A Battle Raging in a Single System - discussions

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A BATTLE RAGING IN A SINGLE SYSTEM

Being wide-ranging discussions on historical and contemporary questions concerning relations between Islam and the West. Like many entries on this blog this is a sketch to be enlarged and developed.

Question: Conflict between Islam and the West is among the defining features of our age. What is your perspective on it?

Answer: It needs to be placed in a larger context, and a deeper context than the merely political. History is a process, a drama of the soul. Most of the important factors and forces are hidden, underground. In any matter like this, where it defines an age, as you say, it is important to step well back and to take a much longer view. And to realize that the political dimension is usually only symptomatic, not decisive. This is especially the case in religious and spiritual conflicts. These are conflicts in the human soul. This is a spiritual history. So what framework do we bring to that? What framework is useful for that?

Question: That is what I am asking.

Answer: In this case we have a situation of profound antipathies, but also of complementarities. Contraries and complements. There are symmetries and forces – energies – that go much deeper than politics or sociology.

Question: You’ve written about ‘historical rage’. What do you mean by ‘historical rage’?

Answer: Just what it says. A rage against the course of history. But in relation to what do you mean specifically?

Question: Specifically, in relation to Islam. You portray Islam as being subject to ‘historical rage’.

Answer: Contemporary Islam. But not Islam, per se. Only Islam in relation to its contemporary situation. Historical rage is a way of describing or understanding the character of contemporary Islam, or at least certain trends or aspects in contemporary Islam. Specifically, Islamism, jihadism, radical Islam. In these things we find a rage against history. Although at a deeper level it pervades contemporary Islam. The jihadis and the suicide bombers are merely acute manifestations of it.

Question: So what does it mean, in that context?

Answer: It just means that there is a sense of grievance, in contemporary Islam, in modern Islam, against the manifest course of history. On a deeper level it means there is a grievance, a sense of injustice, of things not being right, between heaven and earth.

Question: I don’t understand. Can you explain?

Answer: For Muslims there is a strong sense that Islam has a certain destiny. It is particularly strong in Islam because historically Islam has been a quite extraordinary success. It exploded into history. It began in a small illiterate backwater – late antiquity Arabia – and in a very short time it conquered a large portion of the world. This gave it a strong sense of destiny. God is on their side. God has destined Islam to be an historical success. This is backed up in certain Islamic texts, such as the hadith – the prophetic tradition – that says, the prophet says, ‘My people are the best of people’. Or ‘My Ummah is the best of Ummahs.’ Which means that the Islamic ‘nation’, the Islamic people, are destined to be the very best of people. But this is an expectation that far exceeds the facts, in the modern era. Once it was true. Once the Muslims, Islamic civilization, was the most advanced, the most successful in the world, in history. But from the late Middle Ages onwards Islamic civilization went into decline. So there is something wrong, something amiss between the mandate of heaven – because the Divine will is for the Islamic Ummah to be the best and the foremost, as Muslims see it – and the mundane order. Historical rage is the anger this causes. There is an anger that history has not gone according to a perceived destiny. There is a sense that the destiny of Islam has been thwarted. So something must be done to correct this. This is a deep motivation behind radical Islam. But, of course, it is not exclusive to Muslims. That is only a specific instance of it. Much of Western history, or Christian history, needs to be understood in terms of historical rage as well. On the other side of the coin.

Question: How? Or when? How are the Christians subject to historical rage?

Answer: Historical rage is the great motivating force in Western history. Specifically, in that case, against the historical success of Islam. When Islam was in ascendancy and Christianity was in decline, then we witnessed a similar historical rage in the Christian world. Once again, this is because there was a perceived misalignment between heaven and earth. How could God tolerate the Muslim infidels, followers of that blasphemous pretender, Muhammad… as Christian saw it… how could God permit them to build such a huge, vast and prosperous civilization, as Islamic civilization was in the Middle Ages? In Christian minds, this surely violated the Divine Will. The Divine Will, for Christians, was for all people to come to Christ. And for many centuries it seemed that way. Slowly – not in an explosion like Islam – but slowly, steadily, Christianity was extending itself across the world. But then suddenly, very suddenly, it faced the shocking reality of Islam. Suddenly, Islam stole the whole of North Africa, nearly a third of the Christian world fell to the infidels, the pretenders, the false creed. How could history go this way? In Christians this provoked a rage against history. A violent reaction to the course of historical events.

