By Amir NOUR[1] for the Saker Blog
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,
now is the time of monsters”
(Antonio Gramsci)
Introduction: Between “apparent” and “real” History
Alvin Toffler, one of the world’s leading futurists, is often quoted, and with good reason, as saying that the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
In the same vein, in an interview given in 2014, Noam Chomsky was invited to comment on his book “Masters of Mankind”[2]—a collection of essays and lectures written between 1969 and 2013. Pointing out that the world has changed a great deal during that period, his interviewer asked him whether his understanding of the world had changed over time, and if so, what have been the most catalytic events in altering his perspective about politics. Chomsky—who was voted the world’s top public intellectual in 2005—offered the following answer “My understanding of the world has changed over time and I’ve learned a lot more about the past, and ongoing events regularly add new critical materials. I can’t really identify single events or people. It’s cumulative, a constant process of rethinking in the light of new information and more consideration of what I didn’t properly understand. However, hierarchical and arbitrary power remains at the core of politics in our world and the source of all evils”.
Such an answer underlines the relevance in the truthful, cold and hard words once famously uttered by Winston Churchill “Truth is the first casualty of war (and) history is written by the victors”. Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code[3], didn’t think otherwise when he wrote “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe”. And as Napoleon once said, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
This is also what Malek Bennabi[4]—arguably one of the greatest Muslim thinkers of the 20th century—alluded to when he stated “The real history of the modern world has yet to be written, because only its apparent history has been reported (and) it takes a certain sense of esotericism to actually penetrate the secrets and arcane of history (…) and to leave to the generation that comes sound and reliable information about the heredity of its own world”.[5]
Surely, one of the illustrations of this state of affairs is the history of Islam—a religion, a civilization today, more than ever before, finger-pointed by some as the source of many evils. For them, Islam has mutated into “Islamofascism”, a “new sworn foe” that a “coalition of the willing” from the “civilized world” is determined to confront by all available means in a looming “World War IV”.[6]
But what is, in fact, the truth of this matter through the ages? And what are the significance and the impact of the momentous events of 9/11 on that history? And, most importantly, what can one reasonably forecast with regard to the future of Islam and the Islamic world, particularly in view of what appears to be the twilight of the empire age and the dawn of a digital era, in the midst of a global moral vacuum and spiritual influx?
A brief history of a long struggle
What a large proportion of Muslims believe is a prophesied “Global war against Islam” is found in a popular hadith (a saying of Prophet Muhammad) dating back to over fourteen hundred years, according to which “the Messenger of Allah said: The nations are about to flock against you [the Muslims] from every horizon, just as hungry people flock to a kettle. We said: O Messenger of Allah, will we be few on that day? He said: No, you will be many in number, but you will be scum, like the scum of a flash-flood, without any weight, since fear will be removed from the hearts of your enemies, and weakness (Wahn in Arabic) will be placed in your hearts. We said: O Messenger of Allah, what does the word wahn mean? He said: Love of this world and fear of death”.
Whether or not authentic, this hadith all but rings true with both the present chaotic situation prevailing in the entire Muslim world, and with the ongoing ominous antagonism between the West and Islam. As a result, the much-feared “clash of civilizations” seems closer at hand than ever. Indeed, as exemplified by the testimony of Graham E. Fuller “Islam seems to lie behind a broad range of international disorders: suicide attacks, car bombings, military occupations, resistance struggles, riots, fatwas, jihads, guerrilla warfare, threatening videos, and 9/11 itself (…) Islam seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone, enabling us to make sense of today’s convulsive world”.[7]
Precisely, in order to make sense of this awful “apparent reality” and put it into an appropriate historical and geopolitical perspective, it certainly helps to recall some of the forgotten or misremembered history that prepared for it, from its remote origins to its different contemporary manifestations dramatically brought into focus by 9/11.
To this end, any retrospective overview of the relations between the West and Islam would likely be incomplete if it did not refer to Arnold J. Toynbee’s monumental study of history, which has been acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship.[8] It is worth noting that Toynbee published an interesting book[9] on the interactions between the West and Oriental civilizations, and that he worked for the British Foreign Office (within the Political Intelligence Department) during World War I.
Thus, addressing the issue of Islam’s place in History and its relations with the West, he wrote in 1948 “In the past, Islam and our Western society have acted and reacted upon one another several times in succession, in different situations and alternating roles. The first encounter between them occurred when the Western society was at its infancy and when Islam was the distinctive religion of the Arabs in their heroic age (…) Thereafter, when the Western civilization has surmounted the premature extinction and had entered upon a vigorous growth, while the would-be Islamic state was declining towards its fall, the tables were turned”. The British historian further noted that in that life-and-death struggle, Islam, like Christendom before it, had triumphantly survived.
Yet this was not the last act in the play, for “the attempt made by the medieval West to exterminate Islam failed as signally as the Arab empire-builders’ attempt to capture the cradle of a nascent Western civilization has failed before; once more, a counter-attack was provoked by the unsuccessful offensive. This time, Islam was represented by the Ottoman descendants of the converted Central Asian nomads.” After the final failure of the Crusades, Western Christendom stood on the defensive against this Ottoman attack during the late medieval and early modern ages of Western history. The Westerners managed to bring the Ottoman offensive to a halt in the wake of the battle of Vienna that lasted from 1683 until 1699 when a peace treaty between the Sublime Porte and the Holy League was signed at Karlowitz. Thereafter, having encircled the Islamic world and cast their net about it, they proceeded to attack their old adversary in its native lair.
The concentric attack of the modern West upon the Islamic world, according to Toynbee, has inaugurated the present encounter between the two civilizations, which he saw as “part of a still larger and more ambitious movement, in which the Western civilization is aiming at nothing less than the incorporation of all mankind in a single great society, and the control of everything in the earth, air and sea which mankind can turn to account by means of modern Western technique”. Thus, the contemporary encounter between Islam and the West “is not only more active and intimate than any phase of their contact in the past, it is also distinctive in being an incident in the attempt by the Western man to ‘westernize’ the world—an enterprise which will possibly rank as the most momentous, and almost certainly as the most interesting feature in history, even for a generation that has lived through two world wars.”
Toynbee drew the conclusion that Islam is once more facing the West its back to the wall; but this time the odds are more heavily against it than they were “even at the most critical moments of the Crusades, for the modern West is superior to it not only in arms, but also in technique of economic life, on which military science ultimately depends, and above all in spiritual culture—the inward force which alone creates and sustains the outward manifestations of what is called civilization”.[10]
From Deus to Prometheus
Has this perception evolved over time in the West? And who, better that Bernard Lewis, a leading Orientalist and Professor Emeritus at Princeton, could address that story? In the academic world, he is considered as the most distinguished living expert on the Middle East, and he is indeed amongst the very few historians who have ended up as historical actors in their own right. In his memoir[11], he recounts his wartime service in London and Cairo as an intelligence officer for MI6, and how after World War II he was granted the privilege to be the first Western scholar to enter the Ottoman archives. He further explains how he coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” in the 1950’s—which is historically untrue since this notion was first recorded in a book[12] written by Basil Mathews in 1926—and how September 11 catapulted him onto the world stage as a prominent mentor for a whole generation of American Neoconservatives. He can therefore hardly be viewed as a steadfast sympathizer of Islam.
And so, in another book precisely titled “Islam and the West”[13] published in 1993, Lewis recalls that in the great medieval French epic of the wars between Christians and Saracens (i.e. Arabs), the Chanson de Roland, the Christian poet endeavors to give his readers or, rather, listeners some idea of the Saracen religion. According to this vision, the Saracens worshiped a trinity consisting of three persons: Muhammad, the founder of their religion, and two others, both of them devils, Apollin and Tervagant”. He adds that “to us this seems comic, and we are amused by medieval man unable to conceive of religion or indeed of anything else except in his own image. Since Christendom worshiped its founder in association with two other entities, the Saracens also had to worship their founder, and he too had to be one of a trinity, with two demons co-opted to make up the number”. Lewis then rightfully draws a parallel saying that just as medieval Christian man could conceive of religion only in terms of a trinity, so his modern descendant can conceive of politics only in terms of a theology, or, as we say nowadays, ideology, of left-wing and right-wing forces and factions.
