The new Chief Executive of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) is one Catherine Heseltine.
There is an Islamic threat. It is the threat that people disgusted with the complete collapse of all moral standards in the personal, social and economic spheres, and left helpless by the closely connected, almost total loss of collective cultural memory, will convert to Islam in droves. Look at the mosques full of disaffected young men in Afro-Caribbean areas, and at the flourishing Student Islamic Societies full of white, middle-class, deep-thinking, and often female seekers. In comparable ways did many another country begin to be Islamised.
Who would have thought that present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much of Northern India could have been Islamised? North Africa? Much of Sub-Saharan Africa, very much an ongoing process? Central Asia and much of western China? But how did it happen? And how quickly? The White British Muslim population is already well over 60,000. Imagine if it alone grew by an improbably small 50 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be over a million. Now imagine that it grew by a possibly over-large, but nevertheless much more realistic, 100 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be nearly 23 million. Yet that is only the White British section of British Muslims.
Face-covering – not head-covering, but face-covering – is incompatible with the conduct of Western social and cultural life. Halal meat is one thing, but animal sacrifice is totally unacceptable. So is polygamy. There is nothing any more acceptable about male than about female genital mutilation. While certainly not without sympathy for opposition to usury, Sharia law must have no legal status in this country. There should not be Muslim schools here, where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did. The public holidays in this country should be Christian festivals rather than pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday; there is no case for non-Christian festivals to be public holidays in the West.
And mosques in the West must not have domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam’s forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. How long before our cathedrals, churches and chapels go the same way? It happened in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant and North Africa, all once integral parts of Christendom.
We need to re-learn structured daily prayer, setting aside one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique of both capitalism and Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science. The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.
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Your last paragraph may sound good, especially the personal aspects but it would be nigh on impossible to get the majority of Catholics to do that let aone the rest of the Christian tradition and no chance of the rest of the country!
ReplyDeleteps, You should add a latest comments box to your blog, much easier to see what's going on.
We are due another religious revival. We are in the circumstances that give rise to them.
ReplyDeleteGood post. I believe Hilaire Belloc did indeed make similar arguments about why Islam was successful in the Eastern Roman Empire, arguing that widespread usury, injustice, and debauchery on the part of the ruling classes helped sway people towards Islam, because at the very least it spoke to some of their complaints.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting, though, is that it might be social liberals who end up allowing some of the more distasteful practices of Islamic societies into the West, for example polygamy. I am not sure if the readers of this blog know about the U.S. cable show “Big Love,” about a polygamist Mormon family in Utah.
The show was created by two homosexual men with the intention of “fairly” portraying without judgment, a polygamist family. This was done to try to try to show “alternative” families in a fair light and to convince Americans that the traditional Christian concept of one man and one woman married for life is not the only way families can be organized.
What I have found distressing is that many people I have met, and many folks who post comments about the show, seem to think that polygamy should be legal as long as it is between consenting adults, thus avoiding some of the abuses that occur on fundamentalist Mormon compounds.
Thus, we can see how social liberalism, instead of fostering real progress, simply returns us to the various errors of our pagan or heretic ancestors, errors that Islam never really could get away from entirely, it being an amalgam of Christian heresy and Arab tribal customs.
First it is going to be the legal acceptance of homosexual couples as such, then polygamy, what will be next, chattel slavery? I suppose if the slave contract is accomplished via an agreement between consenting adults, why not! Also, notice how the arguments for social liberalism are very similar to those for economic liberalism (i.e. free-market fundamentalism).