Question: Can you give an example?

Answer: The obvious example is the Crusades. Historians struggle to explain the Crusades. Especially the first Crusade which seemed like a spontaneous sudden popular overflowing of zeal, directed against the Saracens. It is hard to explain. It was an explosion. And then it became an entrenched pattern of cultural religious behavior. That is hard to explain as well. Time and time again Christian Europeans collected themselves into armies and set off to the Near East to correct history. It was a rage against history. The history in that case was the manifest success and prosperity of Islam. The Saracens had built a vast and enormously sophisticated civilization. It dwarfed Christendom. It humbled Christendom. It made Christendom look like an impoverished backwater of history. Christians found this intolerable. It was an intolerable injustice of history. And they raged against it. Not only in the Crusades though. This historical rage became the centre-piece of the Western project – to right the wrongs of history. It shaped the whole of Western civilization subsequently.

Question: So you’re drawing parallels between the Crusaders and Islamic jihadists?

Answer: In their underlying motivations, which in both cases is historical rage. I'm not making judgments about the justness of their cause. There are nearer parallels. Such as the so-called martyrs of Cordova. These were suicidal Christians in Islamic Spain. They would do things like bursting into mosques, screaming insults and abuse at the Prophet Muhammad, and then of course they would be killed by the Muslims. They set out to be martyrs. Christian jihadists. They willingly martyred themselves in the rage against history. They are so enraged, on a deep level, by the course of history that they sacrifice themselves in order to set things right, to set things right between heaven and earth. This is what motivates the suicidal martyr.

Question: So the Islamic suicide bomber is enraged by what? Western imperialism?

Answer: By the manifest success of Western civilization. Which, in the Muslim religious mind is still Christendom. Only, of course, it is not Christendom any longer. Or not overtly. Which is the great irony. This is where it becomes complicated. Because the historical rage of the West, as a force in Western history, so transformed the West that it actually shed its Christian identity in order to set heaven and earth aright. But yes, the historical rage of the contemporary Saracens, the Mahometans, is directed at the enormous disparity between the West and the House of Islam. The House of Islam is backward, impoverished. They are the losers of history. How can this be? How can God tolerate such a state of affairs, that the Ummah of the Prophet – destined to be the best of Ummahs – is in such a terrible state? They are destined to rule the world. Yet on every front they are the losers of history. In the whole world order they are in the inferior place. It is not right, as they see it, feel it. So the jihadist martyr sets out to correct this intolerable state of affairs. You can label it Western imperialism. It just means Western superiority. Culturally. Scientifically. Economically. Militarily. Artistically. Politically. This is impossible to tolerate for someone for whom the superiority of the House of Islam is a given. Just as it was for Christians in the Middle Ages. When Christians in the Middle Ages were faced with the obvious, manifest superiority of Islamic civilization, it was intolerable. They had to do something about it.

Question: What do you mean the West shed its Christian identity? How did that happen? Isn’t that a contradiction?

Answer: It is the great irony here. In order to defeat the Saracens, in order to set things right, in order to set heaven and earth right again, Christianity itself had to be transformed. Because – and this is the source of the irony – the forms of Christianity that had been created prior to Islam, when there was no Islam with which to compete… these turned out to be entirely inadequate for the task. So, in fact, for Christianity to reassert itself against the Muslims it had to be remade. And once this was done there was no stopping it. Christian history, from the Middle Ages onwards, becomes a series of successive revolutions and upheavals. That is, historical rage upsets the equilibrium of Western civilization in a fundamental way. This is why the trajectory of Western history is so unique. This historical rage – against the Saracens – so disturbs the roots of Western civilization that the entire civilization is utterly transformed.