Bernard Lewis also pointed out to the recurring unwillingness on the part of many Westerners to recognize the nature of Islam, or even the fact that Islam, as an independent, different, and autonomous religion persists and recurs from medieval to modern times. One can see it, he explains, in the nomenclature adopted to designate the Muslims since “it was a long time before Christendom was even willing to give them a name with a religious meaning”. Indeed, for many centuries, both Eastern and Western Christendom called the followers of the Prophet “Saracens”, a world of uncertain etymology but “clearly of ethnic and not religious connotation (…) in the Iberian Peninsula, where the Muslims whom they met came from Morocco, they called them the Moors; in most of Europe, Muslims were called Turks, or, farther east, Tatars, another ethnic name loosely applied to the Islamized steppe peoples who for a while dominated Russia”. And until recently, Lewis further clarifies “even when Europe began to recognize that Islam was a religious and not an ethnic community, it expressed this realization in a sequence of false analogies, beginning with the names given to the religion of its followers, Muhammedanism and Muhammedans”.
The deeper history, as asserted by James Carroll[14], shows that this supposedly inherent conflict between Islam and the West “has its origins more in the ‘West’ than in the House of Islam. The image of Muslims as prone to violence by virtue of their religion was mainly constructed across centuries by Europeans seeking to bolster their own purposes”.
If truth be told, how else might we justify, for instance, the astonishing statement made by William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of Great Britain[15], in the House of Commons in the 19th century? Holding up a Qur’an, he cried out “As long as a copy of this accursed book survives there can be no justice in the world”.[16] And how else might we interpret the following opinions later expressed by Basil Mathews and Bernard Lewis, both of them agents of MI6 and true believers in the “Clash of Civilizations”—well before Samuel Huntington’s essay and later book which generated a global debate?[17]
Mathews writes in his book[18] that the Qur’an “is a fixed system of theocracy, conceived in a tribal desert chaos. In the modern world it defies every tendency of modern, democratic, responsible, secular government. This is why Turkey has thrown over the Koran as a rule of the state. And if it does not rule the state, it rules nothing; for the religious attitude and social regulations of Islam are two sides of the one coin. They cannot be separated and remain Islam. Mohammedan Islam is the negation of progress erected into a divinely ordained system. We are tied by Islam to a reverence for Mohammed himself. Our minds, however, are appalled at the murders, the unnatural marriages, the cruelty, the brigandage and the sensuality. As a seventh century Arab the Prophet was wonderful; as a twentieth century hero and leader—not to say saint—he is impossible”.[19]
Lewis’s opinion on Islam is no different. Thus, in an attempt to explain “why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified” he says in a supercilious Atlantic Monthly article[20] of September 1990, “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival”.
Aladdin, the travel ban and the hate factory
It is a fact that Americans are among the most educated people in the world. Yet, it is also a fact that they are among the least educated about the world in general and the Arab and Muslim world in particular. They themselves admit the truthfulness of this flaw and many among them would wish to see it corrected.
This “knowledge gap” about the region was the subject of a wide-ranging poll of the American public entitled “The Arab Image in the US”, conducted by Arab News/YouGov between 17-21 March 2017.
Respondents answered 24 close-ended questions mainly pertaining to news-related behaviors, knowledge and interest in visiting the Arab and Muslim world, the rise of Islamophobia, opinions on Arabs who have migrated to the United States, and the perceived role of media portraying the real image of this part of the world.
Among other results of this survey, 81% of respondents couldn’t identify the Arab region on a map; over three-quarters said they would not consider travelling there because it is too dangerous; 65% admitted to knowing little about the region, with 30% having no interest in understanding it further. But, the most stagggering finding was that more than a fifth of those surveyed said the “Sultanate of Agrabah”—the fictional city from Disney’s motion “Aladdin”—is a real part of the Arab world. An even higher proportion (38%) said they would be happy with a “Travel ban” on citizens of Agrabah should they be proven a threat. A previous poll conducted by Public Policy Polling during the 2016 American presidential campaign found that 30% of Republican voters supported “bombing Agrabah”, though, thankfully, 57% of them said they were not sure!
David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)—a polling expert who has studied attitudes in the region and US-Arab relations for a long time—agrees that it is a negative and grim picture and believes it is due to a combination of factors. For some people in the US “it is a general sense of isolationism” and “a trend where people are like this with all foreign countries and not only the Arabs,” he said. Others are “prejudiced” but most importantly, “there is a kind of tendency to associate the whole region with terrorism, refugees and civil war. The region does not have a positive image and a lot of it is based on ignorance and narrow-mindedness.”
The shocking findings of this poll would’ve probably gone unnoticed had they not been the reflection of the true measure of the lack of knowledge, if not ignorance, driving both the American longstanding and often unwise policies of the successive administrations and people’s perceptions toward this tormented region. It is a feature that is all the more incomprehensible today as this region has become the main, if not the sole graveyard for thousands of young American and other Western soldiers sent into the fray to foreign lands under the guise of a foolish “war on terror” turned into a “war for terror”.
Prior to these and other numerous similar surveys and studies, American Professor of Mass Communications and award-winning film authority, Jack G. Shaheen, had dissected this topic. He did so in a ground-breaking book[21] published in January 2001, and later in a film[22] produced by Media Education Foundation, both with the same title “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People”.
In this meticulously researched study of one thousand films—dating from cinema’s earliest days in 1896 to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters featuring machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing “evil” Arabs—Shaheen documented the tendency to portray Arabs and Muslims as “Public Enemy number 1”, who are “brutal, heartless, uncivilized Others bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners”. He found that out of those 1000 movies that have Arab and Muslim characters, 12 were positive depictions, 52 were neutral portrayals, and 936 were negative.
He was thus able to spotlight anti-Muslim and Arab stereotypes and to probe the intersections of popular culture and foreign policy. To this effect, he recounted how, historically, the strategic stereotyping of populations has been used to garner popular support for governmental policies, citing the career of Leni Riefenstahl and speeches by Lenin and Goebbels to illustrate film’s long history as a propaganda vehicle.
Shaheen explained that what he tried to do was “to make visible what too many of us seem not to see: a dangerously consistent pattern of hateful Arab stereotypes, stereotypes that rob an entire people of their humanity (…) All aspects of our culture project the Arab as villain. That is a given. There is no deviation. We have taken a few structured images and repeated them over and over again (…) We inherited the Arab image primarily from Europeans. In the early days, maybe 150 years, 200 years ago, the British and the French who travelled to the Middle East, and those who didn’t travel to the Middle East, conjured up these images of the Arab as the Oriental other[23]. These fabricated images have then been taken by Americans”. The Arab image in the U.S. began to deteriorate further immediately after World War II according to Shaheen. Three major events have impacted the change: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in which the United States has unequivocally supported Israel; the Arab oil embargo in the 1970’s, which angered Americans when gas prices went through the ceiling; and the Iranian Revolution, which increased Arab-American tensions when Iranian students took American diplomats hostage for more than a year. These three pivotal events “brought the Middle East into the living rooms of Americans and together helped shape the way movies stereotyped Arabs and the Arab world”.
Of all the Department of Defense films, Shaheen pointed out, the one that will stand the test of time as being the most racist is “Rules of Engagement”, which was written by former Secretary of the Navy James Webb. And “if you go and you see the new film called ‘The Kingdom’, Arab children again are portrayed as terrorists. So what’s happening now is the trend has taken us to a point where we look at all those people, namely Arabs and Muslims, as the enemy other, even children”.
Commenting on the film in an interview given to Democracy Now!, Jack Shaheen said that “the humanity is not there. And if we cannot see the Arab humanity, what’s left? If we feel nothing, if we feel that Arabs are not like us or not like anyone else, then let’s kill them all. Then they deserve to die, right? Islamophobia now is a part of our psyche. Words such as ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ are perceived as threatening words. And if the words are threatening, what about the images that we see in the cinema and on our television screens?” He concluded by affirming that “Politics and Hollywood’s images are linked. They reinforce one another: policy enforces mythical images; mythical images help enforce policy”. Indeed, as Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America has said “Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA”.
