Editorial

Confronting the Spiritual Vacuum in a Secularized West MILITANT ISLAM: A WAKE-UP CALL FOR
CATHOLICS AND THE WEST by Fr. Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph.D.

Over past weeks, two unprecedented signs of hope involving militant Islam and the West, and two events that give cause for concern, have gone almost unnoticed. They barely created a blip on the screens of the well-oiled media machines that are minting money from the daily updates they provide on terrorist atrocities, suicide bombings, kidnappings and general mayhem for readers of newspapers, and for TV viewers around the world.
The first sign of hope was a Security Council resolution that supported the full independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon, and called on Syria to withdraw all its armed forces from Lebanon. US Ambassador to the UN John G. Danforth explained: 'We have called on the Security Council to ... support the Lebanese people in their ability to make their own national decisions, free at long last from outside coercion and dictate'.₁ The long-suffering people of Lebanon, Christians and Muslims alike, and Lebanon-watchers generally, have been waiting almost 30 years to see the Syrian lion called to heel. It remains to be seen whether the young lion - Bashar al-Assad - proves more compliant than his late tricky father, Hafiz al-Assad.
The second sign of hope was given by the US State Department that designated Saudi Arabia as a 'country of particular concern under the International Religious Freedom Act for particularly severe violations of religious freedom'. The State Department report identified the victims of Saudi oppression as Baha'is, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans and Sufi Muslims.₂ It remains to be seen whether this isolated flash of reality-politics will usher in a new era of realism in US relations with the corrupt Saudi regime whose Wahhabism has spawned much of the terror and hatred of the West that has plagued the world not just since September 11, 2001 but since the 18th century.
The first cause for concern involved calls by Spanish Muslims for Cordova Cathedral to be 'returned' to them as a Mosque. Father Samir Khalil, a Professor at St Joseph's University in Beirut and the Pontifical Institute for Oriental Studies in Rome commented that the support given to this call by certain Spanish government members showed 'how much Europe had lost its identity'. He went on, 'many Spanish Muslims have the idea of re-conquering Europe'. None of the Spanish Muslims seemed aware that before Cordova Cathedral was turned into a Mosque in 750 AD by Yusuf bin Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri, it had been the Church of San Vicente. Spanish Catholics, unlike their English counterparts, managed to regain possession of confiscated Churches. Politically correct bluster should be met by them with cold facts, not crass acquiescence in historical gobbledegook.
The second cause for concern was an article₃ by John Christopher Hughes Davies who writes under the name of Christie Davies. The article begins by suggesting that there is no need to fear a violent conflict in Britain between Islamists and the non-Islamic population. Most Muslims living here, writes Davies, are just as concerned as their nominally Christian neighbours about health, education, employment, their children, home ownership, superannuation and retirement in comfort. They are not going to put these at risk, nor do they feel any great animosity towards their Christian neighbours with whom they must deal on a day-to-day basis.
That doesn't mean, however, that Muslims may not take over the country. But if they do it will be by default; by peaceful, even democratic, means: made possible by the much vaunted liberalism of the West which neither expects nor permits any of us to take pride in our particular national or religious identity. It will be the spontaneous consequence of uncontrolled immigration, demographic collapse and cultural and religious decline. Islam will fill the vacuum left by the wholesale repudiation of Christian values and tradition and the systematic uprooting of Catholicism from the hearts of children in our schools and students at university, and especially through the media.
'The Muslim takeover of Britain will happen slowly, and by stealth. In the future anyone who dares to oppose it will be prosecuted before and condemned by Britain's politicized judiciary, probably without benefit of trial by jury, ostensibly for stirring up religious hatred. Britain's New Labour rulers undervalue and condemn the moderate solidarity of the indigenous people, yet fail to condemn the obsessive group-mindedness of the Muslims, Britain's left-wing elite have undermined the British family, caused the birthrate to collapse, subsidized illegitimacy and deprived fathers of rights in the name of feminism, yet they say nothing about the tyranny of the Muslim extended family and its willingness to treat women as objects to be bartered and battered and as machines to produce sons. They cannot see that secularisation has led to the collapse of Britain's moral order, nor that Muslim zeal is contrary to the core values of their society.