Question: But I don’t see how this leads to shedding its Christian identity, as you call it. Isn’t that self-defeating?

Answer: It is ironic, at least. The obvious case is the Protestant Reformation. Which is, by this account, a Christian response to Islam. But then this disturbs Christendom in a fundamental way. The split between Orthodoxy and the Roman Church did not damage it in a fundamental way. But the Reformation did. It was damaged spiritually, that is. But, on the other hand, the Reformation enabled Christians – increasingly just ‘Europeans’ – to compete against the Muslims. So it was successful in that sense. Protestantism is a Christian response to Islam. Or we might even say that Protestantism is an Islamicized Christianity.

Question: How so?

Answer: With its emphasis upon the Book. With the doctrine of every man a priest. The rejection of monasticism. The rejection of icons. The prohibition of alcohol. A religion for urban traders. Whereas classical Christianity – which is what I call it – was an agrarian monastic religion. The Protestants remade Christianity in the image of Islam. It is a streamlined Christianity that was able to compete with Islam. The Catholics had a different strategy.

Question: Which was what?

Answer: Conquest. An extension of Crusading. At the dawn of the Reformation the crucial event was the threat of the Turks to Vienna, to central Europe. The Pope proposed another Crusade. That was the typical, age-old response to the Saracens. Crusades. But Luther – this was the crucial turning point in European history – spoke and wrote against the Crusade as a solution to that threat. Instead, he said, the Christians, Christendom, needed to be reformed. Only self-correction could meet the challenge. The Catholics, of course, were forced to do a certain amount of this. Catholicism absorbs, is transformed by, Islam to some extent as well. We see it in architecture. We see it in liturgy. The imitation of Christ. Catholic humanism. That is a Catholicism reshaped by the pressures imposed upon Christendom by the Saracens. But finally the Catholic response, the response of the Catholic world, was geographical. Columbus, remember, set out to find the Indies and sailed westwards. Why? Because the Muslims had closed off the east. The Catholic kings had an idea. ‘We will go around them!’ Columbus set out to circumvent the Muslims, to find a way around the Islamic blockade. The Muslims controlled the great trade routes. This was the source of their prosperity. This is why heaven and earth were out of alignment. So the Catholics discovered the New World. Then, suddenly, Europeans had a vast new source of wealth. After that, everything changed. After that, Islamic civilization went into decline. The Saracens hardly noticed at the time.

Question: But you say Catholic religion itself was transformed?

Answer: In many ways.

Question: Humanism?

Answer: Humanism. So, for example, Christ becomes a man to be imitated. This is a muted theme in earlier Christianity, but in the later Middle Ages there is an increased emphasis upon Christ as a man. Earlier Christ was a cosmic figure. You see it very clearly in iconography. In the Renaissance he becomes a man. The emphasis shifts to his humanity. This, I want to argue, is in response to the imitation of the Prophet in Islamic spirituality. Muhammad is the human exemplar. Islamic piety consists of imitating his example. For Sunni Islam. Christians develop a response to counter this. The imitation of Christ. Christ becomes for them the human exemplar. This new emphasis in the later Middle Ages in Christendom is, I think, counter-Islamic. It would not have happened without Islam. That is the point. It would not have happened without Islam. Christianity was remade to counter Islam. So, to give another example, there was the rise of mendicantism in Catholic Christianity – the Franciscans explicitly. Which are a type of Christian answer to the Sufi mendicants of Islam. These things are to be explained as counter-Islamic. Or para-Islamic. Some things are counter-Islamic. Some things para-Islamic. Some things anti-Islamic. The Crusades were anti-Islamic. But without the fact of Islam, its historical success, they would not have happened. Islam transformed Christianity.

Question: I still don’t see how this led to Europeans shedding their Christian identity as you call it. What do you mean?

