Gość: Daniel
IP: 168.103.126.*
10.12.01, 18:47
Is a war of civilizations coming?
Clearly, not a few in the Islamic world and the West so believe, and ardently
desire. And, with the War Party cawing for an attack on Iraq, with Sharon
unleashed after the atrocities in Jerusalem and Haifa, with the U.S. press
calling for a reappraisal of our ties to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a clash of
civilizations has moved from the possible to the probable.
President Bush, however, seems instinctively aware such a war would be a
disaster. For no matter how many deaths or defeats we inflict, we cannot kill
Islam as we did Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism and Soviet Bolshevism.
Islam has survived for nearly 1,600 years; it is the predominant faith in 57
countries; it is indestructible.
Astonishingly, 63 years ago, when Islam lay dormant under the heel of Western
empires, a famous Catholic writer predicted Islam would rise again. Wrote
Hillaire Belloc: "It has always seemed to me ... probable, that there would be
a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the
renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has
been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Islam was a Christian heresy, Belloc believed, whose strength lay in
its "insistence on personal immortality, the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God,
on his Justice and Mercy [and] ... its insistence on the equality of human
souls in the sight of their Creator."
While The Prophet "gave to our Lord the highest reverence, and the Mother of
God was ever for him the first of womankind," he rejected the Incarnation.
Mohammed "taught that our Lord was the greatest of all Prophets, but still only
a prophet, a man like other men." Belloc believed Islam to be a "Reformation"
movement with parallels to "the Protestant Reformers – on Images, the Mass and
Celibacy."
When Christians were illiterate, Islam spread "for 700 years, until it had
mastered the Balkans and the Hungarian plain, and all but occupied Western
Europe itself," almost destroying Christendom "through its early material and
intellectual superiority."
Three heroes saved the West. In 732, at Poitiers, Charles Martel, the Hammer of
the Franks, stopped Islam's invasion in France. In 1571, the Christian fleets
of Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V, destroyed the
Mohammedan armada in an epic battle immortalized in Chesterton's "The Ballad of
Lepanto." And Polish Catholic King John Sobieski stopped the Turks at
Vienna "on a date that ought to be famous in history, September 11, 1683."
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