Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 5

5,485 words

CHAPTER 5
CRESCENT SINISTER

Islam Contra Philosophy

I call for an immediate ban on the movie “Gravity” as it shows Earth to be spherical, which is against the Quran, and thus insulting to Muslims.
Dr. Zakir Naik

Presumably, that’s why there hasn’t been an Islamic Copernicus. Dr. Naik is a thoroughly entertaining Muslim version of a televangelist, and if you are not mindful of the Islamic sense of humor (Ayatollah Khomeini; “There is no humor in Islam”) you might feel your leg being pulled.

But the mainstream media across the Muslim world regularly matches Dr. Naik’s many outlandish claims and demands. Here are some genuine headlines from the Islamic press:

• Hamas TV Scientist Dr. Ahmad Al-Muzain: Bayer derived its treatment for AIDS from prophet Muhammad’s Hadith about the wings of flies (2008).
• Tom and Jerry – A Jewish conspiracy to improve the image of mice because Jews were termed “dirty mice” in Europe (2006).
• Saudi author Dr. Muhammad Al-Arif: Women in the West marry dogs and donkeys; 54% of Danish women do not know who fathered their babies (2006).

For we kufr, these headlines are comic. Put them into context, however, and the comedy turns quickly to tragedy. We are working with a definition of philosophy as a love of wisdom, that being the end result of the combination of information and knowledge. We will come to see how this is antithetical to the Islamic worldview, cast in stone as it was a millennium ago.

Robert R. Reilly’s 2010 book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (with an introduction by the much-missed English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton), shows Islam’s present antipathy to philosophical enquiry as the enduring result of a philosophical battle waged over a thousand years ago, and its decisive result.

Classical philosophy did not bypass Islam on its route to Europe, a journey which began with the Roman aristocracy and led all the way to the Renaissance. Greek thought came as unintended spoils of Islam’s early Byzantine conquests. But the effects the rebirth of the classical world had in the West were not replicated in Islam, and for a very specific reason, as Reilly writes:

“The dehellenization of Islam had its roots in a particular idea of God that took definitive shape in the ninth century, though a large portion of Islam had embraced a version of it far earlier.”

Although Muslim scholars were initially attracted to practical Greek wisdom, an encounter between Islam and what is now classed as Western philosophy was inevitable. The outcome of this encounter, effectively the end of any philosophy worth the name in the Muslim world for a thousand years, was a result both of the battle between two sects which is the theme of the book, and a familiar dialectic of distrust of the other natural to any people, but not always with such ruinous effects over such a long span of time:

“Muslims were also called upon to defend and advance their faith against Christians and others who used philosophical methods in their apologetics.”

The opposing sides in this fateful debate were the schools of the Mu’tazilites and the Ash’arites. Among their differences, the former believed that the Koran came into being with Mohammed’s transliteration, the Ash’arites that the book had always existed, will always exist, and is coeval with Allah. Indeed, in the beginning was the word. The Mu’tazilites also believed in free will and the primacy of reason, while the Ash’arites held with predestination and the ultimate impotence of man’s intellectual capacities. In the 9th century, the Mu’tazilites held the upper hand as the Caliph, al’Ma’mun, both enshrined the teaching of a created Koran into law and made his attachment to the font of Western philosophy clear:

“Al-Ma’mun was the greatest supporter of thought in Islamic history and the creator of the famous Bait al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, a great library and translation center, which opened in 830. According to Arab historian Ibn al-Nadim, Aristotle was supposed to have appeared to al-Ma’mun in a dream.”

Anyone inclined to a Whiggish view of Islamic history is invited to imagine such a building being opened in the Islamic world today. Whereas the Medieval Church in the West also had to contend with Aristotles relation to God, they adapted and found conceptual space in their metaphysics for the Stagirite (as Aristotle is known after his birthplace of the city of Stagira). In the Islamic world, Aristotle was ultimately banished.

