Robert Kaplan, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, has just published a piece on Islam and the future of Europe. He claims, startlingly, that Europe “was essentially defined by Islam,” by which he means that before Islam swept across North Africa, Europe consisted of a single civilization, on both banks of the Mediterranean — that of the Roman Empire — and that Islam’s arrival severed “the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves.” It is true that Muslim conquerors swept across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, but not quite true, pace Kaplan, that they “extinguished Christianity there.” Millions of Coptic Christians remained a majority in Egypt until the 14th century (that is, for at least 700 years after the time that Kaplan claims Muslim armies “virtually extinguished Christianity” in North Africa). And while it is true that the Roman Empire was sundered, it was not only by the forces of Islam, as Kaplan appears to believe: before the Arab armies arrived, others had been seizing territory from Roman control, including the Visigoths in Spain and the Vandals, who conquered the Roman province of Africa in 433 and held it till 539.
Kaplan quotes with evident approval Jose Ortega y Gasset that “all European history has been a great migration toward the North.” Is that true? The Roman Empire fell because of a great migration of the Germanic tribes from the north and northeast to the South; it was they, the Barbarians, who beat down the steady Roman legions and seized Rome in 476 A.D., with the Germanic warrior Odoacer placed on the throne. And even before the Fall of Rome, the Roman Empire had divided into Eastern and Western Empires, one ruled from Rome, the other from Constantinople. Surely that split was just as significant, for the future of European civilization, with the Western empire embracing Latin Catholicism, and the Eastern empire Orthodox Christianity, as the loss of North Africa to Islam.
Racing through the centuries, Kaplan in the same sentence leaps from “the breakup of the Roman empire” (into East and West, but he says nothing further about the colossal effect of that split) to “that northward migration” which “saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization.” This is a doubly bizarre remark, since it was their southern migration which brought the Germanic peoples within the borders of the Roman Empire and ultimately to Rome. And it was the Romans of both the Western and Eastern Empires, not the Germanic tribes, who forged more than the rudiments of Western civilization, including such monumental achievements as, in the Eastern Empire, the Code of Justinian.
Kaplan fleetingly mentions, exactly three times, what should be at the center of any history of Europe: Christianity itself. He writes that the Slavs and Magyars “adopted Christianity,” that European unity began with the concept of a “Christendom” in “inevitable opposition to Islam,” and that Muslims in Europe today “have no desire to be Christians” – and that’s all he has to say on the subject of Europe and Christianity. He does not discuss what Christianity has contributed to forming the European mentality over the last two thousand years, or how it has influenced, even shaped, Europe’s art and music, its literature, its philosophy, its political thought, its more, none of it thinkable without taking into the account the influence of Christianity. Kaplan has Islam on his mind, and were he to do justice to Christianity, his readers might begin to see the sense of insisting that it was not Islam, but Christianity, that “defined Europe.”
If Islam and the Muslim armies hadn’t existed, Europe’s civilizational boundaries would be different – could still extend into North Africa and the Levant — but the nature of that civilization would not be different from what it was, and is. Europe would still have been a child of Greece and Rome and ancient Israel. Islam did not contribute to those many things – art, music, literature, philosophy, political theory – that we mean by “civilization.” Islam created in its adherents a mentality that abhorred novelty, or bida, that held to a kind of inshallah-fatalism based on the view of an Allah who could interfere, at whim and subject to no laws, with the lives of men, that encouraged a habit of mental submission rather than of skeptical inquiry. European civilization stood in stark contrast, promoting rather than anathematizing the new, believing in a God who was not whimsical but rationally prepared to obey His own laws, and promoting critical thought and inquiry. After the initial sweep of Muslim armies through North Africa, halted at the highwater mark for Islam of Poitiers in the West and, centuries later, of Vienna in the East, Islam’s “contribution” to Europe consisted solely of military aggression, mainly through raids by sea (in one case, Muslim raiders got as far as Iceland). But Islam contributed nothing to European culture. Civilizationally, Europe remained a child of Greece and Rome and Israel, and then, of course, for two millennia, of Christianity. The armies of Islam waged war as best they could; their gains and losses helped to define Europe’s political boundaries, but Islam had no effect on the European mentality.
Kaplan several times mentions Edward Said’s book Orientalism favorably, claiming that it set out how “Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing what it was against. Europe’s identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery.” What Said mainly tried to do in Orientalism was different: to endow with a new and insidious meaning the word “Orientalist,” which hitherto had referred neutrally to Western scholars of the languages of the Levant (especially Arabic), and of Islam and Islamic civilization. Said claimed that these “Orientalists” studied Arabic as part of a deliberate campaign to justify and help the project of Western imperialism by means of their putatively unsympathetic or hostile treatment of Oriental peoples. The devastating detailed critique of Said’s use of “Orientalism” as a term of polemical abuse, delivered by Bernard Lewis in 1982, and which many considered a knockout blow, apparently has not yet reached Robert D. Kaplan.
Kaplan appears to believe that European unity in the early modern period could not have been achieved without Europe’s “inevitable opposition” to Islam. This “inevitable opposition” to Islam was, Kaplan says, “a concept that culminated in the Crusades.” No, the Crusades were not the culmination of some “inevitable opposition” to inoffensive Muslims. Rather, Europe’s opposition to Islam “culminating in the Crusades” was fed by centuries of Muslim attacks up and down the coasts of Europe (and not the other way around), and the Crusades were undertaken initially in order to repel an assault by Muslim Seljuk Turks on Anatolia, and the Christian effort then broadened into an attempt to retake the Holy Land because, for a century, Muslims had made life hell for Christians in the Holy Land, beginning with the almost-total destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the orders of the Caliph Al-Hakim in 1009, and attacks on Christian pilgrims that kept them from travelling freely to, and within, the Holy Land. This understandable response to continuous Muslim aggression hardly required an “inevitable opposition” to “Islam.”
