Their Jihad And Ours

EVER SINCE the seven century, we are all constantly reminded, jihad has been a one-way ticket to Islam. The jihad warriors conquered the ground, sweeping out of Arabia, westwards along the south shore of the Mediterranean and north through Spain, eastwards across the ancient lands of Persia and the great civilization of India.

But they were not just nomad bands, strewing destruction in their wake. They offered a remarkable proposition to the peoples that they conquered, as Lee Harris makes clear in his review of The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

The Muslim victors could have condemned their victims to everlasting servitude, but they didn’t. They gave them a choice. They could stay as they were, a conquered and humiliated people, or they could join the victors and surrender to Islam.

Quite a concept, writes Harris.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any method by which a quicker pacification of a conquered people could be achieved than by allowing them to make a swift and easy transition from being outsiders to being insiders

If you were a Christian or a Jew, you were permitted a middle way, of dhimmitude. You could keep to your religion of the book, but you had to acknowledge the supremacy of Islam.

It has been a remarkably successful proposition down the centuries. Very seldom has Islam retreated from the lands it had conquered not just by the sword but with the word of Mohammed.

So the question is: How can we, in the enlightened tolerant west, contest on equal terms with such a powerful ideological force

The answer is that we have a pretty powerful jihad concept of our own. Just like the Muslim jihad it is a program of world conquest. And it offers a remarkable menu of benefits to those that surrender to its will.

You already know its name. It is the movement of democratic capitalism informed by the spirit of Christianity.

It began in the despair of Jewish defeat in the Roman Empire and grew with the conversion of rich women in the cities around the Mediterranean. From monasteries in northern Europe in the dark ages it took over the minds of the feudal nobility.

And then about half a millennium ago in the aftermath of the religious upheaval we call the Reformation it started to go global. It was a force of remarkable power and it spread across the world, for its strength was not just spiritual, but economic, political, cultural, and military.

In place of tribal gods it offered the God that saved all of mankind. In political terms it offered the community of language to transcend the community of the kindred. In economic terms it offered a community of trust that was proven by acts of trustworthiness. In cultural terms it offered a separation between cultural power and religious power, and in military terms it offered the strength of the western team and delegation combined with the economic power of the community of trust.

And anyone could join. All they had to do was to liberate themselves from the limited trust boundaries of the blood kindred—the tribe or clan—and learn to expand the boundaries of trust as far as they could tolerate, beyond the boundary of blood kin, even beyond the boundary of language and religion to the horizon of humanity itself.

The chief block against the expansion of this European idea was Islam. On the west was the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean; on the east was the implacable foe of Islam. But the development of ocean transportation in the fifteenth century allowed the jihad warriors of capitalism under Christianity to outflank Islam in the east by establishing trade routes to India around the continent of Africa and migrate westward across the Americas and thence to China.

Growing slowly at first and then with gathering speed, the capitalist Christian jihad has finally achieved the capitulation of the two great ancient cultures of the world: India and China. Now we are left with a single holdout, Islam, inoculated against the western virus by its own jihad faith, is facing what may be a final challenge.

In the tumultuous confrontation between two jihad armies, can the jihad of Islam survive? Will the next century see the final annihilation of Islamic jihad in a double envelopment, the traditional German Kesselschlacht? Or will the jihad warriors achieve a breakout from the Middle East into the population collapse of western Europe?

That, of course, is the Question. President Bush has made the first steps to oppose the breakout and to divide up the homelands of jihad. It will be up to his successors and up to us what happens next.

For it is true that, just as we understood in the Cold War that communism and capitalism were in a contest for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world, the outcome of the present war depends upon a similar understanding, a multigenerational covenant to contain and neutralize the virus spreading out of Araby.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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