Folie à Millions

The four pieces of the militant Islamic jigsaw listed above should be viewed in the context of Eric Fromm's contention that the history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.₄
Anyone so ignorant or imprudent as to ignore or be indifferent to this fact, must surely have been roused from torpor by events of the past few years. Acts of terror in the name of Allah, designed to kill and maim primary victims and to shock and horrify and paralyse the secondary victims - the bystanders - have been met by unplanned, often irrational and more often than not involuntary, reactions. TV and the media generally, especially the internet, have given new meaning to the words 'bystander," and 'onlooker'. Not always unwittingly, the media have become Terrorism's fifth column as they carry its grisly message, and extend its scope world-wide until no corner of the planet is immune to it.
Fromm may not have been the first, but he undoubtedly was one of the most articulate psychoanalysts to point out that just as there folie à deux - delusions shared by more than one persons - there is also insanity of millions. Call it what you like - folie à famille or mass hysteria - it is real, and its power is fearsome. The sheer magnitude of the insanity can blind one to the fact that consensus in error [even by millions] does not transform error into truth.
Like individuals, societies are not immune to pathological conditions such as paranoid thinking, fanaticism and automaton-like thinking. Somehow or another we have to penetrate and dispel the mists of rationalization, political correctness, self-delusion and xenophobia that mask truth and destroy freedom. No society is totally free from pathological thinking.

Paralysis, Indifference and Incautious Writing

The past three years have seen more widespread interest in the history, teachings, political theories and personalities of Islam than in the three hundred years that preceded September 11, 2001.
Catholic response to the revival of militant Islam ranges from reasoned and well-informed argument to supine indulgence motivated sometimes by ignorance, and sometimes by a seeming desire for peace with Militant Islam at any price.
For reasons that I have no time to go into here, dialogue with Islam - in any win-win sense - has always proved to be difficult if not impossible.
But if we can't yet dialogue meaningfully, prudence requires that policy makers and those entrusted with the welfare of our societies listen to what others who do not share their values, are saying; and that they read what is being written or otherwise disseminated through the media.
Islamic extremists are reading what we write, listening to what we say, and learning about us from what we do and especially from how we react. Not to act as they do is foolishness.

Fourth Generation Warfare?

Al-Qa'ida runs a bi-weekly internet magazine called Al-Ansar: for the struggle against the crusader war. Abu Ubeid al-Qurashi, one of Usama bin Laden's closest aides writing in it, described the September 11 bombings by bin Laden as 'asymmetric warfare' using terminology developed by US military experts₅ describing what they called Fourth Generation Warfare. This is how al-Qurashi summed up their thought:
'Fourth generation warfare, the experts said, is a new type of war in which fighting will be mostly scattered. The battle will not be limited to destroying military targets and regular forces, but will include civil societies and will seek to destroy popular support for the fighters within the enemies' society. In these wars, the experts stated in their article, television news will become a more powerful operational weapon than armoured divisians' [our italics].

The US military experts who authored this article would be mortified to learn that their thoughts published in their Marine Corps Gazette may have inspired the attack on America's heartland where Americans believed they were untouchable.

Man the Unknown

Alexis Carrel [1873-1944] would be surprised to learn of his influence on the major contemporary radical Islamic groups who, for the most part, derive their inspiration from the teachings of Said Qutb in Egypt and al-Mawdudi in Pakistan.

Religious and Cultural Cringe
THE story of Western apologists for Islam be it militant Islam or otherwise, is familiar. Since the French revolution and Napoleonic wars, so many British intellectuals have tended to espouse the cause of their country's enemies. They do so, it seems, because of their dissatisfaction with what they see as their countrymen's unromantic and materialistic existence, and sometimes because of dissatisfaction with their status in their own country. Napoleon had the support of Fox, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Byron, each of whom had grievances. Fox was angry that his beloved father, a supporter of the king, had not received a peerage.
Stalin had many a poet and journalist to champion him here. When Khrushchev discredited Stalin, they transferred their allegiance to Mao, Castro, Guevara or successive African dictators. For we must always remember the Western radical intellectual's wish to identify with the world's rising and most frightening power. Coleridge spoke of Napoleon's British admirers possessing a 'prostration of the soul'
But British Napoleonists differed from British Stalinists, and were similar to today's Muslimists in one respect. They did not want the foreign power to rule Britain. Byron said that Napoleon was his hero 'on the Continent; I don't want him here'. Those feminist columnists and academics - proclaiming Islam's great past - do not want to have to go veiled in their native Camden Town or Islington. Their game is to use Islam to demoralize Western bourgeois life.
Between the world wars, one of the most vocal champions of Islam and the Arabs, and a hostile critic of Britain's treatment of both, was the Arabist Harry St John Philby. He died in the arms of his exceptionally devoted son, Kim. Perhaps - no longer able to spy for the Soviet Union - Kim Philby would today seek to undermine despised bourgeois Britain, and our hated friend the United States, by proclaiming Islam's virtues.
Frank Johnson. 'Why Western Intellectuals Champion their Country's most Powerful Enemies,'
The Spectator, September 18, 2004.

