Diogenes: He would have appreciated Bernard Lewis circa 1954, not circa 2010
At 7 PM Central Time 9/28/10 in Chicago, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of Turkey delivered a keynote speech opening a conference at the American Islamic College, entitled, “The Role of the OIC and The scope for its relations with American Muslims.” Bat Ye’or’s recent American Thinker essay highlighted the OIC’s agenda—consistent with the historical jihad imperative—global Islamization, or in modern parlance, totalitarian hegemony.
A 1954 Diogenes—lamp in hand, in broad daylight, searching for an honest assessment of Islamic totalitarianism—would have been uncharacteristically rewarded had he read Bernard Lewis’ essay, “Communism and Islam.” [International Affairs,Vol. 30, No. 1(Jan., 1954), pp. 1-12] Currently, however, in his twilight years, Professor Lewis’ apologetics on Islam (discussed here, here, and here) are but a simulacrum of the uncompromised views he recorded over 56 years ago. Alas, Professor Lewis’ “transition” is profoundly disappointing, and would only confirm the classical cynicism of a Diogenes, circa 2010.
But as the “Islamintern”/OIC holds forth in Chicago this week, we must share and preserve for posterity these timeless, intellectually honest insights on the totalitarian nature of Islam Professor Lewis published in his prime, during January, 1954:
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition…. Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West…. In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy…[I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God’s vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”
…Quite obviously, the Ulama of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which- the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as “There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet!” was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith-a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy-might well strike a responsive note.