The priests of war and the “Islamic” terrorism
In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell said that the political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. This essay, as well as his other famous classic “1984”, published in 1949, are so profound as to be as much relevant today as they were in the aftermath of WWII.
Thus, in January 2017, the dystopian novel “1984” sold out on Amazon in the U.S. after it rose up to the top of the site’s bestsellers list. This ascent to the top began when Donald Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, coined the phrase “alternative facts”, after she was asked to explain the reason of Press Secretary Sean Spicer making a statement which was filled with inaccuracies. Journalists soon started to label Conway’s comment as “Orwellian”. One of them even concluded that “truth” is being redefined as whatever the U.S. government, NATO and their Western interests say is true, and disagreement with the West’s “group thinks”, no matter how fact-based the dissent is, becomes “fake news”.
So is the case concerning the story of “Islamic terrorism”[24], which led to an unprecedented level of Islamophobia in the Western world nowadays. Long before the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the American media has broadcast fears of “terrorism” with the clear message that Arabs and Muslims are, if not terrorists, at least extremists prone to violence and terrorism. And as the record shows, according to American political writer Michael Collins Piper[25]—unsurprisingly labelled as a conspiracy theorist by Jewish groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, Bnai B’rith, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Middle East Media Research Institute—when the media outlets turn to “experts” for information about terrorism, more often than not they rely on sources with close ties to Israel and its American lobby.
Piper recalled that in 1989, Pantheon Books published a little-noticed volume[26] that provides a stark and revealing look at the development and growth of the “terrorism industry”. In this book, co-authors Professor Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan of the University of Pennsylvania, provided a comprehensive overview of the way that powerful private special interest (both domestic and foreign) have worked together with government agencies in the United States and internationally to influence the way that the world looks upon the phenomenon of modern-day terrorism.
The public, therefore, learns of terrorist activity from the government and from overwhelmingly right-wing “experts” who confirm and reinforce state policy discourse, and the mass media, thus missing a balanced perspective, usually serves as gullible conduits for promoting stereotypes and biased information, if not outright propaganda. One has to recall what historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote about the methods used by “the enemies of truth to suppress those historians who dare to lift the veil on reasons for world events (…) I charge that the articulate publicists of our country, by their semi-hysterical words in print and speech in which they champion extremes of diplomatic and military policy, are driving us rapidly into a war of unlimited and unattainable objectives which will bring on a gigantic catastrophe of ruin and revolution at home and abroad (…) By articulate publicists I mean those speakers and writers ranging from editors, novelists, magazine writers, columnists, dramatists, radio writers, lecturers, college professors, and educators, to senators and other elected officials, cabinet members, political leaders and presidents. When what they write and talk about becomes a united theme of agreement, action follows as certainly as butter follows the churning of sour cream”[27].
Numerous reports and investigations have indeed shed a light on the Islamophobia network of so-called experts, academics, media outlets, and donors who manufacture, produce, distribute, and mainstream fear, bigotry, hate and lies against Muslims and Islam in the United States such as: “Sharia is a threat to America”; “mosques are Trojan horses”; “radical Islam has infiltrated America, the government and mainstream Muslim organizations”; “there is no such thing as moderate Islam”; “practicing Muslims cannot be loyal Americans”, and so on and so forth. Two such reports[28] were released in 2011 and 2015, which revealed that close to 200 million dollars have been spent to support anti-Muslim activities.
One of the beneficiaries of these funds is Robert Spencer’s website “Jihad watch”, which received more than $500,000 in donations between 2001 and 2009. The ideas propagated by Spencer—long known for endeavoring to cast Islam as a diabolical threat that must be eradicated[29]—have inescapably resonated in America and elsewhere. A case in point is the story of Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist who, on 22 July 2011, committed the worst mass killing his native peaceful Scandinavian country, Norway, has seen since WWII. In his 1,500-page manifesto entitled “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence”[30], Breivik referred to Spencer and his website 162 times. In the own words of the Washington Post “the monster who admitted slaughtering at least 76 innocent victims in Norway was animated by the same blend of paranoia, xenophobia and alienation that fuels anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. Yes, it could happen here”.[31]
Moreover, this powerful Islamophobia industry seems to have succeeded in gaining the upper hand over those trying to speak out to counter its politics of fear. Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian recounts this epic struggle in an article[32], which she concluded by stating that “Ideologues are seeking to marginalize Muslims by making their speech and their activism relating to their religion come at a very high price. They believe that Muslims are malevolent, duplicitous, and dangerous, and these Islamophobes will bend the truth to fit their claims. In the process, they are denying Islam the same functional rights that Christianity enjoys and silencing the very people best poised to reconcile Islam with modern American life. Which may be the very point”.
The “war against terrorism” has thus become part and parcel of the neoconservative long-range view and political agenda, in which Professor Bernard Lewis played a prominent role thanks also to the media which has consistently promoted his lectures and books.
Explaining Bernard Lewis’s scholar and political role in an excellent article[33] written in December 2002, Lamis Andoni says that Lewis’s work, especially his inflammatory book “What Went Wrong: Western impact and Middle Eastern Responses”––released in January 2002 shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks but written shortly before—has been an essential source of what was practically a manifesto for advocates of U.S. military intervention towards “establishing democracy in the Middle East”. This appreciation was indeed confirmed by Paul Wolfowitz in March 2002. Speaking via video phone at a special ceremony held in Tel Aviv to honour the leading Orientalist, he said “Bernard Lewis brilliantly placed the relationships and the issues of the Middle East into their larger context with truly objective, original and always independent thought. Bernard has taught [us] how to understand the complex and important history of the Middle East and use it to guide us where we will go next to build a better world for generations”. It was also confirmed on 5 April 2003, by the New York Times which described the book as having been a major influence on Bush administration thinking.
By declaring that the peoples of the Middle East—meaning Arabs and Muslims—have failed to catch up with modernity and have fallen into “a downward spiral of hatred and rage”, Lewis has not only exonerated American imperial policies and provided a moral and historical justification for Washington’s “war on terror”, but has also emerged as chief ideologue for the re-colonization of the Arab world. Andoni drew the latter reflection from the conclusion of the book in which Lewis says “If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination”.
All of the above has been aptly summed up in James Carroll’s aforementioned article which he concluded by stating that this inherited European habit of politicized paranoia is masterfully continued by freaked-out leaders of post 9/11 America. They too, he adds, like prelates, crusaders, conquistadores, and colonizers have turned fear of Islam into a source of power, and this history teaches that such self-serving projection can indeed result in the creation of an enemy ready and willing to make the nightmare real…
It is against that essential backdrop that we will set the events of 9/11 and their impact on the contemporary relations between the West and Islam, in a forthcoming analysis.
