AT WAR: Identity Unknown: The case for civilizational confidence

National Review, Nov 19, 2001 by John O'Sullivan

Seville

Atop this city's vast Gothic cathedral-built in a century-long surge of pious enthusiasm following the Christian Reconquista of Moorish Andalusia-stands the figure of Faith. The irony of making Faith a weathervane has often been noted; but it does not seem a wholly inapposite comment on a post-Christian Spain and a post-Christian Europe as they face a Muslim world increasingly radicalized by Osama bin Laden. Neglected and ignored, Faith has been whirling pointlessly in the last few decades. Buffeted now by this hot reviving wind from the East, however, will Faith swing back into fashion, either in her original religious intensity or diluted into a sort of cultural loyalty?

If the current war turns into a full-scale clash of civilizations, the front line will be here in Andalusia. It was here that a splendid and relatively liberal Islamic civilization flourished while the rest of Europe languished through the Dark Ages. Some Muslims undoubtedly cherish fantasies of a reverse Reconquista. "The tragedy of Andalusia"- a remark generally attributed to bin Laden but said to have been actually uttered by his lieutenant-reflects a nostalgia felt by many Muslims. They see the seeds of a historic reversal in North Africa's fast-growing population of young Muslims, many of whom smuggle themselves into Spain as illegal immigrants. Most of them make their quiet way onward to the welfare states of Northern Europe; some stay to work in Spain; all swell the Muslim diasporas of Western Europe, which al-Qaeda hopes to exploit for both recruitment and political influence.

No similar cultural jingoism exists on the European side. In their reflections on the Moorish and Christian monuments, the guidebooks (published, of course, before September 11) are firmly biased towards the Islamic side. One cites the Reconquista as an "unparalleled catastrophe" for Andalusia and paints it as a victory for dogmatism and cruelty over civilized tolerance. The Inquisition, of course, was hardly one of the finer moments in Christian history; but the guidebooks don't show an equal fervor in condemning the oppressive rule of later Moorish dynasties, like the Almoravids and the Almohads.

This pro-Muslim bias is the result of several intellectual trends: the academic convention of cultural relativism; the tendency of many historians of Islam, perhaps overreacting to negative stereotypes, to become propagandists for their subject; the decline of Christian belief and social influence; and the habit of respecting other cultures as unities while treating the West as a kind of multicultural supermarket in which Western civilization is merely one rather dusty shelf. To these trends politicians add appeasement, both diplomatic (of neighboring North Africa) and electoral (of local Muslim constituencies).

Thus, a former Spanish defense minister, Alberto Oliart, writing on the post-September 11 crisis in the English-language version of El Pais, observes that "the West owes much to Islam, and more so in the case of Spain, whose culture and language have deep roots in the splendid culture of al-Andalus." That is true, of course. What is also true, however, is that medieval Spain's culture and personality were forged in opposition to Moorish rule and Islam-and that the self-identity of Catholic Spain persisted until very recently. "Fusionist" theories of culture become plausible only when the religious passions inspiring the fusion have cooled down to the mildness of an English summer. And that, plainly, does not describe Islam and the West just now.

Indeed, Osama bin Laden, in his effort to unify the Islamic world against us, claims that the West as a whole still possesses a well- defined cultural identity rooted in Christianity. At present, that is an exaggeration at best. Might his Islamic crusade, however, not stimulate the revival of some kind of vibrant, self-conscious Western identity, and accompanying cultural loyalty?

If it were left to governments or intellectuals, no such revival could occur. Governments do not want such thorny subjects even to be raised. And intellectuals largely follow Francis Fukuyama in believing Islam to be an implausible ideology for modern man, no competition for Western philosophies-and so not worth bothering about.

It is possible, even likely, that Fukuyama will prove prescient in that long run when we are all dead. In the short term, however, Islam (including radical Islamism) seems perfectly plausible to large numbers of modern men across the world-including some who have lived and been educated in the West. And though the economic backwardness and military incompetence of current Islamic societies ensures that they would be defeated by the West in any serious clash of civilizations, radical Islamist terrorists are capable of inflicting very serious damage and causing thousands of deaths in lesser conflicts.

After all, radical Islamists have three advantages on their side: demography (the populations of Islamic nations are increasing while the West suffers a "birth dearth"); rapidly growing Islamic diasporas in the West, fueled by illegal immigration; and official Western policies of multiculturalism (which not only encourage immigrants to retain their original cultural identity but even promote the "de-assimilation" of previously assimilated minorities in the West).