According to Qutb, a leading figure in the Muslim Brothers, condemned to death for his involvement in a plot to assassinate former Egyptian President Nasser, all polytheists, hypocrites, Jews, Christians, secular rulers, communist states and capitalist systems, have conspired to undermine Islam and are to be resisted.
A major influence in Qutb's thought was an Arabic translation of L'homme, cet inconnu a book published in French in 1935 by Alexis Carrel - he developed the Carrel Suture for stitching blood vessels and received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1912. The problem is that Carrel also wrote a damning indictment of western society and suggested that the laws of natural selection, brutally suspended in favour of uniformity and standardisation, should be restored to their vital role: two techniques, he said, are indispensible for the perpetuation of the strong: eugenics and euthanasia: Eugenics is necessary because 'a great race must propagate its best elements. Euthanasia ensures that the gradual disappearance of creatures who infect the body politic with terminal diseases.' Among comments made by this well-meaning but injudicious thinker, is the following ominous prophecy that is still finding ears all too ready to seek its fulfilment:
It is a well-established fact that discipline gives great strength to men. An ascetic and mystic minority would rapidly acquire an irrisistable power over the dissolute and degraded majority. Such a minority would be in a position to impose, by persuasion or perhaps by force, other ways of life upon the majority'.₆

Not surprisingly, both Qutb and al-Mawdudi put Jihad at the forefront of Islamic obligations, and drew hope and fuel for their anti-Christian and anti- Western zealotry from the writings of a man for whom - despite his pessimistic musings - nothing was further from his mind than the destruction of Christian civilization and culture.
In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Jihad 'means the conquest of all non-Muslim territories. It will be incumbent on every able-bodied adult man to volunteer for this war of conquest whose final goal is the domination of Qur'anic Law from one end of the earth to the other'.
The conspiracy of silence in the mass-media when fundamentalist Islamic violations of the rights of Muslims and non-Muslim minorities is concerned, has done much to convince the likes of Usama bin Laden that their cause is just and that many in the West approve of it.

The Problem

That non-Muslims have a problem with Militant Islam is clear from events that range from before the death of Muhammad in 632 AD to the time of writing. Scholars may argue about the extent to which violence is inculcated in the Qur'an and the Hadiths, but the incontestable fact is that from the very beginning, Islam's expansion which occurred by force of arms, was justified by verses from the prophet's writings.
The Qur'an continues to be used in this fashion with no significant protest from the majority of Muslims. Al-Qa'ida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith posted a three-part article 'In the Shadow of the Lances' on the website of the Centre for Islamic Research and Studies.₇ Among other things, Abu Gheith states that the whole earth must be subjected to Islam, and that al- Qa'ida has the right to kill four million Americans:

'How can [a Muslim] possibly accept humiliation and inferiority when he knows that his nation [Islam] was created to stand at the centre of leadership, at the centre of hegemony and rule ... how can he possibly [accept humiliation and sacrifice] when he knows that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah - not to the East, not to the West - to no ideology and to no path save the Path of Allah...
'We have the right to kill four million Americans - two million of them children - and to exile twice as many and to wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the Americans' chemical and biological weapons. America today knows only the language of force.'

Few can be unaware of the chaos that has descended upon post-Saddam Hussein Iraq since the invasion by the US and her allies last year. This is not the place, nor do we have time, for me to outline arguments against the West's involvement in Iraq. At least 1,000 US soldiers have already died, and estimates of civilian deaths among Iraqis hover around 30,000. The fact that no official figures are released for the Iraqi losses confirm in the minds of Muslims the West's indifference to their sufferings and add fuel to the fire of the extremists.
At a meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York in March 2003 a guest speaker for the Muslim Student Association [MSA] by name Fahid declared, 'We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it ... eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.'₈
The MSA promotes itself as a non-political religious organisation devoted to celebrating Islam and providing students with a healthy venue for developing their faith.
Stephen Schwartz, Executive Director of the Centre for Islamic Plurealism stated in his June 2003 testimony before the US Senate's Committee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,

'Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80% of American mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of between 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control - which means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching, including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyad, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in mosques and bookshops, notices on Bulletin Boards and organisational and charitable solicitation.'₉

Demanding that Universities become more 'Muslim friendly' the Muslim Student Association's newly established National Religious Accommodation Task Force [RATF] directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims.₁₀

Some obstacles in the way of understanding Militant Islam

The fact that history is scarcely taught in our schools. Reading of history is essential for understanding Islamic thought. In the few schools where history is taught, more often than not it is biased. The distorted 'history' of the early Church, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, that has been written by non-Catholics and secularists aimed at destroying the credibility of Catholicism, is now used by Muslims to support their view of the past.