Answer: Protestantism was an over-compensation. And it unfolds from there. It begins a process of deconstruction. Christendom unravels. But in fact Christianity – in its classical forms – was not well-formed, not well-equipped to compete with Islam. It was first constructed in an environment where there was no Islam. And it was not the Church so much as the secular powers that set out to match the Saracens, finally. It happens on several levels. It is the secular powers, the nobles, that want to acquire the spoils of the Crusades. They want the silks and the spices and the technology and the medicine and the weapons. They want to acquire Saracen sciences. This sets them against the Church. This is played out at length in European history. And these factors converge. The desacralisation that follows from the Protestant revolt. The rise of the secular classes. Each of these forces are anti- or contra- or para- Islamic, and together they give birth to a Europe that is no longer a ‘Christendom’. To put it bluntly, what was once Christendom sold its soul in order to put the Saracens in their place, in order to set history right again.

Question: This is not a conventional reading of European history though, is it?

Answer: Not at all. In some measure it is the ‘secret’ history of European civilization. Historical rage is often, very often, an undercurrent, an unspoken motivation in events. But it is plain enough. I think I read five or six or more histories of the Reformation and not one of them mentioned the Muslims as a factor. Here were the Turks threatening to overrun central Europe and none of these histories even acknowledged that as a factor. Instead, they wrote about the Reformation as a self-contained thing. Luther’s personal struggle, and so on. Abuses of the Church, and so on. And yet, quite obviously, the entire episode was framed by the threat of the Turks. And similarly, you can read dozens of accounts of Protestantism, literally dozens, and not a single author will mention the very obvious parallels between Protestantism – especially Calvinist forms – and Islam. Why not? Islam is the elephant in the room, as they say. It is blindingly obvious but it is never mentioned.

Question: Why is that do you think?

Answer: Because it is a deep psychology in European history, and in Christian religion. Just as historical rage is a deep psychology in contemporary Islam. By that I mean that much of it is hidden below the surface of things. Islamic jihadists will present all manner of explanations for their actions. They won’t tell you they are driven by historical rage. Similarly, in European history it is an undercurrent. It is largely unconscious. But, as in Freudian psychology, it is what is unconscious, unseen, unacknowledged, repressed, that is important. Most of the iceberg is below the surface. Islam is the unseen, unacknowledged factor in European history. That is why, personally, I engaged with Islam in the first place – a journey into that historical darkness.

Question: What is your association with Islam?

Answer: I’ve had a lifelong association with Islam. I grew up in a very multiethnic environment. There were a lot of Turks. I had Turkish friends growing up. Immigrants. I grew up knowing about Turkish Islam. And Albanians. So my association began there. From childhood.

Question: And after that?

Answer: After that I had a much closer association, through family, marriage. It is hard to avoid in multiethnic Australia. There are wives and girlfriends and partners and colleagues and neighbors and friends. Islam is a big minority where I came from. And then I had a professional acquaintance because I was fortunate enough to teach Islamic/West relations – although this was in the context of a course on Western Traditions. Actually, professionally, I am a student of Plato, Greek philosophy, the Western Tradition. But at a certain point I came to understand that you cannot really get to the bottom of the Western Tradition without a deep knowledge of Islam. So - strange to say - my approach to Islam has been through the Western Tradition. I see it as a complement to, or the other side of, the Western Tradition. Both personally and professionally.

Question: Can you elaborate on your personal approach to it?

Answer: Personal things are, well, personal. They don’t really matter, except to me. It is better to concentrate on the bigger picture, the larger scope of things. But I will say – because it’s important – that my interest in Islam, even in its spirituality, has never been anti-Western. It is important to stress that, because these days there is an Islam/West antipathy, an active antipathy, and you will find many people who become interested or involved in Islam – even as converts – are motivated by a rejection of their own tradition, a hatred of their given tradition, by which I mean the Western Tradition. I am not in that category. I have never been in that category. And personally, I have no sympathy for it. I can say that. I have no sympathy for people – malcontents – who look to Islam because they hate the West. On the contrary, my interest in Islam and my journeys into Islam – adventures you might say, explorations - have always been about knowing the West on a deeper level.

