam decrees the death penalty for apostates (see Muslim
anguish and Western hypocrisy, November 23, 2004).
It is clear that Cardinal Ratzinger
has been thinking about this for some time. "Islam has no magisterium,"
that is, official teaching authority, Ratzinger observed in a 2001 newspaper
interview. [7] But the Catholic world can count on the services of scholars
such as Alain Besancon, Hans-Peter Raddatz, and perhaps the pseudonymous
Cristoph Luxenberg, who showed that the sloe-eyed virgins promised to Islamic
martyrs actually were raisins. [8] If the Church were to devote its shrunken
but still formidable intellectual apparatus to such matters as Koranic
criticism, all heaven would break loose, if I mix my metaphors right.
Years ago I argued that Koranic
criticism "yet may turn out to be the worm in the foundation of radical
Islam" (You say you want a reformation?, August 5, 2003). Unlike the Christian
and Jewish scriptures, revealed to men who heard the revelation in their
own voices, the Archangel Gabriel dictated every word of the Holy Koran
to the Prophet Mohammed. As Toby Lester reported in the January 1999 edition
of The Atlantic Monthly:
"To historicize the Koran would
in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community,"
says R Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University
of California at Santa Barbara. "The Koran is the charter for the community,
the document that called it into existence. And ideally - though obviously
not always in reality - Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and
work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a
historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of 14 centuries is
effectively meaningless."
Koranic criticism has disappeared
from the radar screen. No news outlet has so much as mentioned the name
of Professor "Luxenberg" in recent months. That simply might indicate that
the entire establishment of the West, from the democracy-obsessed administration
of US President George W Bush to the timid mandarins of the Vatican, do
not want to tread upon Islam's sore toe. Or it might mean that such weapons
are being held in reserve. One wants to exclaim, like an Italian taxi driver,
"Cosa sperate? La morte dal prossimo papa?"
Notes:
1. Ian Fisher, "Issue for Cardinals:
Islam as Rival or Partner in Talks", April 12, 2005.
2. George Weigel, The Cube and
the Cathedral (Basic Books: New York 2005).
3. See Recognize the Spiritual
Bonds which Unite Us: 16 Years of Christian-Muslim Dialogue; Pontifical
Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, Rome 1994.
4. In First Things, February 2005.
5. Hans-Peter Raddatz, Von Gott
zu Allah? (Herbig: Munich 2001).
6. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim
(Prometheus: New York 2005).
7. Le Figaro, November 17, 2001.
8. Christoph Luxenberg (ps), Die
syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung
der Qur'ansprache. Berlin, Germany: Das Arabische Buch, First Edition,
2000.