Kaplan mentions Europe’s “sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery” as building its identity. Curiously, he doesn’t mention Islam’s far greater sense of superiority to the Christian world on its periphery. Nor does he mention that Europe had been quite capable of uniting and building an identity without needing Islam to measure itself against – or has he forgotten about the Roman Empire?
And Kaplan continues in the Saidian vein of grand pronouncements, and like Said, turns out to be wrong in many of his details.
He writes that “imperialism proved the ultimate expression of the evolution” from the “inevitable opposition to Islam” to that European “sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world.” That’s the grand pronouncement. And here’s the cavalier way with history: “Here modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and – most crucial – inferior.”
What happened was this: Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798. Far from this representing the beginning of Europe’s conquest of the Middle East, all French forces had left Egypt by 1801, and no European forces “conquered” any part of the Muslim Middle East or Muslim North Africa until the 20th century, with the single exception of Algeria. But Kaplan appears to believe that Napoleon entered Egypt, and then those Europeans, “starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East.” He may not know the true sequence of events: save for a three-year stay by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt, and the annexing of Algeria by France in 1830, the Europeans had little to do with the Arab lands until just before World War I. Scrupulosity with the facts of history is indispensable, but Kaplan dispenses with it, and how.
He is careless, too, when he writes that “early modern Europe….dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as beautiful, fascinating, and – most crucial – inferior.” This is pure Said — the Orientalist as handmaiden to imperialism. Is it true? Which scholars and diplomats were “dispatched” by their governments to study Islamic civilization? A few possibilities come to mind. Edward William Lane produced The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, but no one “dispatched” him; he was simply a rich man indulging his curiosity in Cairo. The Frenchman Champollion was in Egypt, but instead of studying Islamic civilization, he deciphered the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphs. The scholar of Islam Theodor Noldeke stayed in Germany, and most of the important Western scholars of Islam similarly remained at home. Perhaps Kaplan was thinking of the scholar who fit his bill most closely – the Hungarian Ignac Goldziher, who did travel in the Muslim East, supported by his government. But Hungary had no imperialist project, in the Near East or anywhere else. And most damning to Kaplan’s suave assumption is that Goldziher – I’m fairly sure Kaplan didn’t know this – did not find “Islamic civilization” at all “inferior.” As for those “scholars and diplomats” who found “Islamic civilization” both “beautiful” and “fascinating,” it’s hard to tell whom Kaplan has in mind. I suspect he may have been thinking of writers, not diplomats or scholars, and got Flaubert, so scathing in his epistolary reports from the fleshpots of Cairo and Beirut, confused with Chateaubriand, who in his Le Dernier des Abencerages of a generation before, presented a Romantic view (“beautiful,” “fascinating”) of Islamic Spain, akin to what Washington Irving did with his Alhambra. Of course, neither Flaubert nor Chateaubriand was sent to the East by anyone. I’d like to see Kaplan’s list of the “scholars and diplomats” he claims were “dispatched” for such study.
And having misstated so much about early modern Europe in relation to Islam, in treating of the present day Kaplan, consistent in his inaccuracies, does not disappoint. He claims that “Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant.” Could it be that Europe’s “sense of cultural preeminence” needed no buttressing from the existence of Arab “police states,” but reflected an unapologetic awareness of Europe’s, and especially of France’s….”cultural preeminence”? And when one thinks of those places where French cultural penetration has been most pronounced, and thus French cultural “preeminence” most clearly on comparative display, they have been Lebanon and Tunisia, the two Arab countries that have been least like police states.
Kaplan thinks that the Europeans welcomed the absence of political freedoms in North Africa and the Levant, because it gave them the opportunity “to lecture Arabs about human rights” while not having to worry “about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration.” This is bizarre. For decades European governments have been monitoring the domestic politics of the Arab states, lecturing them about human rights and — for Turkey, in particular — about standards for admission to the E.U.. Kaplan is saying that it’s all been a farce, that the Europeans were happy to tolerate, behind the smokescreen of their human-rights-and-democracy palaver, the “police states” that held the Arab peoples prisoner. But the Europeans meant it; they followed through with threatened sanctions in order to force Arab governments to be less despotic. They supported, and still support, all kinds of NGOS. Kaplan would have you believe that when France and Great Britain bombed Qaddafi’s forces in Libya, thus helping to ensure his overthrow, they were deliberately acting against their own interests in making possible “messy democratic experiments” possibly leading to greater “migration.” His view of European malevolence toward the Arabs is not supported either by their words or their deeds. Their enthusiasm for the “Arab Spring” may have been naïve, but it was also genuine.
Kaplan writes that “hundreds of thousands of Muslims are filtering into economically stagnant European states…” True? A moment’s glance at the news tells us that these Muslims are in fact headed as quickly as they can for the most well-off European states, to the Scandinavian countries and, above all, to Germany, and not to the “economically stagnant” states, such as Spain or Greece or Italy.