The ninth century was philosophy’s last stand in the Arabic world, an ascendancy fated to end in the following century. As Reilly observes, the problem with Islamic history – and doubtless that of other cultures – is that the victors in any dispute tended to erase their opponents’ intellectual legacy by burning their books. This is happening in modern Britain as I write, except books are not consigned to the flames but re-designed by sensitivity readers. Undoubtedly, actual book-burnings are harmful to the environment.

The philosophical atmosphere under the Caliphate of al-Ma’mun also produced the first Muslim Arab philosopher, Abu Ya’qub. One of his bold statements is of interest today:

“We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races different and nations different from us.”

From our standpoint, over a millennium later and wearily facing a resurgent Islam, we can see that Abu Ya’qub would face opposition today for sanctioning the idea that worthwhile thought both took place in the dar al harb and that it was worth appropriating. Also, the quote above neatly illustrates the attitude of the dar al Islam today, provided you substitute the word “technology” for “the truth.”

By the end of the 10th century, however, there had been philosophical regime change. The Mu’tazilites were removed from court and government positions, their works burned, and the holding of their doctrines punishable by death. The philosopher Al-Kindi’s library was confiscated and the heretic himself given 60 lashes before an enthusiastic crowd. Just as today people are punished for things they did not themselves write but merely re-posted or re-tweeted, transmission of proscribed doctrine was also outlawed:

“In 885, all professional copyists in Baghdad were required to promise under oath to exclude from their professional activities the copying of all books of philosophy.”

Some Mu’tazilite philosophers fled to Shia Persia, and Reilly makes clear that he is referring throughout to Sunni Islam, still of course the dominant strand of what is a very sectarian religion.

Reilly terms the process undergone by Islam “dehellenization” (and appears to attribute the word to Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial 2006 Regensburg address), and by the 12th century Islamic thought was anti-rationalist, occasionalist (or voluntarist), and fully given over to the concept of itjihad, or Koranic interpretation, meaning that any intellectual problems which might arise can be settled simply by consulting a book whose contents were delivered by an angel and which has existed and will exist for all eternity. What became known as the school of fiqh had as their motto; “Abandon debate and surrender to the text.” There is nothing outside the text, as Jacques Derrida wrote in a very different era and context. Here is one of history’s greatest – and surely its most troublesome – religions saying, mutatis mutandis, exactly that.

And today, even tricked out with all the razzmatazz of the Western world and its trinkets, modern Islam remains thoroughly dehellenized. So much so, in fact, that its central poles have been reversed. Reilly begins with a quote from an Islamic scholar from 2005:

“Wherever I go in the Islamic world, it’s the same problem: cause and effect, cause and effect.”

Just as Al-Ghazali thought, so Muslims think today. Sneakers may be worn under distashas in Jalalabad, but what is inside the Muslim head has essentially remained unchanged since Muslims burnt the great library at Córdoba in Spain in 1013.

 

Sharif don’t like it.
The Clash, Rock the Casbah

The texts which best represent the poles of the debate appeared around a century apart. Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers (IP). The book codified the Ash’arite position, which is radically dogmatic and opposed to reason as a valid source of revelation. Reality is religious territory, not philosophical:

“If these things were true, the prophets would know them through inspiration or revelation; but rational arguments cannot prove them.”

The Islamic world was about to enter the biggest circular argument in history – it would resurface as the ontological argument in Descartes, among others – but IP does make provision for valid (ie. permitted) intellectual enquiry. Al-Ghazali makes a division within philosophy, whose systems he claims to reject, and finds a scapegoat among the questionable pursuits of the falsafa (the Arabic word for philosopher, still with its echo of the Greek):

“While admitting the validity of mathematics, logic and physics as inoffensive to faith, Al-Ghazali charges that metaphysics is the most offensive because it is “the breeding-ground of the errors of the philosophers.”