Western double-think: Syria's Hafiz al-Assad was an 'ally' supporting the West in its attacks on the 'monster' Saddam Hussein during Bush Snr's First Gulf War. Most Muslims knew that Assad was as bad or worse than Hussein and were appalled by what they regarded as the hypocrisy of the West.

The Islamic belief that 'history' commences with the revelation of the Qur'an and that all before was the jahaliyya or 'Darkness' is reinforced by the anti-Catholic teaching that the Period before the Reformation was the 'Dark Ages,' and that no useful thought occurred between Plotinus and Francis Bacon.

The belief of some Western Power Brokers [who refuse to admit the possibility of modern, and democratic Islamic thought, in some way in harmony with its culture], that the only way to control the Militant Arabo-Muslim threat is to support regimes that keep them ignorant and powerless.

The support of the Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia, for Islamic Extremist Movements, and the diverting of funds via Petrodollars to control the press and the Arab media, and a significant part of the Islamic as well as Western 'intelligentia' - all have tended to obscure the efforts of Islamic reformers trying to 'modernise' Islam.

The impossibility of finding among Muslims themselves unanimity regarding authority to speak on their behalf. If as Ali Abdel Razzak claimed [1994] the Caliphate [never a universally accepted authority in Islam] is not necessary for the government of Islamic societies, then what is the alternative? Who will speak for the Muslims on religio-political matters?

The fact that when Muslims who are used to living under Islamic regimes come to the West, they find a pluralist and secular society where religion is separate from the state. Unless they are well-informed about the nature of western-democracies they will fall back on their own, inward looking, politico-religious society, and not enter fully or at all into the civil and secular nature of authority and law in their new home out of fear of commiting the sin of shirk by agreeing that anyone other than God has power and authority. With disastrous consequences for them and for their adopted country.

The West's continuing refusal to admit that the Saudis play a key role in spreading Islamic fundamentalism by the Wahhabite-Saudi support for al-Qaida and Usama bin Laden; by their support for the Hanbalism of extremist theological centres, as well as for the brainwashing of Muslims who live on the periphery of Arabia [Nigerians, Sudanese, Malaysians, Indonesians etc] and make the Hajj. They have reduced the training time for Ulemas [teachers] from 15 years to 3-5 years, and exploit the internet.

Ignorance of the fact that the West provides a real, and often the only, chance for Islamic modernism and moderation to flourish. It is only in the West that Muslims can find total freedom of research and debate, for publishing, for discussing a broad range of ideas concerning their religion, and its spread by means of books, TV, conferences and the Internet - all activities impossible or prohibited in their countries of origin.

There is no unambiguous, non-foreign word for 'democracy' in Arabic. While 'democratic' ideas find a response in the hearts of many Muslim peoples, their understanding of 'democracy' often does not correspond to what people in the West think. It is not conditioned by centuries of pondering on the implications the Classical Greek model as in the West, but by their understanding of the Shari'a. Literalists among them will attempt to extract 'democratic' principles from Islamic Law; from the Muslim idea of shura [consultation] derived from the Qur'an, Sura 42, verse 38, they will arrive at the idea that governments should respect the desires of the people who do not want to live under non-Shari'a Law. This pseudo-democratic idea is the very base from which the Islamic extremists launch their often bloody assaults on what they regard as corrupt, illegitimate or oppressive Islamic regimes. By the same token they can and do appeal to this same understanding of 'democracy' to attack what they regard as 'corrupt' Western regimes.

The West's inability or unwillingness to help Muslim migrants to understand that they are welcome to live in Western countries provided they accept the democratic way of life, as understood in the West, and are willing to abide by the laws of the country; and acknowledge the legitimacy of its institutions.

Because al-Qaida seeks to unify the Muslim world against the West, and wants to hinder, by all means possible, the integration of Muslim minorities in European countries, or in the US or Australia, it is more important to bolster moderate influences in the communities, than to bomb Iraq; more important to promote integration than to risk the very real dangers of segregation.