* * *
- Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the book “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (“The Orient and the Occident in time of a new Sykes-Picot”), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014: downloadable free of charge, by clicking on the following links:http://algerienetwork.com/blog/lorient-et-loccident-a-lheure-dun-nouveau-sykes-picot-par-amir-nour/ (French)
http://algerienetwork.com/blog/العالم-العربي-على-موعد-مع-سايكس-بيكو-ج/ (Arabic) ↑ - Noam Chomsky, “Masters of Mankind: Essays and lectures, 1969-2013”, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2014. ↑
- Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code”, Doubleday, 2003. ↑
- Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) was an Algerian writer and philosopher who devoted most of his life to observe and analyze History to understand the general laws behind the rise and fall of civilizations. He is mostly known for having coined the concept of “colonizability” (the inner aptitude to be colonized) and even the notion of “mondialisme” (Globalism). ↑
- Translated from Arabic. In Malek Bennabi, “2ج وجهة العالم الإسلامي” (Vocation of Islam, Part 2), Dar Al-Fikr, Damascus, Syria, 2012. ↑
- Norman Podhoretz, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism”, Doubleday, New York, 2007. ↑
- Graham E. Fuller, “A World Without Islam”, Foreign Policy, January 2008. ↑
- Arnold J. Toynbee was an English historian whose 12-volume study entitled “A Study of History” put forward a philosophy of History based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations that provoked much discussion. In his study, began in 1922 and completed in 1961, he examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his “The Decline of the West”, Toynbee did not regard the death of civilizations as inevitable, for they may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. And unlike Karl Marx, he saw History as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica online, 2008). ↑
- Arnold J. Toynbee, “The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations”, Constable and Company Ltd., 1922. ↑
- Arnold J. Toynbee, “Islam, the West, and the Future”, in “Civilization on Trial”, Oxford University Press, 1948. ↑
- Bernard Lewis (with Buntzie Ellis Churchill), “Notes On A Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian”, Penguin Books, New York, 2012. ↑
- Basil Mathews, “Young Islam On Treck: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations”, Friendship Press, New York, 1926. After service in the British Ministry of Information during WWI, he became the Literature Secretary of the Conference of British Missionary Societies and editor of Outward Bound. In 1924, he was called from London to Geneva, Switzerland, to be the Literature Secretary of the Boys’ Work Division of the World’s Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations. ↑
- Bernard Lewis, “Islam and the West”, Oxford University Press, 1993. ↑
- James Carroll, “The War Against Islam”, in The Boston Globe, June 7, 2005. ↑
- 1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94. ↑
- Quoted in Paul G. Lauren, ed, “The China Hands’ Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy”, Westview Press, 1987, page 136: A variant of this quote is found in Rafiq Zakaria, “Muhammad and the Quran”, Penguin Books, 1991, page 59: “So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world”. ↑
- Samuel Phillips Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”, Simon & Schuster, 1996. ↑
- “Young Islam On Treck: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations”, op cit., page 199. ↑
- This appreciation is totally at odds with such writings as astrophysicist Michael H. Heart’s book “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History” (Hart Pub. Co, 1978), in which Prophet Muhammad is listed first. Asked why he made this choice, the author answered “My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels” (To read more on that subject see: http://www.iupui.edu/~msaiupui/thetop100.html?id=61 ). Or Karen Armstrong’s “Muhammad: A prophet For Our Time”, Harpers Collins, 2006, in which this renowned author demonstrates that Muhammad’s life—A pivot point in history—has genuine relevance to the global crises we face today.↑
- In Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, The Atlantic, September 1990 issue. ↑
- Olive Branch Press, 2001 ↑
- Showed for the first time in 2007. Watch on: https://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/19/reel_bad_arabs_how_hollywood_vilifies ↑
- In his landmark book “Orientalism”, first published in 1978, Edward Said observed: “Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient… My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action… European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self”. ↑
- See my analysis titled “The Western Roots of ‘Middle Eastern terrorism”http://10.16.86.131/the-western-roots-of-middle-eastern-terrorism/#post-28423-footnote-ref-17 ↑
- See his book “The High Priests of War”, American Free Press, Washington, D.C., 2004. For a free download: http://users.skynet.be/boekanier/High_Priests_of_War.pdf ↑
- “Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutes That Shape Our View of Terror”. ↑
- Harry Elmer Barnes (editor), “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath”, Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1953. ↑
- See Center for American Progress report “Fear Inc.: the Roots of Islamophobia Network in America”, 2011; and CAIR’s report “Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States”, 2015. ↑
- Robert Spencer is the author of such hateful books as “Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs” “Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t” and “The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion”. ↑
- To read the manifesto : https://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-complete-manifesto-2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/ ↑
- Eugene Robinson, “Anders Behring Breivik and the influence industry hate”, The Washington Post, July 25, 2011 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anders-behring-breivik-and-the-influence-industry-of-rage/2011/07/25/gIQASd2WZI_story.html?utm_term=.8c0880c06bf3 ↑
- Read “The Making of Islamophobia Inc.”, Foreign Policy, March 16, 2017:https://www.google.dz/amp/foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/16/the-making-of-islamophobia-inc/amp/ ↑
- Lamis Andoni, “Bernard Lewis: In the Service of Empire”, The Electronic Intifada, 16 December, 2016. ↑
Very informative and a well researched article. But Islam and west cannot reconcile till the end.
More than a thousand years of warfare, Europe and muslims have been fighting since the rise of islam, no other enemies in history has fought for this long .
There is indeed a clash of civilizations but it is not entirely between the west and islam.
Its between the racist, imperialist and decadent west, hell bent on imposing its hegemony over the whole mankind and wants to convert the entire humanity into carbon copies of themselves, as opposed to the east represented by a rising china, resurgent russia and their muslim allies, who want a multi-polar world with mutual respect.
There’s more than one theme at work here. In as much as Arabs and Muslims are portrayed negatively by the media, I would argue that Christians are depicted frequently as either buffoons, child molesters, or hypocrites most of the time as well.
Jews, on the other hand, are rarely if ever portrayed as anything other than philanthropic geniuses, moral giants, or innocent victims of unwarranted aggression if they are ever identified at all. It is in the best interest of Israel to play off their enemies against the USA, and the media apparatus, which is largely owned by Zionists, has dutifully tried to keep the ancient antagonisms alive.
This is not to say that the only reason for the Muslim-Christian animosity is Zionist propaganda, because it is true that there is much more history to it than that, but the USA never really had any problems or even dealings with the Muslim world until after WWII, and the wars didn’t begin until after the neocons took over our country.
jon, Zionazi hate propaganda is Central to Islamophobia and the Clash of Civilizations’ War of Terror that is Devestating the Islamic world. If you investigate the Islamophobia industry in the West, you soon find Jewish philanthropists financing the activities. Then there is the DIRECT control of US foreign policy by the ‘neo-conservatives’ overwhelmingly Jewish ‘intellectuals’, many former Trots, and many acolytes of the sinister Judaic supremacist philosopher, Leo Strauss, with a few Sabbat Goyim collaborators (‘colluders’) thrown in for local colour and plausible deniability.
Islam means “submission”. It does not tolerate any other faith on an equal basis. In Saudi Arabia you can get executed if you insult Islam, or if you leave it. The only “equality” Islam accepts is a temporary truce, when Muslims are weaker in relation to others. Mod-to note: to be fully accurate Islam means submission of one’s desires to the will of God. The argument could be made that as God does not wish to have his creation slaughtered, therefore no man should be inclined to do so. It is important to note that Saudi Arabia as a state adheres to Wahhabbism (al-Wahhābiya:said by many to be the main source of terrorism); this doctrine is not reflective of Islam as a whole, much as Roman Catholicism is not reflective of Christianity as a whole.
Europe has so far been invaded on two occasions by Muslims. The first first invasion was in the 8th century, when Muslim Arabs invaded Spain, killing 480.000 Spaniards who refused to convert. After that the Muslim Arabs moved into France, where Charles Martel defeated them at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, which some historians regards as one of the most important in European history.
The second invasion of Europe was in the 14th century, when the Ottoman Turks invaded the Balkans, moving towards Central Europe, in order “to spread the true faith”. They layed siege to Vienna on two occasions, in 1529 and in 1683. However, the article is not correct in stating that the West saved Vienna in 1683. The troops who fought the Turks were Austrian, Serbian, German and Polish. It was a combined West-East coalition which saved Vienna. The Austrians even created a frontier region against Ottoman Turkey, called “Krayina” or “Serbian Krayina”, made up of Serbs and commanded by Serbian captains.
Is Europe facing a third Muslim invasion ? I am afraid it is, being more dangerous than the previous two ones, as the new invaders are armed with passports and not with weapons. Europe has become a target of a mass invasion by false “migrants” and “refugees”, who are using international law to misrepresent their status. According to observers on the ground, at least 95 % of “refugees” who have come to Europe after the Syrian conflict began are false “refugees”, the unemployed from third world countries, many of them using false passports. Among them you will find “refugees” from Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Erdogan and his Government have been very helpful, issuing travel instructions to these “refugees”, including names and addresses of institutions to which they should report for registration and for free social security handouts. False Syrian passports have been issued both by ISIS in Syria and by someone in Turkey, as openly reported by journalists.
