Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci’s next circle of cultural diversity – the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up. Beginning with the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the 1983 Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue, Signora Fallaci rounds up a quarter-century’s worth of westerners who’ve insisted that everything you know was invented by Islam: paper, medicine, sherbet, artichokes, on and on and on…

Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dim-witted pupils.

This, it seems to me, is the most valuable contribution of Oriana Fallaci’s work. I enjoy the don’t-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was downriver in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not. And one reason why westernized Muslims seem so confident is that Europeans like Herr Genscher, in positing a choice between a generalized “Islam” and “the west”, have inadvertently promoted a globalized pan-Islamism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, Germany has Turks, France has Algerians, Britain has Pakistanis, the Netherlands has Indonesians. Even though they’re all Muslims, the differences between them have been, historically, very significant: Sunni vs. Shia, Arab Islam vs. the more moderate form prevailing in Southeast Asia.

Once upon a time we used to understand this. I’ve noticed in the last few years that, if you pull any old minor 19th-century memoir off the shelf, the en passant observations about Islam seem more informed than most of the allegedly expert commentary that appeared in the year after 9/11. For example, in Our Crisis: Or Three Months at Patna During the Insurrection of 1857 , William Tayler wrote:

With the Soonnees the Wahabees are on terms of tolerable agreement, though differing on certain points, but from the Sheahs, they differ radically, and their hatred, like all religious hatred, is bitter and intolerant. But the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect, and that which principally concerns this narrative, is the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide.

Mr Tayler, a minor civil servant in Bengal, was a genuine “multiculturalist”. That’s to say, although he regarded his own culture as superior, he was engaged enough by the ways of others to study the differences between them. By contrast, contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them.

In 1946, Colonel William Eddy, the first US minister to Saudi Arabia, was told by the country’s founder, Ibn Saud: “We will use your iron, but you will leave our faith alone.” William Tayler might have questioned whether that was such a great deal. The House of Saud used the Americans’ “iron” to enrich themselves and export the hardest, most unyielding form of Islam to the Balkans and Indonesia and Britain and North America.

This resurgent Islam – promoted by a malign alliance between Europe and the Saudis – is a much better example of globalization than McDonald’s. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it’s put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of antitrust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom’n’pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis’ Burqa King version of globalization. If a 21st-century William Tayler is unlikely, perhaps Naomi Klein could step into the breach.

According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Macleans Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia , the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following assertions:

1. Mosques are a “one-stop shop” for Muslims looking to wage a “Jihad” against the West.

2. Mosques generally and commonly promote the killing of Jews.

3. Muslims commonly threaten to kill innocents; violence and threats have come to be recognized as part of the Muslim “cultural tradition” and are therefore accepted by Western society under the guise of diversity.

4. Oriana Fallaci is really a fearless and heroic figure who is being harassed by law enforcement for no good reason.

5. Oriana Fallaci is wanted in several European countries for the promotion of hatred and racism against Muslims only because Muslims have ganged up on her and are exploiting the legal system to their advantage.

6. Laws have been made in Europe in order to permit Muslims to win lawsuits by invoking bogus claims of religious and racial discrimination.

7. Muslims routinely launch meritless lawsuits against writers.

THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:

From The Globe And Mail , April 15th 2008:

Dear Sir,

In his letter, Imam Delic of the Canadian Islamic Congress says that, in my Maclean’s columns, I ‘allege’ that ‘Muslims believe in drinking their enemies’ blood’ and that ‘contemporary Islam condones sex with minors and animals’.

Er, no. It was not I who ‘alleged’ that. The latter ‘allegation’ was made in the 1980s by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, a quite famous Muslim in his day, and the former ‘allegation’ was made by Sheikh Omar Brooks, a British Muslim, in a well reported debate at Trinity College, Dublin, the oldest debating society in the world.

Imam Delic says these articles were ‘scurrilous’. If by ‘scurrilous’ he means ‘the crime of accurately quoting prominent Muslims’, then I plead guilty – though I confess I am surprised to discover this is apparently a crime in Canada. But if the imam disputes these and other characterizations, he should surely take them up with the Islamic scholars who made them rather than attempting to eliminate the middle man.

Incidentally, perhaps I might take this opportunity to extend an invitation to Imam Delic and his boss, Dr Mohamed Elmasry, to be my guests at this year’s World Press Freedom Awards in Ottawa on May 2nd.

The sheep-shaggery was to become a persistent motif of my year in the vise-like grip of the thought police. Despite the above, the tireless “human rights” apparatchik Pearl Eliadis, pushing back against what she saw as a threat to the entire racket, revived the matter of ovine fornication in a long snoozeroo of a piece in Maisonneuve called “The Controversy Entrepreneurs” – a not-quite-good-enough concept she spent many months attempting to plant in the zeitgeist, presumably in hopes of landing a book deal. “The Controversy Entrepreneur” is meant to be me, frantically milking my notoriety, although dear old Pearl seems to be the one who can’t let go of the udders. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

In December, Awan, Mithoowani and Sheikh – a fourth complainant has since dropped out – filed human rights complaints against Maclean’s with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). The complaints singled out Steyn’s article ‘The Future Belongs to Islam’, which predicts a Muslim global takeover, and Maclean’s refusal to provide space for a rebuttal, as discriminatory. (Steyn clarified that he was not trying to say that ‘the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers.’)