Question: But how? Surely Islam is a completely different tradition?

Answer: It is. But also, it isn’t. I don’t think you can really understand the West without understanding Islam. In ways that I’ve already mentioned. The historical rage of the West, that transformed the West. That is a fact of history. But it goes much deeper than that. Very early – in my twenties – I came to understand that, in fact, Islam and the West are a single entity, on a certain level. I adopted a phrase from the Algerian scholar, Hichem Djait. He described Islamic/West tensions as “a battle raging in a single system.” It is an important phrase. That is my starting point. Islam and the West are a single system. But of course they are opposites as well as complements. Like the two sides of a coin, the heads and the tails. Some people might reject the heads and embrace the tails. That’s never been my interest. I’m interested in the whole coin. I didn’t set out to study Islam, or become involved at any level, because I rejected the West. I just realized that there was another side to the coin. It’s a Self and Other problem. Islam is the Other. To understand the Self you need to acknowledge and confront the Other. The academic study of the Western Tradition was lacking in that.

Question: What do you mean?

Answer: You can study the Western Tradition as if it is a self-contained thing. You can study the great works. Plato. Aristotle. The Bible. The cathedrals. Cervantes. Dante. Arthurian Legend. The Renaissance. The Reformation. You can study it all as self-referential. You need never step out of that occidental world. A standard university course – in the old days, at least – did just that. But I came to appreciate that there was something lurking in the shadows. Always. To reach a full picture of European history and the Western Tradition, the occidental civilization, you need to realize the role of Islam in it. Which is sometimes a positive role, and more often a type of shadow, a dark side, lurking in the background. From the early Middle Ages onwards this is true. Or even earlier. As it’s said: ‘Without Muhammad, no Charlemagne.’ There is a certain narrative that ignores Islam entirely. I find it unsatisfactory. As I say you can read entire histories of the Reformation where Islam is never mentioned as a formative factor. I cannot understand the West without Islam. Without Muhammad, no Charlemagne. A battle raging in a single system.

Question: Is that still true today? A battle raging in a single system?

Answer: Of course. That dynamic – Self and Other – let’s use the Jungian term, the ‘Shadow’ – is of course present today. It is not so easily overcome. This is the foolishness of the multiculturalists and the Leftists. They think that this entire history, a whole historical dynamic, centuries of historical rage and counter rage can be overcome by good will and bumper stickers and community love-ins and workshops. Of course it can’t. And it is utter folly to try. I think the forces involved are very deep. A deep psychology, as I say. A deep cultural psychology. That is my main interest. This is something you discover on a journey into Islam. It is not like changing your coat. It is not like choosing a new hairdo. It is much more like Ishmael in Moby Dick. Going to sea is like suicide, you know. Going to sea is death. Islam is the Shadow. It is a dark realm. Not in itself, but in relation to the West. The Other is dangerous. The Other is hidden. The Other is unseen and dark, unconscious. You encounter things you never expected. It is a journey into night. I am speaking personally.

Question: I am not sure I understand what you mean.

Answer: There is a very deep psychology – the psychology of civilizations. The differences between Islam and the West are not superficial. They run very deep. That is what I mean. The historical rage we have discussed – it is a very deep pattern that grips whole civilizations, often unspoken, unconscious, deep and hidden.

Question: But antipathy between Islam and the West has hardly been hidden over the centuries…

Answer: No, but there are still profound undercurrents. The Crusades – they were ostensibly about liberating the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens. Sure. But that doesn’t explain the explosion of the First Crusade. The spontaneous nature of it. The intensity of it. People throughout Europe literally dropped everything and marched to the Holy Land on a whim. Nothing explains that. And along the way they murdered Jews, and fought the Orthodox Christians and in Syria they resorted to cannibalism. How do you explain that? That outbreak of barbarism? The quest for the Holy Sepulchre doesn’t match the depth and ferocity and intensity and explosive nature of the phenomenon. So you realize that there must be something deeper going on that the given explanation. Some deep psychology. A dark psychology. Islam is the hidden, the occult.