Upon arriving in Europe, these refugees are pointing to the international convention which deals with refugees and demanding refugee status. This international convention was indeed signed by a number of countries, who were under the impression that they would be accepting refugees from their region and not from other continents. We now have a pretty horrific legal problem with respect to this matter. Is a particular country in Europe supposed to accept “refugees” from every country in the world which is experiencing a military conflict ? Do “refugees” have the right to pick a country to which they wish to go ? At the same time we have Saudi Arabia, who has refused to accept any refugees, but has generously offered money to Germany to construct 400 mosques.
And the European Union ? It is backing the rights of third world “refugees”, making threats against those EU members who refuse to accept them. We now have our answer what the EU policy of “open borders” really means. The intent is to destroy the nation states of Europe, making them subservient to the dictatorial control of Brussels. The refugees have been given the status of a political Trojan Horse, which would cause immense political, economic, financial, social and ethnic troubles for all the nation states of Europe. The next step is apparently the creation of one European nation living in one European state. I think not. This fact alone will lead to the break up of the European Union, aided by the dismal economic performance of many EU member states, who started experiencing economic troubles pretty soon after joining the EU.
The EU even demanded that the Russian Government accept “refugees”. The Russians wisely declined the offer, pointing to the fact that the Russian military in Syria is liberating the country from ISIS, allowing refugees to return. And one million real refugees did indeed return to Syria from Turkey. At the same time between one and two million went to Europe, mostly to Germany. Interesting.
Can Christianity and Islam coexist ? The answer is no. Christianity has moved into the 21st century, while Islam still lives in the past. There is no way that ISIS could have been created if Islam had moved into the 21st century. One only has to look at the behavior of immigrants (real and false) in Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany and Britain to see that Europe is facing an ethnic and religious crisis.
I thank the Moderators for their comment. However, if one takes into account the activities of ISIS and the advocates of Sharia Law, one has to wonder what the majority of Muslims think Islam means.
mod-to note: As it would be unfair and completely in contravention to the purpose of moderation, further response to your valuable discourse will be made outside of this moderation session and of my own personal interaction.
As Homer says, ethnic differences are insignificant compared to the difference between individual human beings. A war is fought over a woman (or an oilfield, or a goldmine) with an army led by an arrogant egomaniac whom some of his soldiers despise more than they hate the enemy. A cabal of Anglo-Zio-Capitalists around 2000AD hired scribes to pen “Clash of Civilizations” as a religious sounding slogan to conceal their oil grab in the MENA. Same as 1900-1918 when the British Foreign Office hired distinguished writers to develope the theme “German Militarism” while building up a military alliance to smash Germany as an economic competitor. Empty slogans, masks for criminals to wear when committing their smash-and-grab, thrown away when they have run off with their loot.
Besides the relative insignificance of artificial ethnic differences as compared with natural human differences between individuals, there is always something comic about fighting over religion because we know nothing about such matters. As Jehovah says to Job, “Where were you when I created the Universe?” The most alarming symptom of degeneracy in the West is that we are allowing mischievous Leaders to stoke up the fires of (usually imaginary or trite) Religious and Ethnic differences again, instead of aiming for our common humanity.
Most Muslims know what Islam means and most of them know also what ISIS really means…a NATO armed and Zionist Saudi financed proxy group for achieving Zionist strategic interests in the Middle East.
Thank you.
A Muslim.
Islam is way more complex then the way you describe it. Within Islam their are just as many different streams, if not more as in christianity. So to try to make a single sweeping statement is not factual. For example everyone knows about the sunnis and shia. But within sunnisim their are 4 different schools of thought(hanafi, shaffi, Maliki, Hanbali). Then you have the Shia which for the most part are from the Imammiyya school of though, but their are other significant minorites. Its not even as simple as that however, because you still have the sufi’s and all the different streams within that. Now you mention Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are a relatively young monarchy(in my opinion a bunch of tyrants). They also follow a realtively recent phenomenon within the “Muslim” world known as Al Wahhabiya. They have a incredibly rigid understanding, matter of fact if you go according to the opinion of their founder Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, he branded basically the entire muslim world as “kaffir’ which means non believer, of course excluding those who adhered to his interpretation. Their founder was born in the 17 hundreds, so when i say they are a recent phenomenon, i mean really recent.This is just a quick scan of whats considered the “muslim” world.
You also mention the Ummayad and the Ottoman empires. I’m not going to try and justify the actions of empires which i view as “empires” in the sense that they opperated as almost every other empire. Meaning they just ran around conquering lands for their own desires. To use these empires as something to paint all muslims with is also unfair. Can i go and blame every American, and other people from the west for all the carnage that they bought upon the world. Of course not, because i understand its a minor group of people who have their hands on the lever of power. Anyways theirs alot more i can i mention but it would make this most way to long.
There might be many streams in Islam, but all streams are obliged to say Shahada and enjoin all and sundry to say it.
All Muslims are under obligation to conveying the message of Islam to non-Muslims and inviting them to Allah. The Qur’an advocates this process categorically in these words:
“You are the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah.” “Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good instruction, and argue with them in a way that is best.”
Muslim apologists do not tire to claim that “Da’wah has become a universal need in the present world. It is the only hope of mankind to deliver justice to suffering humanity. Muslims should try to reach every street in the world and tell people that Islam has come to help them with new hopes and expectations”.
They have therefore to tell Christians that ‘Allah has no son’.
Islam means submission for muslims, submission to the will of god. As for tolerating another faith on equal basis, it is the only faith which acknowledges Christianity as a true religion and jesus as a prophet, this is not the case with Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism.
If Saudi Arabia is an example for Islam then isn’t the western zionist empire with all its oppression and unjust wars an example of Christianity? Or the roman catholic church which corrupted (it’s own version of) Christianity and caused an era called the ‘dark ages’ to exist, which had its own share of oppression against the citizens of medieval europe and other adherents of Christianity which they deemed to be heretics?
An oppressive state represents no one else than itself and its partners. Islam existed more than a thousand years before the SECULAR Saudi state emerged. How do you deem it logical that the actions of that secular state, define a religion which was already defined over a millennium ago.
As I said before an empire or a state defines no one but itself and its partners. Therefore the invasions you mentioned define no one but the states themselves. I cannot find any source that claims the conquest of spain resulted in 480.000 deaths, so please share where you got that estimation from. Forced conversion is forbidden in Islam. The killing of civillians is also forbidden by Islamic law in the rules of warfare.
Rather 7 years after spain was conquered by the catholics (not the visigoths) the treaty was broken and the archbischop ordered mass conversions of muslims and jews. He ordered the burning tens of thousands of valued Arabic manuscripts on science, technology, astrology, agriculture, in fact, a vast amount of valuable knowledge written by Islamic scholars was destroyed. Only books on medicine claim to have survived the mass destruction of Islamic-based knowledge. Which was translated to latin and then laid the basis for medical practice in western europe, source here. The repressive measures led to revolts that ended in many Muslims being forced to choose between conversion, exile, or execution. By 1502 the Catholic monarchs had made the practice of Islam illegal in Spain.
The Ottoman empire has indeed committed grave injustices to innocent christians. But as I implied before, it’s the (ottoman) empire that committed those injustices, not the state religion of that empire.
I could say more about it, but your responsibility as someone with an intellect to objectively investigate a subject. This has become hard thanks to the vigorous propaganda machine and tactics deployed by the present zionist empire, which was clearly pointed out in this article.
As for the refugee ordeal. Refugees don’t come from a huge country called Islam. The refugee flow started from Syria. After USA and friends executed project Arab spring. In which multiple middle eastern countries were destabilized so political goals could be achieved. The result is thousands of people being displaced. Syria for example has been ravaged and citizens fled. You think USA cares? No, their propaganda tactics show clearly that they’re only increasing in demonizing muslims so they can continue their plan. Who pays the price? Lapdog western europe, which will bark at anyone (especially Russia) except it’s master uncle Sam. History has already shown that all of USAs allies, except Israel are discardable assets. Only some are used more and longer than others.