Al-Ghazali introduces here the seeds of a schism which would also affect the West during its Enlightenment, when metaphysics was left behind by other sub-disciplines of philosophy – basically those named by Al-Ghazali – which better lend themselves to the service of science.

The riposte to IP was by Ibn Rushd (better known to the West as Averroes) in his publication The Incoherence of the Incoherence in 1180. This is a line-by-line exegesis of Al-Ghazali’s text, stressing both the primacy of reason and its compatibility with understanding God. It reiterated Al-Kindi’s promotion of all the avenues of investigation Islam would prohibit: Reason, free will, causality, metaphysics. Al-Ghazali is often called the second most important Muslim after Mohammed, while Averroes’ books were burned in the square, again at his birthplace of Córdoba, in 1195. Averroes’ statue remains in Córdoba, but not his books. As noted, from 1013 there was already no library in which to keep them.

The central supporting wall in the house of Western philosophy is reason, and it is a structural necessity Islam dismantled. Reilly shows concisely the rejection of reason by the Ash’arites and their champion Al-Ghazali, and how close the Islamic world came to a history-changing choice:

“Al-Ghazali’s influence was, and is, so important that a modern thinker of Fazlur Rahman’s stature could say that ‘without his work… philosophic rationalism might well have made a clean sweep of the Islamic ethos.’”

One can only imagine how different the world would have been had that happened. Compared to current Islamic epistemology, it might have been like a dream.

 

Dream a little dream of me.
Gus Kahn

I mentioned René Descartes in the context of the ontological argument and its congruence with Al-Ghazali’s begging of the theological question. There is another scenario these writers share across the centuries and its concomitant metaphysical divide. I begin part-way through the passages which link Al-Ghazali with Descartes for a very specific reason:

“I then examined what knowledge I possessed, and discovered that in none of it, with the exception of sense-perception and necessary principles, did I enjoy that degree of certitude which I have just described…”

So far, so Cartesian, and the evidence of the senses is next called into question as it will be again in 1637 in the Discourse on the Method. Again foreshadowing Descartes, Al-Ghazali is in need of a methodology which is not susceptible to doubt:

“Fundamental principles, such as the following axioms: Ten is more than three. Affirmation and negation cannot exist together…”

Simple arithmetic truths, the law of excluded middle, these are all consonant with Descartes’ use of mathematics as the ultimate arbiter of truth, the model of what truth should look like and how best to proceed towards it. There is one more proto-Cartesian scenario which Al-Ghazali considers; dreaming. Dreams seem real until you wake, when:

“[Y]ou recognize them for what they are – baseless chimeras. Who can assure you, then, of the reliability of notions which, when awake, you derive from the senses and from reason?”

Descartes’ answer, of course, was supplied by the cogito argument and its surety as a fixed point of indubitability. Even though you are dreaming, your existence cannot be in doubt. (This also occurs in St. Augustine’s prototypical cogito argument in City of God). There are problems with Descartes’ rebuilding of certitude with regard to the imagination, but the centrality of the cogito is clear. What is Al-Ghazali’s version of the cogito?

“Surah 2:2 – This is the book about which there is no doubt…

Surah 102 – If you only knew with the knowledge of certainty.”

Never has a question been so begged. For Descartes, the world exists because a rational procedure, guaranteed by the rigorous methodology of mathematics, can be shown to prove what was previously able to be doubted. For Al-Ghazali, it was much simpler. To answer any speculative question, simply open the Koran, an Arabic word whose root means “to read.”

As for the effects on democracy (or its possibility) of Al-Ghazali’s triumph, Reilly sees democracy as reliant on reason. Modern Islam, however, dethroned reason in the 11th century, recognizing power as its primus and philosophy as at best worthless and at worst seditious.

The extremist Islamist viewpoint is a dismissal of philosophical reason in favour of a type of psychosis in the mindset of Sunni Islam. This wholesale rejection of Western reason shows up the hopelessly naïve attempts by the American-led West to bolt democracy on to the Arab states as easily as one might build a conservatory onto one’s house.