Question: The occult?

Answer: It is a hidden force in European ideas. Islamic science comes into Europe in the form of so-called ‘occultism’. The history of the European acquisition of Islamic science is inseparable from the history of occidental occultism. The word ‘Abracadabra’ is just a corruption of Arabic. All the magic words of Western occultism are corruptions of Arabic. Islam is the occult, the dark, the hidden. It is the darkness of the Other. This is very significant. The study of the occult in Western history is very significant, because often it is there that we see the real movement of ideas, the true currents of cultural exchange. Newton, all those scientists, were interested in alchemy. But what is alchemy but the Islamic sciences? It is heavily encoded. Exchanges between Islam and the West are often heavily encoded.

Question: So your personal encounter has been about Self and Other?

Answer: Yes. I’m a Western man. But there is a hidden side to the West that I set out to explore. Difficult, of course. And complex. A tangle of pathways. My foundation studies are of Plato. But after that there are adventures, journeys, into the whole complex of Western history, and I found it necessary to expand that to include Islam. In that sense I see it as a Western religion, in that broader sense.

Question: And you also studied the Biblical tradition, early Christianity?

Answer: For the same reason. Although again I was fortunate to be in the position where I could teach Biblical Studies at University level, at the same time as teaching Greek philosophy and Islam and the West. They all form a single study, a single quest, if you like. In the case of Biblical Studies and early Christianity, once again, even then, I was interested in Islam. Of course there was no such thing as Islam at that time, but there was already a proto-Islam, in early Christianity there was already an Islam before Islam. And once again it is a hidden history. In that particular case, a history of heresy and forgotten possibilities. I didn’t study Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity according to the conventional patterns. I wanted to see into the shadows.

Question: Is there evil in the shadows?

Answer: More than you suspect. When you dredge things up which have been forgotten, or when you dredge things up from your subconscious, you never know what might come with it. Many lost pathways are dangerous. A confrontation with your own Other is confronting. The same applies when considering whole cultures.

Question: For instance?

Answer: Leaving aside my own personal demons, there are cultural expressions of it. The one I often cite is the vampire myths. Which I think are adumbrations of hidden forces on the borderland between Islam and the West. The vampire is a shadow, a reflection, a projection of Islam. Specifically of the dark Turk. I think that is what the vampire mythology is about. I’ve written about it. Someone put it to me recently – it was an arresting idea - that for a Western person to convert to Islam, to become a Muslim, is an act of suicide. It is an act of spiritual suicide. Cultural suicide. That is true. It is a type of death. Just as, for a sailor, going to sea, setting out to sea – into the Otherness of the ocean – is a death. I am thinking of Ishmael at the start of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Noting here that his name is Ishmael, after all. It is only implied, but he is clearly thinking of suicide, Ishmael, the narrator. Setting out to sea is a death of the Self, immersion in the Other. And of course there is a new psychology that prevails at sea. New laws. New realities. For a Western person to go into Islam is like that. Unless, of course, they are dead already, completely superficial. Islam, for a Western person, is the darkness.

Question: But isn’t it important that we overcome these divisions today? Those are the divisions of the past…

Answer: They are not superficial divisions. The multiculturalist has a dangerously superficial view of human beings. They think that human beings – cultures – are just sludge, and you can shape them or reshape them easily. It is not so easy. There’s a deep hidden psychology to it. Those deep forces won’t be thwarted. They will emerge and re-emerge and go underground and re-emerge again. Only a tremendous amount of destruction and violence can actually change cultures, finally. That is an unfortunate fact. Marx was right about that. Real change, deep change, takes revolution. Terrible violence. You can paste over surfaces but underneath there are deep and terrible forces. These are the forces that animate the ‘battle raging in a single system’. That rage is deep. It cannot be wished away by do-gooders. The multicultural project is doomed because it is so completely naïve. You can’t mix oil and water. The hostilities between Islam and the West are profound, not just long-lived. You can’t paste over them with sentimentality. It is frightening how stupid people are about those things.