ISIS and other rebels, where the tool used to execute their political goals, which is to destabilize a country. Some rebels are called ‘moderate rebels’, which actually means they’re potential discardable assets to rule the country, just like Assads family was a discardable asset when France put his zionist grandfather in charge of Syria, but now he needs to go according to rex tillerson.
ISIS had more goals though than the moderate rebels. They were supported not only with weapons, but also a continuous money stream, why? Because they have to execute the final part of the plan. After destabilizing a whole region, someone had to come and rule it. How about a bunch of yankee jihadis paid for by uncle Sam, calling themselves the Islamic state? That way we can attach a correlation between islam and a rogue army. Let them commit atrocities and then use social media to publish them, and they’ll do our job for us!
Now Russia blocked that plan they’re demonizing it like never before as pointed out by the saker.
Now all this talk, but what is Islam really? That is what the western media doesn’t want you to know apparently, since demonizing Islam is one of it’s highest priorities. From what I read from your post it contains a lot of false information which either come from biased news sources or from a book of which was written by an author who neither knows arabic nor has a degree in Islam or middle eastern history, but has an expertise in islamophobia and bias.
It’s up to you as someone with an intellect to look into a subject objectively, although that has become very hard nowadays. Just to give you a glimpse, the Quran states “Whoever kills a person [innocent person]…it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.” (Qur’an, 5:32) Do you think anyone who adheres to a terrorist organization follows the book of god rather than the dollars from uncle sam he’s paid to cause mischief on earth and displace his own native population?
As last, your remark that Christianity moved to the 21st century and Islam remained behind doesn’t make sense. True Christianity has severely diminished in the world, with most ‘christian’ countries having a population of which the majority are atheists, compared to a few hundred years ago. The church has no authority whatsoever in most western european countries, in contrary to Russia. On top of that most christians believe (especially in western europe) that secularism and religion are not opposites and can live together in harmony. Also believing that acknowledging a state has sovereignity, which is an attribute only god has, isn’t equal to blasphemy. All countries in the current world have a secular consitution, including muslim countries. The western zionist empire has launched an attack against the religious way of life, they’ve demonized Islam and Christianity. Those who live the religious way of life should unite, not disunite even though enmity has been sowed to prevent it from happening.
“Is Europe facing a third Muslim invasion? I am afraid it is, being more dangerous than the previous two ones, as the new invaders are armed with passports and not with weapons.”
Well, poor little innocent Europe thought the Zionazis were its solid, dependable friends, forever causing mayhem and murder abroad to share the proceeds thereof in solidarity with the Euro-trash at home. Terribly sorry: the Zionazis have had a profound change of “heart” (or whatever) for 30 years now. Put bluntly, they are ditching Global Apartheid. Sure, groovy imperialist wars are still being waged all right, but now it’s also a matter of deliberately destroying Whitey’s Christian Heimat.
The prime movers of the moslem/ third world invasion of Europe are people like Coudenhove-Kalergi, Spectre in Sweden, Sarkozy and Bernard Levy in France, and Gysi in Germany, among others. Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots for themselves.
If at least you could come up with some more powerful people and leave out the long since dead. George Soros´is quite a significant actor, to put it mildly. But the people running NATO and the West’s intelligence services are really crucial, since they are directly responsible for the West’s non-stop wars. I mean, a pathetic piece of merde pure such as BHL is their laughing stock.
Islam means “submission”.
Submission to God for the one choosing it. The renunciation of self-will to use a Christian terminology. But, hey, if you rather oppose God, be my guest and good luck.
Can Christianity and Islam coexist ? The answer is no
Clearly, you have never heard of Russia.
But then, you clearly have not heard about a lot of things.
The Saker
And the invasion of the rest of the word by Europeans? Read this article of Jeff J brown to know how much body count the imperialist western Europeans racked up.
http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/06/slavs-and-the-yellow-peril-are-niggers-brutes-and-beasts-in-the-eyes-of-western-empire-china-rising-radio-sinoland/
It could have prevented this ‘muslim invasion’ had NATO not destroyed Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.
European ‘Christianity’ and Jewry cannot coexist side by side with Islam. The European ‘Christianity’ of 21st century of yours that you talk about has nothing to do with the true Christianity and is European paganism displayed as Christianity. What you talk about the 21st century Christianity is the Christianity stripped off its essence. The western European Christianity doesn’t have the social, political and economic system prescribed by Christianity.
Same can be said about the huge genocide (unparalleled in human history for its scale, size and the time for which it was committed) by the european colonists since the past 500 years. Does Christianity permits it? NO. But they did use the name of Christianity to commit these crimes.
You have just repeated the AngloZionist propaganda. Stop distorting the reality to fit your own desires and stop hiding behind Christianity.
Very comprehensive and lots of good references, thank you!
Agreed.
John Doran.
Well I’m glad that the writer didn’t equate the West with the Roman empire. In reality, Islam, Orthodox christianity and Western christianity are succesor ideologies to Roman universalism. Those wars of the early medieval era or “dark ages” were more like wars between different imperial factions rather than separate civilizations. I am no fan of Islam but these guys who say that the first Islamic invasion of Europe occurred when the Umayyads took Spain are just being dishonest and merely vomiting the standard medieval bullshit. The christians at the time saw Islam as a heretical form of christianity. Even the christianity in Spain was different from the traditional orthodox or catholic christianity.
The article is ok but I feel like the writer could have gone deeper into history and talked about the conflicts between the “Byzantine” empire, the Papacy, the Germanic tribes(especially the Franks), the different forms of christianity throughout the Roman/mediterranean world. How all these related with each other and their relations eventually led to the conflict between these three “remnant” post Roman ideologies.
“By declaring that the peoples of the Middle East — meaning Arabs and Muslims — have failed to catch up with modernity and have fallen into ‘a downward spiral of hatred and rage’, Lewis has not only exonerated American imperial policies and provided a moral and historical justification for Washington’s ‘war on terror’, but has also emerged as chief ideologue for the re-colonization of the Arab world.”
If by “modernity” Lewis means the eulogising of sexual degeneracy, infantilism, and “post-industrial society”, he is quite right. As for hatred and rage, the downward spiral in the Muslim world still doesn’t seem to have caught up with the West, most notably not with the US. Or is the MSM keeping quiet on surging shooting sprees in the schoolyards of Muslim countries?
As usual, what passes for Western ‘discourse’ beautifully boils down to a pile of smelly feces. Just like one is supposed to believe in the fairy-tales of Western/Zionist rock-solid anti-Nazi credentials, one is now supposed to believe in the heroic Western sacrifices against Takfiri liver-eaters. In both cases, it is Western imperialism which sets the template and hands out the money.
Something is wrong when you bring in Dan Brown to explain what went wrong between the West and Islam. He is not far from the Chanson de Roland understanding of Islam. And of Christianity for that matter, which is nearly absent in the analysis. Western Christianity may have wrong ideas about what went wrong between Islam and Christianity. But can you say the same about the ‘ideas’ of Eastern Christianity? Of Saint John of Damascus who wrote the first hand analysis of what went wrong between them from the start?
Another Anonymus
@Another Anonymous. It is easy to write a facile denigration of Islam in a book called “What Went Wrong” because most things go wrong sooner or later (2nd Law ofThermodynamics). Harder to write “What Went Right”. And hardest of all, “What Will Go Right”.
@most things go wrong sooner or later (2nd Law of Thermodynamics)
“”Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” (Murphy’s Law).
I am not clear whether you refer to the book of Saint John of Damascus “Fount of Knowledge, part two entitled Heresies in Epitome: How They Began and Whence They Drew Their Origin”.
@A.Anon. Refering to book “What Went Wrong” [with Islam, of course] by historian and British Military Intelligence MI6 agent Bernard Lewis, well known Zionist and originator of the “Clash of Cultures” propaganda which has been recently fostered in order to popularise the oil wars by A-Z-C armies against Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan — all of whom happen to be Islamic countries, so fit conveniently into an anti-Islamic “Great Crusade” (of George Bosh Jr and subsequent A-Z-C Crusaders).
why was my comment not published? I posted back when there were only 11 comments, last night. Strange you accept a comment from someone who just wants to spew anti-muslim hate (even the Saker replied to him: “you clearly have not heard about a lot of things.”) and you reject my comment that adds context from an Aran & a Muslim to the article?!!