CMM is not a philosophical history of a time too long ago to be of any relevance to us, and part of the thrust of Reilly’s book is that it does affect us, very much so. What is happening now to reason in the West is a sorry tale for another day, but one example suffices to illustrate the importance of Al-Ghazali’s influence over the world of today. And not just the Islamic world.

 

The message from the activist left, visibly Muslim for public purposes but intellectually white left-wing, was loud and clear: if you do not agree with us, you are a racist.
Danny Lockwood, The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury

The following is from a 2012 book about censorship, You Can’t Read this Book, by veteran British Left-wing journalist Nick Cohen. Here, he is describing the notorious backlash to Britain’s Salman Rushdie controversy in 1988, when an international fatwa called for the death of the Indian-born British author of The Satanic Verses (who was later attacked and severely wounded by a Muslim in New York in 2022). We detect the resounding echoes of the war between the Mu’tazalites and the Ash’arites and the resulting cloud of unknowing:

“He [Rushdie] had not grasped that reactionary mobs and those who seek to exploit them have a know-nothing pride in their ignorance. It was sufficient that clerical authorities said that the book was blasphemous, and could quote a passage or two to prove their case.”

The West never will understand that what underwrites the bottom line for Islam is not reason or morality but power. Who is doing what to whom? To unpack once again Lenin’s famous dictum. One of Reilly’s sources also reminds us of Stalin:

“The problem for the side of reason, as expressed by an Indonesian Islamist, is that ‘liberal Islam has no cadres.’”

We recall Stalin’s famous question; How many divisions does the Vatican have? Reilly uses neither of these quotes, but does draw a parallel between Lenin’s cheery mission statement and that of Islamism; “We must hate. Hatred is the basis of Communism.”

Two neat bookends illustrate Islam’s dilemma, which is swiftly and once again troubling the West. Reilly quotes Fazlur Rahman, a Muslim philosopher (a dangerous profession in Islam, and increasingly a risky one in the West):

“A people that deprives itself of philosophy necessarily exposes itself to starvation in terms of fresh ideas – in fact it commits intellectual suicide.”

Unfortunately for over a billion Muslims – and by extension the urban West into which they are being siphoned – Islam still regulates itself according to 11th-century writer Abu Sa-id ibn-Dust’s curt dismissal of the discipline which led to the West’s scientific and technological dominion over Islam; Philosophy is a lie.

The West may not think it is at the start of a crisis of reason – or even quite well advanced into it – but nor did the Mu’tazilites of the ninth century, whose most famous contemporaneous Western philosopher was probably Duns Scotus, who was more constrained by the Catholic Church than the Mu’tazilites were by the Caliphate. All it needs is for one side to dominate a debate at the core of which is reason, and for the rationalist side to be vanquished. Reason goes with them. This is happening now in the West, and fear leads thought rather than reason. I have witnessed many politicians, of all major Western parties, refuse to define a woman. It isn’t because they can’t, either through native stupidity or the complexity of the question, but because they won’t. They are afraid to. Keir Starmer, the current British Prime Minister, said that the sentence ‘Only a woman can have a cervix’ is ‘not something you should say’. At present, those who define a woman as an adult, human female are not whipped in the square like Al-Kindi. But, as Robert R. Reilly’s book shows, reason can turn and face in the opposite direction with unnerving speed. Islam jettisoned reason a long time ago, the West may be about to experience its equivalent to the reign of the Ash’arites. It may be some time before we can once again heed the invitation in Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, let us reason together.”

 

I have been led to reject philosophical systems.
Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers

I set out with a simple and etymologically Greek definition of the philosopher as a lover of wisdom. But the word also made its way to the Arabic world as falsafa, or philosopher. For the Greek philosophy so familiar to us was introduced to the Muslim world long before the Renaissance. What happened to it there may have set Islam on a path it would take more than any Reformation to reverse.