Question: Did you experience the journey into Islamic ideas as a type of suicide? A death?

Answer: A hall of mirrors, at least. It is a hall or mirrors of Self and Other. It is easy to get lost in there, certainly. As I say, I never rejected my occidental identity. To study the Other is still a way of knowing the Self. But anyone who converts to Islam – to externalist Islam, street-variety, Koran-thumping Islam – beard and kurta Islam – that’s a death. Sooner or later the bell will toll, on some level. And we are seeing exactly that. Have you seen those young people, boys and girls, teenagers, who leave their safe middle class homes in the middle of the night and run away and catch a plane to Syria to join ISIS or al-Qaeda and post jihad videos to the folks back home? Have you seen that? It is suicidal. It is an act of suicide. They are already dead. Islam, for a Western person, is always a dance with death.

Question: So you are saying it’s impossible for a Western person to convert to Islam?

Answer: No. Many people do it. Most of them are unsuccessful. In most cases it doesn’t last. Because, without knowing it, it involves a deep level of self-violence. It can be done. But at a high price. Generally, I am more pessimistic about conversions to any religion – Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism – than I was in the past. Although there are exceptions, usually where there is a higher spiritual calling involved. In some cases you can move to a higher level. At a higher level religions converge. There is a higher level at which Islam and Christianity converge. That is a level above the level of historical rage. But that is not for everyone. Very difficult. The vast majority of people are better advised to stay with the tradition into which they were born. In my opinion. Experience and age confirms me more and more in that view. You can never not be a Western person. So be a good one. That’s the best advice. But it is, in fact, a very complex thing. The liberal myth supposes that we are self-created beings. No we’re not. Only very superficially so. Converts now – it is very different than in the past.

Question: When do you mean? In the past?

Answer: I have written about this. In the 19th century there were converts to Islam. Among the English aristocracy. Important people. Among orientalists in the British upper class. But that was a very different phenomenon that what we find today. Today, it is among disaffected out-of-work snotty-nosed badly educated and resentful urban youth. In the main. There is always an element of self-loathing involved. And the liberal myth of self-creation.

Question: The liberal myth of self-creation?

Answer: The essence of liberalism – an ideology that unfortunately permeates the West now, and certainly its media and education system - is the idea that only what you choose has value. So you must reject what you were born into. This is supposed to be liberating. So we cheer someone who is born a man but chooses to be a woman. The liberal values self-creation. Whereas the conservative values making the most of what you are given. The liberal myth is that we are self-created beings and the circumstances into which we are born are inconsequential. That is the essential fallacy of liberalism. Whereas those older so-called converts to Islam – most of them – had no such motivation. Their motivations were much different, and much more interesting. But then, they were involved in a very different type of Islam. What I usually call classical Islam. Whereas modern Islam is a very different beast indeed.

Question: Different motivations? What were their motivations?

Answer: Look at a ‘convert’ like Lord Farook, for instance. A British aristocrat. You see pictures of him, Lord Farook, in his highland kilt and regalia. Not looking like much of a convert. Compare that image to that of one of these contemporary jihad punks with their beard and their seventh century Arabia attire, dressed like the Taliban. Those older ‘converts’ were not converts in the modern sense. They weren’t driven by a rejection of their own tradition. On the contrary, they were driven by the fact that their own tradition – the Western tradition – had recently acquired, conquered, the Islamic world. That is to say they were orientalists. The historical rage was over. All was right in heaven and earth again. And so, at last, it was safe to play the Other, embrace the Other. That was the remarkable thing about the Orientalists.

Question: What was?