I am not going to re-write it (I didn’t even keep a copy) but hopefully either the Mods publish it or explain to me why it was rejected because I have no idea! It can’t be the little eschatology I added because that’s what Imran Hosein always talks about and he’s the Saker’s best friend!
not sure why it was not published … we have 7 different moderators covering 24/7 … comments that do not meet moderations rules are flagged and sent to ‘Saker’ for review. Saker reviews the flagged comments and either approves them for publication or they are not approved and removed. …. mod
Thank you for the reply H.S.
I can’t believe that my comment could have violated any rule but maybe my criticism of non-Arab Muslims (from an Arab point of view) rubbed one of the mods the wrong way, I guess if you can’t answer me then you just silence me :(
please try a repost and note what happened to previous so the mod on duty will be aware of the history …. we are in general fairly lenient on most comments … only maybe 1-2% get rejected … mostly because of foul language … inane statements .. and personal attacks on other commentators — Its also possible that our automated spam filter got it. The mods ck the spam log but when we have 40 spam items to review …. items get deleted in error at times …. mod-hs
To be credible the author must explain to us why Christians and Christianity have all but been disappered
in the Middle East- there were thriving Christian kingdoms in Yemen.What happened to them, to say nothing of what happened to Christian Asia Minor. Has Islam had anything to do with their disappearance- dare say extermination?
To Mario and all other respected readers and commentators. At the outset, I’d like to thank all of you for showning interest to my modest contribution to a huge international issue, which will undoubtedly impact our fast-changing, uncertain, and indeed perilous “small” and “unique” village. I’d also like to advise that this article is the first part of a comprehensive study, both retrospective and prospective, on the fate and the role of Islam as a great religion and of the Islamic civilization in history, in the past and in the future. So I beg your patience and kind understanding in relation to my personal efforts, taking in account the constraints of the obvious human limits in terms of time and knowledge.
Dear Mario, my intent through this work is not to be a 100% credible (who in the world could be?). My genuine and only objective is to make known what I see as little-known, and often deliberately made unkown by certain vested interests, and in doing so discharging my duty as a citizen of the world, our common world. In other words, I’m trying my best to respond positively to the wise appeal of Dr. NG Maroudas: “The most alarming symptom of degeneracy in the West is that we are allowing mischievous Leaders to stoke up the fires of (usually imaginary or trite) Religious and Ethnic differences again, instead of aiming for our common humanity”. All the best to you all.
Amir NOUR
The Anglo-Zionist empire, unless stopped, will be the death of our planet like it was in Sumer (Southern Iraq – the first western civilization). Now perhaps you can understand why the Anglo-Zionists wanted the museums and culture to be annihilated.
What would be your one wish if you could go back in time? I think mine would be to assassinate Abraham before he had a chance to destroy the world… What would your wish be?
After having left the CIA, and then U.S. for Canada, Graham E. Fuller confessed his guilt with regard to his past activities and made his mea culpa by writing a memorable piece in Foreign Policy magazine, which became a book titled “World Without Islam”. He started by asking: “What if Islam had never existed? To some, it’s a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world? Would the Middle East be a peaceful beacon of democracy? Would 9/11 have happened? Would the world be more peaceful?”. He then answered these questions and concluded by saying: “In the face of these tensions between East and West, Islam unquestionably adds yet one more emotive element, one more layer of complications to finding solutions. Islam is not the cause of such problems. It may seem sophisticated to seek out passages in the Koran that seem to explain “why they hate us.” But that blindly misses the nature of the phenomenon. How comfortable to identify Islam as the source of “the problem”; it’s certainly much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world’s sole superpower.
A world without Islam would still see most of the enduring bloody rivalries whose wars and tribulations dominate the geopolitical landscape. If it were not religion, all of these groups would have found some other banner under which to express nationalism and a quest for independence. Sure, history would not have followed the exact same path as it has. But, at rock bottom, conflict between East and West remains all about the grand historical and geopolitical issues of human history: ethnicity, nationalism, ambition, greed, resources, local leaders, turf, financial gain, power, interventions, and hatred of outsiders, invaders, and imperialists. Faced with timeless issues like these, how could the power of religion not be invoked?
Remember too, that virtually every one of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their “world wars” twice upon the rest of the world — two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.
Some today might wish for a “world without Islam” in which these problems presumably had never come to be. But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises of such a world might not look so vastly different than the ones we know today”.
Abdul Haq
To lump in Hitler, Mussolini and to a lesser degree Stalin with psychopaths like Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot indicates that you’re not seeing the master puppeteer forest for the puppet trees.That, and over-simplifying by stating that “Europeans visited their world wars twice upon the rest of the world”.
The master puppeteer behind the scourge of zionism are the manipulating power that TWICE goaded Germany into what sparked the two world wars. Hitler represented the last bulwark against its creeping pestilence
mod-to note: parts of line removed to avoid personal attack
“It is a fact that Americans are among the most educated people in the world.”
What?? On what planet?
Compared to what nations?;)
No offense to americans (usa people), but big part of the world do not consider americans educated.
Almost all of the rest of the western world is much more educated then usa.
And also most of the former USSR countries are way more educated then americans.
But if we are to compare the poorest countries in africa… then i guess usa is one of the most educated people in the world.
Just hearing the “fact” that usa people are amongst the most educated people in the world… it is so absurd, that i dont even able to find it funny…
(One of the most uneducated people of the world would been just as close to the “facts” in reality).
And what is education? Learning, or brainwashing/indoctrine into “usa is great”, “salute our brave (military) men and women, who defend our country” (defend against what?;)
But good article:)
d’autres acteurs majeurs ont émergé et pèseront lourdement sur le devenir du monde, le duo-islam-chrétienté est restreint ( 20% des musulmans sont arabes) plus visibles c’est vrai mais cela restera t-il ainsi ? l’analyse est bien structurée sur un fonds de prérequis qui date (obsolète?) essentiellement d’inspiration coloniale et d’un occident triomphant ,
“War of Civilizations” is a Zionist Scam – Muslim
January 9, 2018

A British Muslim reader explains the
Saudi role in the Zionist (Masonic) plan to start a war
between The West (Christianity) and Islam.
He exposes the online facilitators of this agenda,
Alex Jones and Jeff Rense.
by Ash
(henrymakow.com)
To bring about the Albert Pike’s World War 3, the Satanists had to create a violent bloodthirsty “Islamic” cult. The British establishment found an ancient sect, the Khawarij, that had existed at the time of Prophet Muhammed and had always been at odds with mainstream Islam. The characteristics of this sect were their arrogance and narrow literal interpretation as well as their readiness to label a fellow believer an apostate and hence kill him/her.
The modern-day Khawaraj, the Wahabi movement, was established by the British using the bandit Saudi (Crypto Jew Tribe) clan. The Wahabis issued fatwas against the Ottoman Empire declaring them unbelievers. British imperialist pawns, the Wahabi movement turned their violence against fellow Muslims. The Wahabi tag is largely considered a dirty word in the Muslim world outside of its birthplace Saudi Arabia.
The Modern day Wahabi hides behind the “Salafi” label, the Salaf were the pious early generation of believers. By adopting this label they are arrogantly claiming to be a people who follow the early generations of Islam, but nothing could be further from the truth!

Traditional Islam knows that a majority of these people are fraudsters. It is only by the financial patronage of the Saudi royal family and the support of the western governments that this sect has spread around the world. No matter how bad things get, the West rarely criticize the factory of extremism which is Saudi Arabia.
Never trust any literature that has come out from Saudi Arabia, whether it is a Quran translation or any other text. Look to the authentic traditions of Islam taught by people like Humza Yusuf, Umar Abdullah, Abdul Hakim Murad, Sheikh Imran Hosein etc.