Islam plays a paradoxical role in the history of Western philosophy. Simplistically, Islam was both steward and shepherd for many surviving classical works (including Plato’s dialogues and letters) lost to the West during Europe’s Dark Ages and reappearing to accelerate the philosophical aspect of the Renaissance. Now, Islam is the world’s leading culture devoted to the suppression of intellectual enquiry, the life-blood of philosophy. Islamists in Nigeria call themselves boko haram; “Books are forbidden”. And this suppression is not confined to currently Islamic countries, but is being imported to the European nations undergoing the reconquista, as the anarcho-tyrannists of EU and UK governments tacitly approve of both the death of philosophy and the accelerating erosion of free speech. Things are happening at a speed for which the West is unprepared.

Christianity was formed by accretion, a gradual amalgam of Neo-Platonism, gnosticism, paganism, Hermeticism and doubtless other intellectual under-currents prevalent between Christ and Charlemagne. It had a philosophical and metaphysical history as well as going on to be a social phenomenon. Islam, on the other hand, seems to fall from the sky, literally, as it is delivered by an angel to a goatherd.

And on the other side of a millennium of anti-philosophy? What are we to expect from contemporary Islam? What is the damage caused by Islam’s rejection of reason?

 

When rationalists squared off against literalists in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, they lost. The rationalists wanted to include in Islamic doctrine only principles based on reason. The traditionalists countered that the human intellect is “defective, fickle and malleable.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic

Today, the philosophical battle waged a thousand years ago resonates still in an Islam that sees reason as a Western weakness and notes their increasing absence of a central text which can decide all truths. The authoritarian new Left envy Islam for the Koran, not for its teachings but for its centrality as a totem, an ur-text, its status as the incontrovertible arbiter of truth and reality. The Left yearn for a text of their own, a 21st-century reboot of Mao’s Little Red Book.

As the Bible collapses as a source of ultimate meaning for its European adherents, the Koran builds on the ruins, builds back better. Rebecca Bynum, in Allah is Dead: Why Islam is not a Religion, calls the Koran “a replacement for history, outside of and superior to mundane historical facts.” We recall the destruction of the library of Alexandria, the jahilya, the useless and troublesome ages before Islam. Koranic philosophy is superior to Western philosophy also by, effectively, constructing an epistemology with no law of excluded middle. Bynum again:

“In Western philosophy there is only one Truth. In Islam, truth is dual and is neither sacred or revered.”

This is in complete ideological alliance with the new Left, for whom meaning – which they equate with truth if compatible with their ruling ideology – is a moveable feast, malleable and controllable. The important difference is that the Islamic diktats are divinely and so judicially sanctioned while, in the contemporary West, the faithful arrived at their value-system by way of Nietzschean resentment. This assault on truth is ethnically structured and ideologically assimilated, and intended to strike at the surety of Western epistemology, its investment in the sanctity of truth. Bynum again:

“In Islam, the relation between truth and reality is severed. Truth is not extolled, but rather enslaved to expediency, to the advance of Islam… Islam has overthrown truth with its substitution of duality and so has no real grasp on reality.”

The nature of Islamic reality is outlined in a speech Geert Wilders was to have given to the House of Lords in 2010:

“There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never go away. First, there is Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect.”

We do indeed. We recall the “perfect man” of the Renaissance, l’uomo universale. Where Western nations have taken great care to separate church and state, in Islam the two are not separable, and therein lies the power of the new Ottomans.

 

Informed discussions about Islam are confined to a small group of intellectuals.
Tommy Robinson/Peter McLoughlin, Why do Muslims Kill for the Koran?

Philosophy has always had an uneasy relationship with political power, while Islam is and always was a political project. Religion is an introductory course for the fearful.