Answer: For the first time in history, the first time in European history, Europeans looked with real sympathy and interest at the Saracens. They could do so because the historical misalignment had been healed. Christendom was triumphant. Islamic civilization had been conquered. And so, now, the Muslims became objects of interest and fascination and Europeans were free to admire them. But this changed again in the 20th C. In the 20th C. – one of the most important and salient features of the whole century – Islam was resurgent. It is one of the great facts of our time. Resurgent Islam. Historical rage begins again. People like Edward Said – he reignited the historical rage. The wonderful and unique thing about the Orientalists – that Edward Said deliberately overlooks – is that, for the first time, Europeans looked upon Islam without seeing through the lens of historical rage. I’ve only ever been interested in the Orientalist vision of Islam. Not resurgent, modern Islam. Not political post-colonial Islam, which is repugnant. In post-colonial Islam historical rage begins again in new and more dangerous forms. It is a new monster. That is where we are today.

Question: Today we see the return of old animosities?

Answer: Yes. In new forms, or in new configurations of old patterns, one should say. Which demonstrates how deep those animosities run. It is a battle raging in a single system. That is the important thing to grasp. That is the frame you need to apply to the problem in order to understand it at a deeper level. Many people, of course, are caught in an Us versus Them framework. In order to stand outside of that you need to see it as a battle raging in a single system. You need to think of Islam and the West as a single system, albeit consisting of two vast and opposing civilizations. Today, with Islamic civilization much diminished and caught up in an historical rage about it. In the West, counter animosities. I'm not opposed to people who hate Islam, Westerners who hate and fear Islam. In some ways I'd be more concerned if people didn't.

Question: And yet many people in the west have a sympathetic view of Islam.

Answer: But we are also seeing deep hostilities. Which is what one would expect. And they are not overcome very easily. The narrative continues to play out. History is not over yet. The dynamic is not completed yet. Now we see a new chapter. The most interesting phenomenon now is the convergence of liberal Leftism and Islam. They would seem to be odd bedfellows. But in fact the socialist stream in Western history has deep roots in Islam too. When you sit in a mosque, on the large empty even space of the floor - there is socialism. It is no accident that the hammer and sickle so nearly resembles the hilal, the crescent that symbolizes Islam. Since the collapse of communism there are new configurations emerging. The system continues.

Question: The single system?

Answer: Yes. It is a very useful frame in which to place contemporary events, as well as earlier history. It is quite obviously a single system. Ideologically but also geographically. Geographically Europe doesn’t end at Sicily. Europe extends all the way to the Sahara desert, geographically. The Mediterranean basin is a single world. If you remove the political and religious and cultural boundaries, it is a single geographical system. It is a single world. But it has been bifurcated. The last time it was a single political entity was under the Roman Empire. The Roman project was to unite the geographical reality of the Mediterranean basis. And of course it lasted several centuries. And Christianity was part of that project. Specifically it was to unite the eastern and western ends of the Mediterranean. But the rise of Islam ruptured that unity. It was ruptured in both directions. The Saracens took North Africa, and then later they took the eastern Roman Empire, Asia Minor. So the geographical world of the Mediterranean was ruptured. The single system was bifurcated. Recent events have reminded us of this.

Question: What events?

Answer: The immigration crisis. Thousands of North Africans travelling across the Mediterranean and pouring into Europe. And thousands more from the eastern Mediterranean travelling westwards into Europe. Suddenly you realize what a compact system it is, geographically. But politically and religiously and culturally it has been bifurcated. It has been cut in half. It is now a coin with two sides, heads and tails. And there is endless tension between these two sides, and they are tensions that run very deep and are not easily overcome. The Muslims took North Africa in the blink of an eye, and yet it is as if it is completely indigenous there. It is as if Islam is in the soil itself. You cannot just remove it. And no amount of social engineering will wish away the tensions and divisions – deep, real divisions – between Islam and the west. People are not just sludge that can be shaped by social policies. There are much deeper dimensions. As we will discover.

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black