‘The migration,” he claims, is “driven by war and state collapse.” But not only that. What about the availability of more boats, run by better-organized smuggling networks? What about the refusal of Western navies to enforce blockades as they once would have done, because of the power of the bien-pensants who have convinced Europeans (with Pope Francis now taking the lead) that they have a duty to accept these “refugees”? Above all, surely the greater migration today is the result of the widespread availability of cell phones and computers in the Third World, spreading tantalizing information about the quality of life in Europe, which would-be migrants assume will be theirs, too, if only they can reach those distant promised lands. Many of those claiming to be “Syrians” fleeing war-torn Syria, or “Iraqis” fleeing war-torn Iraq, turn out to be Muslims from dozens of countries, including Turkey and Pakistan and Kosovo and Russia and Serbia, that are far from collapsing and hardly, right now, war-torn.
Kaplan talks of the new Muslim migration with a kind of inshallah-fatalism. It’s here; it can’t be stopped; there’s no point in even weakly protesting against it, this migration is “erasing the distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies.” Such “imperial centers” as Sweden or Germany? And what were their “former colonies” in North Africa and the Levant? Only two European countries had “former colonies” in those places – France (in North Africa) and Italy (in Libya). Great Britain’s mandates and protectorates did not constitute “colonies.” But Kaplan likes to think in terms of “imperial centers and their former colonies” — “imperialism” fits a left-wing mindset.
Bizarrely, Kaplan points to “the cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.” “Craves cultural purity”? Another product of Kaplan’s perfervid imagination: Europe does not crave “cultural purity.” Europe has admitted into its midst all sorts of immigrants who violate its “cultural, ethnic, and religious purity,” such as it was, but who worry the Europeans not at all: Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindus from India, Brazilians, Filipinos, Peruvians and many others; Europe is, like America and the rest of the West, busily celebrating its new diversity. But there is one kind of “diversity,” the permanently un-assimilating, threatening kind, the kind that comes from Muslim migrants alone, which Kaplan never mentions. The Islamic division of the world between Believer and Unbeliever, the doctrine of al-wala’ wa-l-bara, that is, loyalty to fellow Muslims and enmity toward non-Muslims, the belief that Muslims are the “best of people” and non-Muslims “the vilest of creatures,” the duty of Jihad, incumbent on all Muslims to spread the faith, until Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere – what sensible Europeans “crave” is not “cultural purity,” but freedom from the fear of millions of unwanted Muslim migrants.
To accuse Europeans of desiring “cultural purity” (that word “purity” has a distinctly unpleasant – as in “racial purity” – note) when their worries about Muslims are well-founded (see Paris, Brussels, Madrid, London, Cologne for a start), is unfair. To insist that “if [the West] does have a meaning beyond geography”(!), that meaning will be found only in “an ever more inclusive liberalism,” by which Kaplan means “liberalism” in the peculiarly kaplanian sense of happily agreeing to admit into your national home everyone who wants to come in, amounts to suicidal altruism. “Going back now to nationalism” is impossible, Kaplan asserts; it would be “courting disaster.” I don’t know why Kaplan believes the kind of nationalism that consists of pride in one’s own country’s history, and an attachment to, and affection for it, is wrong and impossible and means “courting disaster.” He relies on authority, quoting Alexander Herzen’s version of inshallah-fatalism: “History does not turn back…” We derive as little meaning from this kind of portentous but hollow remark as from Fukuyama’s “History is Dead,” or Obama’s incessant prattle about “getting on the Right Side of History” or “getting on the Wrong Side of History.” But History is the kind of thing Robert Kaplan likes.
Kaplan sees as inevitable a Europe where Islam must be fully accommodated: “Europe must now find some way to dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law-based system that arose in Europe’s north.” (“Europe’s north”? Has he forgotten where the Code of Justinian was fashioned?) And while Islam has its own rule-of-law-based system, called the Sharia, for Muslims there can be no compromise with another “rule-of-law based system”; accommodation with Islam means surrender to Sharia.
Kaplan ends: “If [Europe] cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. This would signal the end of ‘the West’ in Europe.”
But Europe already has “universal values” that were doing just fine before the recent Muslim invasion — democratic polities, legal limits on government power, protection for individual human rights including the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, legal equality for men and women; these are some of the “universal values” that are being attacked daily by Muslim migrants who hold very different “universal values” based on the supremacy of Islam, and submission to the Sharia. Kaplan appears to think it is Europeans who need to compromise, and ignores the grim fact – or does he not know? – that for Muslims there can be no compromising. Their ultimate goal is not “accommodation” with Europe, but “imposition” on Europe of the Sharia.
Kaplan’s take on the Islamic invasion of Europe is peculiar: fond of the idea of a once-and-future Europe, on both sides of the Mediterranean, being resurrected in a return to “a classical geography” — that of the Roman Empire — “as terrorism and migration reunite North Africa and the Levant with Europe.” Terrorism and migration are not “reuniting” Europe; they are destroying Europe, for these are simply two means of Muslim conquest, first by striking terror into the hearts of Infidels, and second, by demographically overwhelming them. As for invoking the future threat of the “dementia of ideologies,” what is Kaplan talking about? The only “dementia” apparent in Europe today is that of Muslim migrants in mental thrall to the ideology of Islam and, just as worrisome, the dementia of those non-Muslims who, like Robert Kaplan, fail to see what is staring them in the face – not the promise of a “new Europe” but the threat of a Europe that could be destroyed by the failure of its citizens to recognize, halt, and determinedly turn back, what has now become a Muslim invasion.

marble says
Is Robert Kaplan practicing to assume the dhimmi position?
Custos Custodum says
Kaplan’s wordiness suggests a more, er, oral orientation.
Kepha says
Kaplan is a disappointment. His ascription to the anti-jihadis in Europe of a desire for “cultural purity” is indeed dubious.
