Nomad (37 page)

When I came to the West what I found truly amazing was the fact that believers, agnostics, and unbelievers could debate with and even ridicule one another without ever resorting to violence. It is this right of free expression that is now under attack. And in time of war, internal feuding in the ranks—between atheists and agnostics, Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics—serves only to weaken the West. So long as we atheists and classical liberals have no effective programs of our own to defeat the spread of radical Islam, we should work with enlightened Christians who are willing to devise some. We should bury the hatchet, rearrange our priorities, and fight together against a much more dangerous common enemy.

Given the choice, I would by far rather live in a Christian than a Muslim country. Christianity in the West today is more humane, more restrained, and more accepting of criticism and debate. The Christian concept of God today is more benign, more tolerant of dissent. But the most important difference between the two civilizations is the exit option. A person who chooses to opt out of Christianity may be excommunicated from the Church community, but he is not harmed; his destiny is left to God. Muslims, however, impose Allah’s rules on each other. Apostates—people, like me, who leave the faith—are
supposed
to be killed.

Christians too killed blasphemers and heretics, but that was long ago, during the dark days of the Inquisition. On September 12, 2006, at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he had once taught theology as a professor, Pope Benedict gave a wide-ranging lecture, titled “Faith, Reason, and the University—Memories and Reflections.” In it he proclaimed that any faith in God must also obey reason; God cannot ask you to do something unreasonable, because God created reason. Islam, he pointed out, is not like Catholicism: it is predicated on the idea that God may
overturn
law and human reason. Allah may demand immoral or unreasonable behavior, for he is all-powerful and demands absolute submission.

In spite of the pope’s invitation to dialogue with people in other cultures, his speech unleashed Muslim protests around the world, and several churches were fire-bombed: more evidence of the intolerance of criticism of Islam by Islamists. This speech was still very much present in everyone’s mind during my visit to Rome eight months later. Indeed, Father Bodar and I discussed it.

Pope Benedict XVI, the Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church and Servant of the Servants of God, heads the world’s strongest system of religious hierarchy. No other spiritual authority can claim to control such a well-structured network. I’m sure that his pyramid of priests, bishops, and cardinals has kept him fully aware that another spiritual potentate, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, feudal ruler of Saudi Arabia and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, has for years been investing in
dawa
, in unifying peoples of different languages and geographies into a powerful body called the Organization of the Islamic Conference,
a formidable and wealthy body that has transformed the United Nations Human Rights Commission into a sad comedy, organized the Muslim boycott of Danish companies after the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and sought to influence the domestic policies of several European nations. Members of the OIC, for instance, mounted a well-organized campaign of global condemnation against Switzerland when a majority of voters supported a ban on the building of minarets on Swiss soil. However, members of the nations of the OIC pay only lip service to protect Christians living in their own countries from persecution.

The pope also knows that wherever radical Islamists become a majority they oppress other faiths. In Muslim countries there is no equal competition for souls, hearts, and minds, because atheists and missionaries and communities of Christians are forced to operate in an atmosphere of physical menace. And although there are plenty of mosques in Rome, not a single church is permitted in Riyadh.

Imagine if the pope were to organize some fifty nations as the “Organization of the Christian Conference.” They could dispatch deputations of ambassadors every time construction of a church was banned in a Muslim country. Where the OIC seeks Islamic dominance and the erosion of human rights, an OCC would aim for the defense of Western civilization and the advancement of human rights.

A confrontation between the values held by Islam and those of the West is inevitable. There
is
already a clash, and we
are
in some sense already at war. That Western civilization is superior is not simply my opinion but a reality I have experienced and continue to appreciate every day. I assume that the West will win. The question is how.

Can the various churches of Christianity help stem this rising tide of violent Islam? Can today’s Christianity play a role in preserving the values of Western civilization? Can the Vatican join in this campaign, if not lead the way—or is it doomed to become a decorative relic, like the European royal families and the fish fork? Can the Established Churches of Europe heed my call—or will the cultural and moral relativists prevail, Christian leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury, who professes to have an “understanding” attitude toward Shari’a?

*    *    *

Globalization is not just an economic process, moving jobs to countries that have cheap labor, bringing goods to countries with money. It’s also about people. The commercial unification of the world during the West’s long boom following World War II brought millions of people from historically Muslim countries to live in Europe with extraordinary speed, far quicker than the process of establishing Christianity in Europe’s colonies or the march of Muslim armies from the Arabian Peninsula to the heart of Europe in the century that followed the death of the Prophet. These millions of modern Muslims brought their medieval social mores with them.

At first they were guest workers who intended to work in Europe only temporarily. They left their families in the distant villages of Berber Morocco or Anatolian Turkey. Their belief in Islam was mostly like my grandmother’s, a diluted, superstitious tradition, more a set of cultural rituals than a rulebook, and they had few mosques in Europe to sustain or harden their observance of the faith. Many of them drank alcohol and adopted other Western habits, and only intermittently observed such Muslim rules as praying five times a day.

But in the 1980s Islam was resurgent again following the siege of Mecca and the revolution in Iran, and many
families
began arriving in European neighborhoods such as Whitechapel and Amsterdam-West. They congregated in geographically separate communities. And, particularly when there was no colonial history with their host country (and thus no common language), as those communities grew larger they kept more and more to themselves. They shopped at their own shops and watched television from Turkey or Morocco by satellite. And then the imams arrived.