It would seem that Islam is going to defeat the West by virtue of the fact that Muslims are metaphysically equipped to play the long game. It does not matter to the individual Muslim whether or not the caliphate is established during his lifetime. Eventually, the ummah will have triumphed and he, a leaf on a tree, will have aided the blessed brotherhood in the name of Allah. But what happens if the Muslim arrivistes in Europe adopt not just training shoes, rap music, gold chains and infantile patois, but also the atheistic default position which does not admit of the existence of an afterlife? They may want to hurry things along a little. This is when explosions begin, rental cars mount the sidewalk, and throats start getting cut. And much as the media would like us to believe that the constant stream of Muslim attacks in Europe are carried out by lone wolves with mental health issues, the ummah may have their own provisional wing. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, in Infidel:

“Shortly after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Asra Nomani, a Muslim reformer, spoke out about what she calls the ‘honour brigade’ – an organised international cabal hell-bent on silencing debate on Islam.”

And Islam has had reinforcements. In the last 20 years since 9/11, the ardent believers have been augmented by auxiliary squadrons of white Western liberal progressive post-modernes who see Islam as a perfect weapon against their hated homelands. Not that it necessarily needs help, as Islam has also mastered the weaknesses of those who will soon no longer be master in their own house. They are being out-thought by those who have abandoned reason.

While Islam may be deficient philosophically, there is nothing wrong with their grasp of psychology. Following Jews, and in turn followed by blacks, Muslims have worked out exactly how to play the sensibilities of the white West. The first stratagem is the reawakening of the ancient concept of the insult. Westerners, being post-tribal, are relatively indifferent to being insulted. Their acceptance of an insult is in fact an example of Christian forgiveness. Muslims, in stark contrast, have weaponised feeling insulted in line with the gathering storm of woke sensibilities. Frans Groenendinjk writes, in Islamophobia – Defying the Battle Cry:

“The strategy of feeling insulted is certainly part of the agenda of the fundamentalists and extremists…”

The key to successful victimhood was the term “Islamophobia.” Pascal Bruckner, in a 2011 essay titled The Invention of Islamophobia, gives a history of the term:

“At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia’. The aim of this word is to render Islam inviolate.”

Christopher Hitchens, in The Enemy, shows how the word is deployed:

“A hitherto marginal propaganda term, ‘Islamophobia’ underwent a mainstream baptism and was pressed into service to intimidate those who suspected that faith might have something to do with it.”

The result of this new edict was not only that writers became reluctant to mention Islam, but also that Westerners began blaming themselves for the state of affairs in which welcome guests could be so insulted. In Fistfights with Muslims in Europe, Julian Langness writes that:

“There was the equally shameful self-flagellation constantly displayed by Europeans, both in their personal conversation and in the media and politics. I came to know this very well in the discussions I had with them during this time. No immigrant could commit a crime, no matter how heinous, without the Europeans jumping over themselves to take the blame. They spoke of European racism, of the history of colonialism, of socio-economic disparities, and of their failures to help immigrants make as much money as native Europeans. And in fact these were the least of their attacks on themselves.”

This self-flagellation and reluctance to speak of Islam for fear of offence even mutates into veneration, as Melanie Phillips writes in the preface to Douglas Murray’s Islamophilia:

“In Britain, the US and other parts of the English-speaking world, many people appear to have succumbed to a strange cultural disorder. When it comes to the subject of Islam, they give vent to a star-struck adoration and suspension which they apply to no other religion, institution or cause.”

This is the way Islam will make the West acquiesce. It will not sweep in Ottoman hordes across the nations and empires of Europe, but combine steady immigration with the gradual domination of local politics, and lash together “Islamophobia” with a very useful sense of guilt readily available among the kufr. The Islamisation of Europe will be – is now – a quiet revolution, bar the occasional explosion. We may not notice it is happening until it is far, far too late. A novel with this theme is Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.

 

Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.
Arabic proverb

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission, the France of 2020 elects an Islamic government. Houellebecq has form when it comes to “insulting” Islam, having previously been tried for hate speech and also having made various verboten comments in interviews concerning the Western elites’ favourite brand. But the critics who couldn’t wait to pounce on Submission and its anticipated “Islamophobia” were left empty-handed.