And I will echo Hugh’s disgust with Said. Said does nothing less than attack the intellectual curiosity which allowed the West to rise.
mortimer says
Bravo to Hugh Fitzgerald for many fine insights…especially, how Robert Kaplan fails to fault Islam at all for faults greater than those of Christian Europe.
One wonders if Kaplan sees Islam as merely a rambunctious form of Judaism that needs to calm down a bit. Kaplan should not hold his breath. Islam hasn’t calmed down in the last 1400 years. Why would it now?
One also wonders why Kaplan is so eager to see Europe invaded by Islam. Where are the modern examples of Islamic culture the world wants to emulate in any of the dozens of Muslim countries?
The impression I get from Hugh Fitzgerald’s review is that Kaplan makes dozens of bold claims and then fails to defend them with evidence.
(One of those claims, that of Jose Ortega y Gasset that “all European history has been a great migration toward the North” is not even supported by Spanish history. Spain received its ‘Spanish’ character from the Visigoths who had come down from the far north.)
Finally, I’m not sure if Europe is presently being ‘redefined by Islam’ as Kaplan claims. It looks to me that Europe is experiencing a massive allergic reaction to Islam which may soon lead to regurgitation.
linnte says
Well, I wish Europe would hurry up and puke out their vile contents, because it’s playing havoc on MY digestive system! Hahahaha!
Kesselman says
The massive influx of the vile invaders has already established Islam nausea.
Custos Custodum says
“Cultural purity”? Perhaps Kaplan has a point.
Come to think of it, there does seem to be a vocal and fast-growing population in Europe whose members (especially males) go to great lengths to preserve the “cultural purity” of their religion, their women and their 7th century mores, and who strictly refuses to acculturate.
marble says
We must not ignore Karen Armstrong. How can these people be explained? Are they ignorant, or do they want everyone else to be?
Custos Custodum says
Dhimmi word spewers are best understood based on biological principals – they have found an ecological niche rich in nutrients, like specialized fish that feed on hippo excreta.
Having found their niche, dhimmi word spewers have adapted to defend and expand their niche by any means at their disposal, especially including deceit through decoy techniques:. “Look! I write in the Atlantic, I am “vetted by the establishment,” trust me!”
Custos Custodum says
*principles
John Galt III says
“The Atlantic” ???? Who reads that crap?
I mean what about the USSR’s:Pravda and the Nazi newspapers: Der Sturmer and Volkischer Beobachter. Now that was when we had true freedom of the press and open inquiry, right?
DFD says
John Galt III says: “…I mean what about the USSR’s:Pravda and the Nazi newspapers: Der Sturmer and Volkischer Beobachter…”
You mean they are different to what we have? One learns something new every day.
Max Publius says
Kaplan may get a nice pay check occasionally, but in the greater scheme of things he is unwittingly a chump whose only use is to write crap so that true scholars can use it as a basis for debunking bad history spread by dishonest brokers like him. Debunking Kaplan’s crap is like shooting fish in a barrel for an intelligent writer like Fitzgerald. Just too bad there are so many Kaplans to debunk.
Wellington says
To begin with, mentioning Edward Said favorably, as Kaplan does, should always be a red light for those who value the truth since Said was a great distorter of the truth by way of his Orientalism nonsense and his general victim-oriented “thinking,” which the Islamic mindset thrives upon (and yes, I know Said was not a Muslim but he was, in full dhimmi mode, a rank apologist for Islam).
Secondly, Kaplan, whether unintentionally or intentionally, invokes the Pirenne thesis, i.e., that the ancient world really didn’t end with the calamitous Germanic invasions of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century but rather when Islamic hordes (the term “Islamic hordes” being not Kaplan’s descriptive but, rather proudly, mine) in the seventh century truly severed the connections of the ancient world. But he uses this thesis (which has merit as first put forth by Pirenne) to exculpate Islam. Indeed, he goes even further than exculpation and “ascends” to approbation of Mo’s creed, a creed which is completely incapable of evolving, let alone apologizing, as the Judeo-Christian, Western world has done many times over, for crimes committed in its name. Yes, the Islamic world to this day has never apologized for anything, even though it has so much to apologize for. Think Kaplan gets any of this? Not on your life. He is only interested, where denigration is a concern, in pulling down the West——–but never the Islamic world.
Finally, and this is where Kaplan is most egregious, he implicitly constructs a paradigm whereby Islamic values and Western values are at least equal and so the West must accommodate to this. Such a hypothesis is rooted in ignorance, deceit, self-hate and general stupidity (and that “special” kind of stupidity that only the well educated are capable of——as another example, Karl Marx). In other words, just more nonsense from an uninformed Western leftist serving the cause of a religion which is in its intellectual architecture a never-ending threat to freedom.
Angemon says
Was Kaplan paid for each false meme he tried to legitimize?
DFD says
I am sure, check is in the mail and scholarship secured. What do you think, do they pay him in Riyals?
Custos Custodum says
No. Saudi oil is traded in US dollars.
Angemon says
If I were him, I’d ask my payment (or at least a part of it) to be made in oil barrels, then sit on them and wait for the prices to rise.
Ciudadano says
Even in Spain Islam influence, after many centuries, was little: some words, some musical influences, some buildings. In El Quijote and El Mio Cid, the moors are always depicted negatively. Catholicism was the force that shaped Spain culture and history.
“From the moors no truth could be expected because all then are deceivers, liers and chimeric”
El Quijote
mortimer says
Robert Kaplan claimed Europe “was essentially defined by Islam”.
No kidding?