We know the internet is run by the enemy, so when you are searching for knowledge, you must be aware that the system is forcing you down a certain route to control the message and keep you fumbling around in the dark.
ILLUMINATI’S ONLINE HUCKSTERS
The Illuminati have completed stage 1 in their creation of the poster boy enemy of Islam. Stage 2 is to instruct their agents in traditional media as well as internet media to create hysteria and justification for civilizational war between Islam and Christianity.
This is Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Jeff Rense and the Controlled Christian movement and their ilk. Fraudsters like Jeff Rense have robbed so many women, he can live in a luxury 4-acre house with a giant model train track. Rense pours out such an extreme vitriol against Muslims that even Netanyahu would blush.
Alex Jones with his three Rolex watches invites Tony Robinson, a racist UK street thug, to talk about Islam. Alex’s UK sidekick, Paul Joseph Watson, can’t make a video about the weather, without attacking Islam. The Infowars network’s main mission is to distract westerners from the enemy within their ranks and instead direct the rage towards Muslims. That’s why the never criticize Israel or Zionism.
World Wars 1 and 2 were largely contrived events, where the flower of the youth of Europe and America were thrown into the industrial war machine. How many people lost loved brothers, fathers, sons, sisters, mothers so a satanic banking cult could consolidate their control of our planet.

Please, for the sake of God, wake up to this insanity and stop sending your loved ones to consolidate power for these Satanists. Read the American General Smedley Butlers booklet “War is a Racket.” Get a decent job or immigrate somewhere on Gods beautiful planet, but don’t join any army. As the arch-Zionist Henry Kissinger says of your beautiful children “Soldiers are dumb stupid animals”
For so long the Muslim world has suffered under the boot of these satanic bankers. When they started waking up, the Zionist armies of the west turned up to bomb them back into the stone age. Turkey is starting to get on its feet, with the President trying to wrestle back control of their central bank, so now the usual media suspects are constantly demonizing Erdogan and the AK Party.
MUSLIMS LOVE JESUS
We Muslims love Jesus and believe in his return. In contrast, the Talmud of the satanist Jews says he is in the lowest pit of hell boiling in excrement. Yet the Christian lunatics around the world hate Islam and say the Zionist are their friends?
Sheikh Imran Hosein, a famous Muslim scholar on YouTube, says the Quran talks about an end time alliance between Christianity and Islam. He believes this is referring to authentic Islam and Orthodox Christianity on the one side and Zionist Jews & Christians with their Wahabi allies on the other.
Before the Zionist-created Al Qaeda and Isis, we had ancient Christian communities living in Muslim countries for thousands of years. In a time when everything is being taken from us, protect and value your mind. Don’t jump on the bandwagon of hatred, make an effort to meet and talk with open-minded Muslims. I’ve made that effort with Christians and now some of my dearest “Christian” or believing friends understand we have lots more in common than we have that divides us.
“Those who believe and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.” Quran 2:62
————–
Related – The Zionist Deception
First Comment from Mustafa
I agree that we need a truce to fight a common enemy.
Did you know that Prophet Muhammad said exactly this 15 centuries ago.
“You will make a firm truce with the al-Rum until you and they wage a campaign against an enemy that is attacking them. You will be granted victory and great spoils. Then you will alight in a plain surrounded by hills. There, someone among the Christians shall say: ‘The Cross has overcome!’ whereupon someone among the Muslims shall say: ‘Nay, Allah has overcome!’ and shall go and break the cross. The Christians shall kill him, then the Muslims shall take up their arms and the two sides shall fall upon each other. Allah shall grant martyrdom to that group of Muslims. After that the Christians shall say to their leader: ‘We shall relieve you of the Arabs,’ and they shall gather up for the great battle (al-malhama). They shall come to you under eighty flags, each flag gathering 12,000 troops.” [= approx. 1 million]
Muslims follow and love Jesus Christ.
We circumcise our boys according to the Law.
We don’t eat swine or blood of animals.
We don’t drink alcohol.
We love our neighbours.
We do unto others……
However, we do not turn the other cheek. Neither did Jesus when he turned over the tables of the Money Lenders.
We know who the enemy is. You need to learn more about Islam to find the truth.
Submission to Allah without equals or partners.
His is the Kingdom. To Him belongs all praise.
He is over everything Capable.
In chapter 5:82 of the Qur’an Allah says:
5:82
You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews and those who associate others with Allah ; and you will find the nearest of them in affection to the believers those who say, “We are Christians.” That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant.
https://www.henrymakow.com/2018/01/Muslim-exposes-zionist-scam.html
Extreme Wahhabism has been a project of Brit Secret Service since 1710.
http://www.tmoamerica.org/sheikhgillani/desk/504-isis-british-wahhabi/
Book: The Lost Hegemon, whom the gods would destroy
by F William Engdahl
Religions, particularly Islam, used for wars in service of a failing Western Empire.
John Doran.
Islam had been born in the religious pluralism of the Middle East, where the various faiths had coexisted for centuries.
The Eastern Christian empire of Byzantium likewise permitted minority religious groups liberty to practise their faith and to manage their own religious affairs.
There was no law against propaganda efforts by Christians in the Islamic empire, provided that they did not attack the beloved figure of the Prophet Muhammad
The fundamental weakness of both western civilization and Christianity is their inability to recognise that they share the planet not with inferiors but with EQUALS.
Unless the Western civilization intellectually and socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the 21st century.
The problems raised in this are, of course, as profound as anything touching on Abrahamic religions
The West should understand that a healthy and functioning Islam is crucial because it helps Muslim people to cultivate decent values and ideals which people in the west cherish. The West finds it difficult to cope with Islam because its ideas have been crude and dismissive. It belies its avowed commitment to tolerance and compassion for the pain and distress in the Muslim world (Siege of Gaza). Islam is not going to disappear or wither away. It would have been better if it had remained healthy and strong
People who consistently bash Islam as regressive but defend Hinduism as a way of life, and as a better civilized way of life on the internet.
For instance Aarti Tikoo will say Islam is terrorism and applaud when a man is paraded tied in the front of a jeep (or when a man is lynched under the pretext of cow protection in India )
If you speak up for that man, you are obviously an Islamist who is okay with Shariah.
If you speak about about Palestine,(or Indian secular constitution) they sneer at you .
The right wing fanatics aren’t afraid to say they are right wingers, these hide behind that label and I am done with that.
Dawkin’s
‘The God Delusion’ gave me the answers I was looking for and I am an atheist too but I will never ever side with imperialism as if Dawkins was my bloody god and neither will I stand back and let the Hindu fundamental politicians and these ‘new horsemen of the apocalypse’ ride roughshod over them just because they are Christians or Muslims.
I am done with these pathetic trolls who laugh at videos of Palestinian mothers crying for their dead babies and leave comments like ‘Awww! Allah took your terrorist baby away?’ Yes that’s an actual quote and I spit on people like that.
I was born a muslim and remain one, culturally speaking. You think that makes me an islamist, so be it.
I know you will still burn my house in a riot, what will it matter that I am oh! so cultured ?
I won’t abandon poor, common people just because they are believers. kill me with them.
I would rather stand with the man killed for wearing a skull cap than the one berating him for clinging to his god.
My unbelief is my own, I will not let people die and be ridiculed for believing. I don’t want a world full of superior sneering beings. I think that explains everything once and for all.”
Sarah Joseph Islam
From her article
“My beef ( dispute) is with ‘New Atheists’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VCZ-il5iwg
I am not sure what to make of this article. Whether the clash of civilizations is a “notion” or whether there is some truth to it depends on where one goes or lives these days. I’m sure that old French priest who had his throat cut by a Muslim culture-enricher certainly felt a clash of some kind as his life’s blood drained out of him. It’s always the little slave people in civilizations who suffer the collateral damage as it gives birth to a new order. Is Europe better off with Islam settling all over Europe? I think not. Are Europeans better off under globalist control. I think not. Both Muslims and Europeans are being exploited. Used and abuse and target like bunny rabbits for further experimentation. It’s going to be capitalism for the super elite and communism for the rest of us.