Conclusion

Catholics have little to fear from Islam. We have much to fear from within ourselves if we ignore the perceptions Muslims have of us, and if we remain complacent when confronted by our government's support for Islamic regimes that oppress their own people. We also have much to fear from the theologically chattering classes. These have to be countered by a genuinely Catholic return to basics.
Catholics need only to rediscover the treasures of their Faith. Then perhaps they would not find it so hard to relate, for instance, to a St Raymond of Llull₁₁ who learnt Arabic and went among Muslim people like a beacon in the dark, and was stoned to death at Bougie₁₂ in what is today Algeria, North Africa. Or to Juan de Segovia [died around 1456] an important theologian and philosopher from Salamanca in Spain, a bishop and former Cardinal, who translated the Qur'an in a tri-lingual version - Latin, Spanish (and French) - and promoted meetings between Spanish Muslim and Catholic representatives to discuss the relative merits of each religion, and to arrive at some modus vivendi. He explained on one occasion to skeptics who doubted the value of such dialogue, 'Even if the meeting lasts ten years it will be less expensive and less damaging than war'.₁₃
As these early years of the third millennium devolve we may well wish that major players in Middle Eastern and world politics - amongst whom one must place the Fourth Estate [or is it now First Estate, I wonder?] - thought along the lines of Juan de Segovia.

The Lord's people

The Lord said to Paul: 'Do not be afraid; go on with your preaching and do not be silenced; for I am with you. ... There are many in this city who are my people'.
- Acts 18.9-10.

Our Holy Father sets us an example. He shines out like a single searchlight in what is otherwise the deepest night. He reaches out to Muslims as he reaches out to our Protestant and Orthodox separated brethren, as he does to Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, because he is Father of all of us.
Heraclius, the Byzantine Emperor at the time of the rise of Islam under Muhammad, seems to have had no idea that there was an economic downturn in his Province of Arabia, nor that the masses were restless, and that there was a religious and spiritual vacuum present that something would fill if care was not taken of the region's religious needs.
The Holy Father is only too aware of the spiritual vacuum that exists in the West, and is untiring in recalling us to our original fervour as Christians: reaffirming age-old truths that have been swept under the politically correct carpet in our struggle to gain acceptance from what has become an increasingly anti-religious and anti-Catholic business and social environment. If we Catholics fail in this task of revitalising our communities and the society in which we live, then the future will be bleak indeed.
But we shall not fail. We have guarantees given by our Lord. St John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Antioch and later Patriarch of Constantinople, friend of the Pope, a devoted Catholic, who was killed by supporters of the Empress Eudoxia in 407, shall have the last word:

The waves are many and the surging sea dangerous. But we are not afraid we may be drowned. For we are standing on the rock. Let the sea rage as it will, it cannot split the rock asunder. Though the waves tower on high, they cannot overwhelm the boat of Jesus. What, pray, are we afraid of? Death? 'For me life is Christ, and death gain.' But tell me, is it exile? 'The earth is the Lord's, and all it contains'. Is it the loss of property? We brought nothing into the world. It is certain we can take nothing out of it. The terrors of the world I despise, its treasures I deem laughable. I am not afraid of poverty, I do not long for wealth. I do not dread death, I do not pray to live, except to help you advance in virtue. So I simply note what is happening at present and I call on you, my dear people, to be of good heart.₁₄

USUN Press Release #153 (04) September 2, 2004.
See US State Department's Annual Report on International Religious Freedom 2004.
Letter from England, published in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles, from Rockford Illinois.
Eric Fromm, May Man Prevail, Doubleday Anchor Book, 1961, p.5.
The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,' Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, by Nightengale, Sutton, Schmitt and Wilson.
Carrell, 1935 p.358. English translation pp.295-6.
www.alneda.com
World/Net/Daily, Mar 18, 2003 at www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31571.
"Terrorism: growing Wahhabi influence in the United States,' testimony before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, June 26, 2003 www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2003_h/030626-Schwartz.htm.
Middle East Quarterly Spring 2004, Islamism's Campus Club: The Muslim Students' Association, by Jonathan Dowd-Gailey pp.66ff.
1233-1315 AD.
Famous for its wax candles - hence the French word for 'candle'
See R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge Mass. 1962, pp.91-2.
St John Chrysostom, Homilies [Before his Exile, nn.1-3]. The Roman Breviary, Matins for the Feast of the Saint, Second Reading.

From "Annals Australasia" October 2004

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