Islam’s attacks across the Mediterranean Sea virtually paralyzed the Roman Empire and brought the destruction of books on a large scale, as well as the death of knowledge in engineering, architecture, music, science, math, language, literature, art, etc.
Islam is an extinguisher of civilization.
mortimer says
Islam caused the Dark Ages in Europe.
Wellington says
With respect, mortimer, I think that is simplistic at best and simply false at worst. Things were pretty damn bleak even by the third century A.D., what with the Barrack Emperors period, plague, debasement of the coinage, population decrease, a decided declining civil spirit throughout the Empire, et al., though Diocletian and then Constantine breathed new life into the Empire and gave it another two hundred some years in the West, serving as a testimony to the staying power of Rome.
But by the early fifth century, Emperor Honorius, son of Theodosius the Great, had to pull all Roman troops out of Roman Britannia, so threatened was he by German tribes close to Italy and Rome. Thereafter, matters got even worse. Remember, the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 and then the Vandals did a redux in 455. Attila and his fellow Huns were no help to Western Civilization either. The Western half of the Empire was gone by the time the fifth century ended and the sixth century was pretty damn bleak indeed for Western Europe, minus a few bright spots like Irish monks keeping the best from antiquity alive.
I have no regard for Islam as you know, but the Dark Ages were not caused by Islam, though one could argue that Islam exacerbated them, for instance especially in Spain and certainly if one accepts the Pirenne thesis about trade in the entire Mediterranean, a thesis which does have merit.
Islam deserves huge amounts of blame to be sure, from the seventh century to the present day, but one should be careful to not assign blame where it does not belong——for accuracy’s sake and also because error in assessing malevolence only gives malevolence a pass. Just sayin’, mortimer.
Kepha says
Wellington and Mortimer: The “Dark Ages” are in fact a myth coined by Petrarccio and blown out of all proportion by bitterly anti-Christian so-called “enlightenment” thinkgers like Gibbon. Unfortunately, the Innaleckchools (I won’t dignify people like Armstrong, Kaplan, Said, and a host of others with the title “intellectual”) pay little attention to such advances as carts with springs, plows that can turn and slice heavy soils, horse collars, water mills, and a number of other real-world innovations that saved labor and made increased production possible. As for the supposed glories of Classical Civilization, I can’t praise temples for pederasty, sexual mores that gave a powerful man the right to rape any of his slaves of either sex, little technical innovation due to the glut of cheap slave labor obtained from constant warfare, and the degraded morals of the courts of emperors like Gaius Caligula and Nero.
Maybe the “Dark Ages” descended not on Western Europe, but in the lands of Islam (especially after Dhimmi communities contracted too much).
Wellington says
I understand your points, Kepha, but the Early Middle Ages (c.476-c.1050) still had a fair amount of darkness to them. Illiterates were everywhere, including among the priesthood, whole areas of Western Europe were barely protected, if protected at all, by any rule of law, and compared to the achievements of the High and Late Middle Ages, the centuries from the fifth to the eleventh were indeed underwhelming, though, as Lord Clark noted, and as you implicitly did, even at its low point, Western Civilization never ceased to be creative, never ceased to do new things, never went static as even great civilizations have (examples being those of ancient Egypt and China) the only civilization to do so according to Clark. And there were definite intellectual and artistic achievements in addition to the technical ones you named, as evidenced by the Northumbrian Renaissance (the Venerable Bede comes foremost to mind here) the Carolingian Renaissance and the majesty of Erigena’s thought.
billybob says
I am so grateful for Hugh Fitzgerald’s piercing intellect for saving me from Kaplan’s delusions. If I ran across his article, I surely would have read it, but would not have had the knowledge to understand the fallacies in what I was reading.,
linnte says
What I’d like to know is WHY is it so necessary to have every single country in the world be “multicultural”? What is so wrong with having a black Nigeria an Asian China or Japan, a white Norway? People migrate to places as they want, and need to, then stay, so there are black people in England, Ireland all majority white countries. I love our diversity here in America! But Muslims want to change the focus of law toward their view and they do not integrate which proves their motive. Personally I don’t care what someone’s color is. Here in America, we are all Americans and abide by the Constitution. But if Muslims had it their way(except for integrated Muslims in America who enjoy our culture with us) they would have Shari’a. There in lies the problem.
Even Dearborn and Hamtramic Michigan Muslims appear to abide by our Laws. I am certain there are secret Shari’a Courts in those cities though. A majority or significant number increase of Muslims would cause discontent in the USA. This is what we need to prevent. Although, how I am not sure, aside from white, black and other minorities all having children equal to the numbers of Muslims.
I say it is well and good for cultures to maintain themselves. It grieves me to see Europe and Britain become strangled by Islam. I am proud to be Scot/Irish by genetic heritage! Alba gu brath!
DFD says
linnte says: “….Even Dearborn and Hamtramic Michigan Muslims appear to abide by our Laws…”
For the time being being, and ‘appear’ is the operative word. When Mohammed and his followers went to Yathrib/Medina, as refugees on Hijra, the obeyed the the laws of Yathrib – for the time being.
The came the massacre of the trench.
Kepha says
linnte: Nigeria actually is multicultural; with the strongly Muslim north at loggerheads with a Christianizing south. Skin color counts little for culture. Even the “Gamle Norge” from which part of my ancestry descends had its Norwegian speakers, Sami, and Kven. As for China, speaking as someone who both studied and married into that culture, I assure you it is a whole civilization masquerading as a nation.
linnte says
I guess my point was; who cares what color someone is or if a nation is all one color, as long as they all SHARE the same culture. It’s the people who hide within ethnic communities and refuse to learn what their new cultural majority is, seems weird to the point of wrong, to me.