For Houellebecq’s fictional Islamisation of France is no invasion; rather it comes as a welcome relief, the conservative nature of Islam serving as a corrective to the decadent, exhausted wreck France has become in the novel, as well as in reality. The novel does not paint a picture of an Islamic invasion of Europe, rather the acquiescence of an exhausted land mass to an invigorating and organising new cultural presence. The Islamists in Submission come not brandishing the whip of shariah but bring instead a conservative order France did not know it needed.

In Submission, the Islamisation of France is not shown as violent or aggressive, but as a slow and tactical takeover of the key estates of the French nation. At one point, the narrator watches an Islamic speaker much loved by the French media. Ibn Abbes is giving a talk on how the arrival of Islam will affect French education and, although the repression of free debate – or Socratic dialectics, if you will – is never mentioned, the implication is made with a smooth and underplayed aggression. Ibn Abbes is talking about a necessary turn back to religion (implying a concomitant turn away from philosophy):

“This return to religion was deep, it crossed sectarian lines, and state education could no longer afford to ignore it.”

Houellebecq’s vision of French acquiescence in the face of a resurgent Islam is echoed by French writer Guillaume Faye. He was unequivocal about the equivalence of Islamic immigration into Europe and colonization or reconquista. And, in The Colonisation of Europe, Faye pin-points the necessity that Europe imitate Islam, perhaps like those insects which can mimic the appearance of others to their advantage. Also, Faye sees Europe as too weak both intellectually and culturally, to fend for itself against the rampaging ummah:

“We will have to imitate Islam and violate the very laws we have adopted in order to come out safe and sound… I also feel that Europe, ultimately defined as Eurosiberia, will remain unable to apply these incorrect, or rather untimely (in the Nietzschean sense), principles, these axioms of liberation and reconquista, until it experiences a grave disaster. Let us wish the latter upon ourselves, for nothing else could awaken our youths and empower their inventiveness.”

So much for France, torn by violent Muslim rioting at the time of writing. What of the old enemy, England?

 

Britain belongs to Allah.
Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary

What has allowed Islam to march almost unimpeded into Europe is the religious void left by the death of Christianity. That death is part murder and part assisted suicide. The leaders of the Church of England, their relevance gone, have become Muslim cheerleaders. What a price England paid for her liberties and values, and how cheaply they are being sold. There is always white noise generated by British politicians about British values. But what are those values? Fair play? Ridiculous. No one outside of the England cricket team believes in any such thing. Decency? Walk through any shopping centre on a hot day and you almost come to believe that Muslims are right about women dressing more modestly. Justice? An expensive bauble only the rich can afford. As comedian Stephen Fry says, the doors of justice are open to all, as are the doors of the Ritz Hotel. Neighbourliness? People live years without talking to their neighbours, who increasingly speak a foreign language. The old adage about people in the east end of London leaving their doors open is as alien to the English now as the farthest galaxy.

No. British values now are – with, of course, many millions of exceptions outside of the kaleidoscope of the media – hatred of the heterodox, the worship of celebrity, football, self-loathing, worthless and debased education, submission to Islam, public drunkenness, vulgarity of dress, an obsession with motor cars, incompetent over-management, adultery, consumerism, financial over-extension, crass loudness in all activities, stupidity and television.

As for any philosophical values Britain might still lay claim to, rather, Western governments have used Islam’s doctia ignorantia as a model for their own repression of free thought.

 

The facts were plain: Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done.
Michel Houellebecq, Submission

We will finish by reflecting on an excerpt from The River War by one of the greatest of all Englishmen, Sir Winston Churchill:

“Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science – the science against which it had vainly struggled – the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”

“Sheltered in the strong arms of science.” Churchill may have put too much faith in the wonders of science, its handmaiden, technology, and eventually their offspring, technocracy.