Just as European governments and other civil society groups underestimated the intentions of the radical expansionist agents of Islam, the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, neglected to offer the new Muslim immigrants the spiritual guidance they sought. To be sure, many Christian volunteer aid workers offered immigrant communities neutral and pragmatic advice along with social assistance. Islamic charity is conditional on your beliefs; these Christians were ecumenical to the point of making no attempt to convert those they sought to help. Ecumenism for most Christians is a measure of progress, allowing a choice of faiths and forms of worship while establishing peaceful
relations between them. Islam is quite different. It was started by a warrior who conquered faster than he could think through a theology or political theory. Islam since his death has been plagued by a crisis of authority, leaving an everlasting vacuum of power that, throughout the history of Islam, has been filled by men who seize power by force. The concepts of jihad, martyrdom, and a life that begins only after death are never challenged. The Christian leaders now wasting precious time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War and who has sent his son to die for all sinners out of love for mankind.

Perhaps if volunteers had more actively preached to these early immigrants and actively sought to convert them to Christianity, the tragedy of the unassimilable Muslim might have been avoided. Converts to Christianity would have recognized the radicals when they arrived and resisted the siren song of jihad.

By the 1990s, however, radical Muslim preachers were going door to door in the tower blocks of Leeds and Lille and Limburg. Indeed, in some of those cities—historically the heartland of Christianity—it seemed easier to find Allah than the Christian God. Despite the enormous potential for assimilation offered by a European urban environment—free schooling of a quality that was certainly much better than that in most immigrants’ home communities, free health care, plentiful consumer goods and trinkets, and a powerful cult of material well-being—startling numbers of European-born children began turning toward the Saudi-trained imams and their extremist revival of Islam.

This is a tragic story of countless missed opportunities. How is it possible that a man who has grown up in Scotland and has trained there to become a doctor could become so devoted to a violent interpretation of Islam as to want to blow himself up at an airport along with countless women and children? How could this happen, after so much potential acculturation, so much potential contact with the values of tolerance, secular humanism, and individual rights?

Part of the answer is that out of a misplaced respect for the immigrants’ culture, no real, concerted attempt has been made to shift their
traditional ways of mind. Despite high rates of crime and unemployment and low rates of success in schools—all indicators of a failure to integrate large numbers of Muslim immigrants into European society—there has not been a deliberate drive to urge immigrants to adopt Western values. The other part of the answer is the willful denial by Westerners that there is a clash of values between the West and the rest, and particularly between Islam and the West.

For decades European leaders, including Christian leaders, neglected to bring the newcomers into their fold. They unthinkingly supposed that the buffet of material pleasure and individual freedoms on offer in European cities would be sufficient to lure immigrants from Muslim countries into adopting modern lifestyles. They assumed that, along with pop music, denim jeans, and the legal right to have sex at age sixteen, the values of individual rights and individual choice, intellectual freedom, and tolerance would entice Muslims into accepting modernity in every sense. Christian leaders assumed the passive position that people will be attracted to the church on their own and that the church had no business trying to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian God.

Muslim Brotherhood members, by contrast, are tireless in their efforts. A Muslim preacher working in a neighborhood in Glasgow or Rotterdam sets up sports clubs, classes, and discussion groups for children and teenagers, works with criminals and drug users, creates networks to maintain order in his community. In immigrant neighborhoods across Europe so-called Brotherhood Women—young and single and bursting with the energy of the born-again—work their way through the housing projects asking how they can help harried mothers. They clean house and offer tape-recorded cassettes of sermons, along with DVDs of desperate martyrs. They counsel on parenting, on employment benefits, on what to do with wayward kids. They give money and bring medicine. There is no end to the kindness; they are doing this for Allah.

But Allah wants something in return for all this charity. He wants submission of will, mind, and body so total that those kids who are saved from the streets and drug addiction are persuaded to commit to the jihad against the infidel.

As a result the people who live in these ghettoized communities
no longer feel alone and alienated. Feelings of social rejection, unemployment, poor educational performance, and, perhaps most urgently, the fear of what a modern value system may do to their daughters—all of these draw people to the Brotherhood’s message of an alternative, pure, and good life. Return to the ways of Islam, and everything will be better: this is religion as a dream of returning to the old, sure ways.

For the younger generation, who feel no roots in their parents’ home countries, the Brotherhood’s focus on the global community of Islam also makes it a powerful force. Its simple message of unity in a movement of anti-Western jihad is the teenage dream: rebellion
with
a cause. All over Europe such young people live in what were once Christian neighborhoods. These places had churches, with congregations, priests, and ladies who put flowers in the chapel every Sunday. But far too few people crossed the tracks and stretched a hand out to the Muslim families who moved into the housing projects of Europe. No priest matched the efforts of the Moroccan imam with the box of cassette tapes. The random messages of Nike advertisements and pop culture were not enough to anchor this new, disoriented immigrant population into a sense of citizenship and community with Europe. The jihadis didn’t have any real competition; of course they spread.

The churches must have seen this happening, and yet for some reason didn’t seek to raise the alarm. They did not try to fight either the massive wave of conversions of traditional Muslims to fundamentalism or the smaller wave of conversions of people from historically Christian communities to Islam. The reason seems clear: the Vatican and all the established Protestant churches of northern Europe believed naively that interfaith dialogue would magically bring Islam into the fold of Western civilization. It has not happened, and it will not happen.

Right now there are three kinds of messages being disseminated in many immigrant communities in European cities: the traditional, more dilute Islam that is mainly a kind of cultural habit; strong, radical Islam, which is clearly on the rise; and the get-rich-quick scams offered by the lords of organized crime who deal in the trafficking of women, weapons, and drugs.