Thanks for the information though Kepha. I didn’t know Nigeria was multicultural, multiethnic.
Custos Custodum says
Interestingly, Muslim businessmen will insist that any legal conflicts over important deals be handled by traditional judges from Christian or Jewish (!) backgrounds.
They will NOT submit to a back-alley Sharia outfit, nor even its business-suit equivalent.
Similarly, we commonly see Muslim defendants in criminal trials being defended ably and energetically by attorneys from a Jewish background. Some of these attorneys may not even be practicing “progressives.”
Civilus Defendus says
Robert Kaplan should be excoriated for promoting fanciful narratives and shamed into under-employment. Or perhaps be made to apologize to his readers, but I suspect he wouldn’t understand for what he should apologize. That his tripe passes for historical analysis at all is a sad commentary on the state of the world–or perhaps just readers of the The Atlantic. The imposition of Islamic sharia law must be resisted by all peoples if there is to be any freedom of conscience, science and arts, and undefiled women in the world. A reread of Pirenne might be helpful, Mr. Kaplan.
Kudos to Hugh Fitzgerald for his cogent and bruising analysis.
jewdog says
When Robert Kaplan relaxes, he has a creme-demented. He finds that he is best defined as a happy nudnik when the Muslims in his neighborhood burn his car and rape his daughter, allowing him to cast off his white privilege and feel like a humble, post-colonial shmuck. Now that it looks like Bernie the Dhimmi will lose out to the Canckle Cackler, maybe he’ll have a shot at ambassador to Libya.
Christian says
Kaplan maybe a jew. His hatred of Christendom overwhelms his thinking but the sad thing maybe that europeans are going to fulfill his wishes, enthralled as they are by silly liberalism.
Paul says
Really? He may be a Jew, but that has little to do with anything. His thinking is 100% ultraliberal self-hating westerner–examples abound among both Jews and Christians and secular.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Thank you, Hugh Fitzgerald, for your analysis of Robert Kaplan’s analysis.
But get a load of this sentence: “Christianity has … shaped Europe’s art and music, its literature, its philosophy, its political thought, its more, none of it thinkable without taking into the account the influence of Christianity.”
Huh? “its more”? Shouldn’t that be “its mores”? Has even Hugh Fitzgerald forgotten his Latin plurals? O tempus! O more!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_tempora_o_mores!
Demsci says
What a great article, refreshing so much my memory of my history-books. So accurate, so devastating to “revisionists” like Robert Kaplan, who shows downright ignorance and bias, ably demonstrated by Hugh.
Western people like and almost every Westerner I have ever known, were perfectly content with a division among states, world-areas of on the one hand Democratic Western, and on the other Islamic.nations, territory. We were perfectly prepared to reach accommodation when we would be in an Islamic country.
Why can’t Muslims have the same attitude? Is “al wala-wal-bara” and the longing for worldsupremacy that dominant among them? Are they so dumb that they will try to slaughter the goose that is laying the golden eggs for them to profit from? Apparantly, witness the many past invasions and aggressions.
I think it behooves the best of our new generations to wake up, internalize the glory of our democratic system (imperfect as it is) and our great Universal (not just Western) values and
Be FOR them, not just against Islam,
and fight to uphold them for the next generations, against and among so many Muslims, Islam-defenders and lethargic masses,
And dare I say it, boldly set out to convert many Muslims to embrace some better spiritual ideology instead of Islam. And I do see possibilities, as gaining momentum is now a drive for practicing principles and strategies for people to get happier, even by the UK government.
And notice: Happiness seems largely unattainable for persons and groups under any other circumstances than those of democratic nations, because of the significance for happiness of freedom of speech and autonomy and proper division of power.
And making people making themselves happy could, perhaps one day could start to give Islam big competition for adherents. And also consider the massive technological wave changing the world right now that could favor our values and system. Don’t laugh, or say I am a Pollyanna, but let me dream, please.
.
linnte says
I don’t laugh at you. Not at all. I want to see Muslims turn to the true God too. That’s why it is critical to convince everyone to read that Qur’an! Shine the light on the evil of Islam. And convince Muslims to read the New Testament. How could they NOT see the truth if they hear the words of Jesus?
Demsci says
Thank you so much Linnte, and I so agree that knowledge of so-called Kuffars of the Quran is shining the light on the evil of Islam. I don’t go further, being an atheist, but rest assured we are in complete agreement about our preference of democratic tenets, values, system and nations over ANY dictatorship, esp. Islamic dictatorship!
UNCLE VLADDI says
Liberals, being Marxists, see everything from an economic, not a religious, viewpoint.
That IS their “religion.” So to them muslims can’t be dangerous because of general religious doctrines which tell them to hate infidels because their god does, it must be because of specific economic grievances.
They ignore that islam was created by rich Muhammad to further enrich himself at everyone else’s expense, and is still perpetrated. And it’s based on Moe’s self-enriching and crime-excusing alibi that god wanted him to commit his crimes!
And yet, the Qur’an clearly and very specifically tells muslims the Bible is wrong and also that all Christians and Jews are infidel criminals who worship a false god, and who must therefore be extorted, enslaved, and murdered for their “crime” of not being muslims:
Sura (Chapter) 47:1-4 of the Qur’an:
1: non-muslims are bad, (allegedly because they insult allah by dividing his nature*);
2: muslims are good, (allegedly because to them allah is the cause of everything*);
3: Allah made them both like that;
4: So muslims should chop off the non-muslims’ heads.
