I have written about Islam twice before, here and here, and I think the points I made there bear repetition and summary.
First, I argued that Islam is: 1. One 2. Unconvertible 3. Power. Hegel: “The worship of the One is the only final aim of Monometalism.”
Belloc: “It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilisation has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past… [Because] Islam is apparently unconvertible.”
Girard: “For Islam, God is essentially power.”
And second, I argued that though Islam is obsessed with Oneness, tawhid, as they call it, this oneness is at least not Chinese. The oneness of Islam does not simply sanction any earthly order, like ‘All-Under-Heaven’, i.e. China – and this is because Islam, like the religion of the Israelites and Christianity, is about the kingship of God.
The second point is an essential correction to the first. Yes, Islam seeks hegemony – but it is not simply an earthly hegemony. It is a hegemony that is sanctioned by, and ultimately ruled by, God. This means it is very strong, no doubt: men have fire in their eyes as they seek hegemony and they feel justified. But it also means that this fire can be turned against the state. And NB, what we in the West think of as Islamic states are, in fact, nervous entities, since Islam is an uncertain sword in the ruler’s hand – it can be used against him.
The next thing to bring into play is a point I made when discussing the West. Our particular problem is not Islam as such. Our particular problem is with Islam in the context of Western states, where Western states are 1. liberal and 2. Christian or post-Christian. And this is not a simple problem because we, in the West, continually argue about whether liberalism is just secular in some absolute sense, or only secular in the Christian sense that we live in the saeculum of the earthly expectation that Jesus will come again and that, until he does, we have to do the best we can with Hobbes’s Leviathan or Schmitt’s katechon. Deep waters.
Let me repeat that point because I do not want it to be lost. It matters that we are unsure about how Christian our liberal order is, and that we are also unsure about what liberalism entails. Let me deal with them one by one – first Christianity, then liberalism....<<<Read More>>>...
