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Spengler: Hirsi Ali, atheism and Islam
Interesting read. Excerpts below, but I recommend reading the whole thing. The implication that the West will crush Islam by force borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then? Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries. Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin. By contrast, there is indeed a war with Islam, and it is being won in parts of the world where Christians wage it on spiritual grounds. No Christian army has had to march in its support. Europe, meanwhile, is losing ground to Islam because it declines to fight. Allah is no more subject to laws of nature than the nature-spirits of the pagan world who infest every tree, rock and stream, and make magic according to their own whimsy. The "carried-forward idea of the unity of God" to which Rosenzweig refers, of course, is the monotheism carried forward in outward form from Judaism, but dashed to pieces against the competing notion of absolute transcendence. As Rosenzweig observes, "An atheist can say, 'There is no God but God'." If God is everywhere and in all things, he is nowhere and in nothing. If there are no natural laws, there need be no law-giver, and the world is an arbitrary and desolate place, a Hobbesian war of each aspect of nature against all. Contemplation of nature in Islam is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. It is not surprising that Islamic science died out a generation or two after al-Ghazali. It is a commonplace observation that Islam is "fatalistic". Muslims typically conclude any statement about the future, eg, "I'll see you at work tomorrow morning," with the qualifier, "Insha'Allah", "God willing". Because God is everywhere and in every action, acting without intermediate causes, the Judeo-Christian concept of divine providence is inconceivable in Muslim terms. If Allah refuses to be entangled by intermediate causes, no divine plan could possibly exist that humankind cannot understand directly, but works itself out through God's intermediaries. Rather than providence, Islam believes in the old pagan fate, the summation of the innumerable capricious acts that Allah in his absolute transcendence performs at every instant. Allah is everywhere, which is to say that Allah is nowhere in particular. Posted by: mrp 2007-12-03 |
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