(“Allah could have done it himself, but he wants you muslims to do it for him”).
…
It’s all right there, in context: islamic violence is entirely general doctrine-driven, and not at all specific grievance-driven.
(And chapter 47 isn’t by any stretch even remotely the worst, most violent chapter; that honor goes to either chapter 8 or 9).
So don’t go looking for what actions of yours may have offended or provoked them; they have been taught from birth that your existence alone offends their god, and so should offend them.
Muslims have been officiallly taught to believe that they are the “best of people” (Qur’an 3:110) and that unbelievers are the “most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6).
——-
*[Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority: their abode will be the Fire: And evil is the home of the wrong-doers! (3:151)].
BOTTOM LINE:
There’s only two cultures in the universe: civilization, & barbarism.
Civilization is enabled by agreeing to obey the Golden Rule of Law, which defines morality (simply: DO NOT ATTACK FIRST)! From it, we get trust and progress.
After all, when you attack first, then by definition you’re the predatory, criminal aggressor, and they’re your innocent victims; there’s no two ways about it.
Of course, when you attack a technologically superior enemy first, it doesn’t matter that you can “only” kill a few of them, then pretend to be victims when you inevitably lose.
The ends don’t justify the means – the means only define the end results. When you lie, steal and murder to get your way, even if you “succeed,” doesn’t make you into a mighty “king” or great “prophet” – it means you’re only still a lying, murderous thief.
Lies cannot become truth, no matter how many people agree with them, and truth cannot become a lie, no matter how many people choose to ignore it.
Barbarism is the opposite of civilization – where at least one group claims it’s their holy right & duty to always attack everyone else first, so there, nyah! (i.e: ISLAM). From it, they get distrust and stagnation.
Other than that, all threats are also a form of (psychological) attack (aka: coercion, duress, extortion, “terrorism”) and all non-defensive attacks are crimes.
Here’s islam’s “holy Message from god” as exemplified by the words & deeds of it’s Founder:
“I will save humanity by lying to, extorting, robbing, kidnapping, ransoming, enslaving, burning out of their homes, torturing, raping and murdering everyone who even only verbally disagrees with me – and you can, too!”
-Muhammad-
So islam is obviously only an ancient ongoing CRIME-syndicate, and the only “religious” part in it, is where they say:
“God told us to commit these crimes!”
(Capisce?)!
😉
No one would fall for that excuse if the (mostly Italian) mafia used it – so why do our “leaders” pretend to fall for it when the (originally Arab) muslims do?!
I’d ask them a simple question: “Do you consider these things (lies/fraud, extortion, robbery, kidnapping & ransoming, slavery, arson, torture, rape & murder) to be:
a) holy religious rights & obligations (?),
or:
b) crimes (?)
If you answered ‘a,’ you’re probably a moslem. If you answered ‘b,’ you’re sane, and if you had trouble deciding, you’re probably a liberal.
And liberals only react in such a cowardly, treasonous-to-civilization way, because they pretend that: “The only way to stop the barbarians from attacking us, is to give them all our (your) stuff, because after all, we stole it all from them in the first place! Submit to the fear of pain, because Giving Up is a holy virtue! Judge Not – EVER!”
Then they accuse everyone else of being “Hater/ Racist/ Bigot” as if we have nothing better to do than to commit “hate crimes” (well, sure – I hate crimes, don’t you?) and that we’re all “bigoted” for noticing the Qur’an is a permanent written death-threat because it claims all it’s moslems are so superior to everyone else, that it’s not only their right, but their holy duty to their god, to extort, enslave, and murder all the non-moslems in the world. Islam is a threat because it claims it is.
Which leaves the liberals’ racism claims. Why bring that up at all, ever – do they honestly think islam is a “race”?!
I think it’s their own, liberal racism at work: clearly, the reason the moslems are violent is due to nurture, not to nature; to the software (the Qur’an), not the hardware. After all, when your barbaric, parasite “culture” is based on “THOU SHALT KILL!” it’s obvious that you’re bound to get completely different socio-economic results (like living in dirt & ruins, and forcing your women to wear their own burka funeral shrouds) than if you were born into a civilized, industrious culture that relies on “THOU SHALT NOT KILL!”
The first step in solving any problem, is to correctly define and expose it.
But self-promoting liberal salesmen always ignore the obvious, (because there’s no money in solutions,) and can always be counted on to spin simple, temporary problem with easy, permanent solutions, into eternal “crises,” in order to exploit the infinite symptoms of ignoring the initial problem, in order to sell us victimology, in order to buy us lowest to sell themselves as the most high, as our much-needed crisis-relief management experts. i.e: “Please Give Generously – AGAIN!”
So, the liberals will always play the race card – which only secretly assumes that since only white, Western people are INTELLIGENT enough to be blamed for being guilty of being truly EVIL, (and of course that includes the Jews in Israel) then their poor “People Of Colur” pets (including the “swarthy” palestinians) just can’t help being violent animals, the oppressed little dears – so they’ll always get a free pass for their 1,400 year history of “holy” crimes: all the lies and frauds, extortions, robberies, kidnappings, ransomings, arsons, tortures, slaveries, rapes & murders, (and that’s wilfully ignoring over a quarter billion deliberate ‘holy’ murders – or human sacrifices – “for allah,” so far,) much as one indulges the new puppy as it pees on the rugs!
After all, according to the liberals, islam’s self-proclaimed “vastly superior” culture “clearly needs to be protected” by special multiculturalist, anti-blasphemy and anti-racist hate-crime “laws,” because it’s the diversely opposite equal to our own civilized laws.
Because evil is the diversely opposite equal to good, and “so it must be protected” from good’s “bigoted, hateful, racist” crimes of daring to try to defend itself from evil’s non-defensive attacks! Pretending their openly intolerant, intransigent and aggressive culture is the exact same as our currently cringingly defensive one, is an obvious lie.
So: multiculturalism IS racism, plain and simple.
The Golden Rule’s Laws are all based on not attacking first – on “who started it?” – on rational cause and effect.
It’s the UN’s founding charter (“don’t be the aggressor in war!”) in the doctor’s hippocratic oath (“First, do no harm!”) and even in the social engineers’ precautionary principle. Even all little kids already instinctively know it as the “But Mom! THEY STARTED IT!” Rule (!)
But liberals irrationally pretend that a mere symptom – “attacking” – is always bad, even in defense of one’s self or of innocent others! Like evil kindergarten teachers, these literally preposterous (backwards) liberal nannystatist victimology salesmen assert their mindless authority as: “I don’t care who started it – I only want it all to stop!” which of course only encourages the bullies while blaming the victims, by asserting that defending one’s self is a crime as bad as being an aggressive bully.
We’ve gone from refusing to attack first, to refusing to attack at all, even to defend ourselves and our children, ever!
We’ve gone from a society where only individual human citizens have rights (and all mere groups of individuals are at most assigned some temporary, revokable privileges) to the exact opposite – where only groups have rights (as they sell divisive identity-politics, mere symptoms of individual humans) and all fallible victim humans are at most assigned some temporary, revokable privileges.
Under the Golden Rule (do not attack first) even the largest group, the state, didn’t have the right to attack any of it’s individual human citizen members first, which is where we got “innocent UNTIL Proven Guilty” from… but of course that’s now being reversed, too. When we hire (‘elect’) salesmen to legislate, then legislate they will – if only to be seen to be doing something to earn their money. But since all laws depend from the Golden Rule, and there’s only so many time & space applications to apply that rule to, they must eventually start breaking that rule of morality, and legislating false ‘ethics’ (the symtoms of having broken that rule). Which is where we’re all at now.
After all, remember that the liberal salesman’s creed is: “There’s no money in solutions!”
And upon what altar do they sacrifice our Civilization to the barbarians? On the altar of self-interested, cowardly treasonous masochism, of course! Because right now, the barbarians are the only ones controlling both the carrot AND the stick of the behavioural conditioning fear and greed binary: the vast oil-money manufacturing industry bribes, and the personal threats of being firebombed and beheaded for daring to criticize “extortion, the religion of pacification.”
Lanya LaPunta says
This is another example of islamophiliacs re-writing history, taking facts and replacing them with lies.
First, it was the noble Crusades (self defense), lying about that … while totally destroying recorded facts.
Now, that’s not nearly far enough. We have the islamophiliacs attempting to replace the history of Europe with their lies.
With the compliance of academia, Western governments, and all of the other islamophiliac slaves to mohamedans … it will, most likely, get done.
Paul says
I suggest this work by Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith. It is a wonderful work. You will find a much more historicaly accurate review of the fate of the Roman Empire. It is free at librivox.org as an audio book. The link is: https://librivox.org/search?q=Europe%20and%20the%20faith&search_form=advanced
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
As usual an excellent essay bringing insight on a very important subject. Also as usual the essay exposes the conventional wisdom on Moslems for the academic fraud it is, the fraud even more dangerous than it is indefensible based on the facts. Fake history is so dangerous because it erases human mass memory, which is to say it puts the human race to flying blind.
Kaplan writes for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, which has done little new or worthwhile in decades. Fitzgerald writes, and, more importantly, researches, for the little known New English Review. ‘Nuff said.
Lloyd Miller says
Kaplan probably works for an institution funded by Saudi Arabia.
DFD says
Has anyone noticed how these bought & paid for Propagandists keep on using the same terms over and over again:
1) Europe/the West/etc. must *evolve* by accepting Islam…
2) It would be terrible for Europe/the West/etc. to *fail* to absorb Islam
3) Europe/the West/etc. must *learn* to accept other…
4) Europe/the West/etc. *cannot afford* not to incorporate/assimilate etc.
5) Europe/the West/etc. can no longer *ignore their/its debt* to…
6) Ad nauseum….
Such phrases are always in their propaganda. At least once. The moment you come across these, you know what you are reading, and what the rest of that dribble is going to be.
Custos Custodum says
Well observed and nice summary. We are witnessing some VERY fancy and expensive PR work, the best that Saudi money and U.S. federal funds can buy.
Sam Hawkins says
Mr. Fitzgerald, sir, it takes nothing away from Robert Spencer or from any other of the fine contributors to Jihad Watch to say that your columns provide some of the nost instructive, insight-packed analyses ever written on the topic of the Islamic threat to our societies.
THANK YOU.
Custos Custodum says
As always, many thanks to our gracious host, Robert Spencer, for giving us the opportunity to listen to Hugh Fitzgerald and many other great observers, analysts and commentators.
If only our MSM were a quarter as reliable as JW!
ronald reed says
that is a crock. Europe was never defined by islam. Europe was a purly christian entity until this century when progressives lies took hold,,Europe was created by the fabian socialist movment at the beginning of the last century.. now you see the results. Islam was a cult created by pirates hundred of years ago. All islam has done is take over christian churches in the middleast and in the meditarian countries. its beginings actually are told in Genesis 16 17,where up on God separted the peoples.