Beyond Danish Cartoons
Dear ICE Subscriber:
I want to let you know about a columnist I now read
constantly: Spengler. He won't say what his real name is.
After his most recent articles on Islam, I assume that he is happy that
he started the column with a nom-de-guerre, as he calls it.
He has nailed the supreme cultural issue of our time:
Islam -- specifically, its inability to adapt the teachings of the Koran
to modern times. My friend, the apologist Robert Morey, has been saying
this for 15 years ("The Islamic Invasion"), and has had to go into
semi-hiding because of this.
Islam is in for the greatest challenge in its history:
modernism. It cannot adapt the unchanging word of the Koran to modern
culture. It must defeat modernism or else see its children corrupted by
it. This is a problem the Christians have been dealing with for over
300 years, with some successes but many failures. The intellectual
state of Christendom as recently as 1960 was appalling. For
fundamentalist Protestantism, it was even worse.
Some liberals think Islam's problem is a problem of higher
criticism. It goes much deeper than this, because Islam is nearly
immune to higher criticism. This vulnerability has been a problem for
Christian and Jewish intellectuals since about 1875, but not for
Muslims, who rarely have advanced educations in the techniques of
literary criticism.
I did not know the following: a blackout is now in operation.
The immutable character of Islamic revelation
makes the subject of Koranic criticism into a
minefield. It is universally known among scholars
that alternative texts of the Koran have been
discovered in various archeological sites --
something of an embarrassment for the Archangel
Gabriel -- but the subject has disappeared from
the media. When Newsweek in 2004 published a
brief mention of the work of the pseudonymous
German philologist Christoph Luxenberg, the
government of Pakistan seized the entire print
run. Luxenberg became famous for re-translating
the Koran to read that martyrs would receive
raisins in Paradise rather than virgins. One
finds nearly 12,000 Google references to
Luxenberg but not a single hit on Google News.
The subject, once so passionately debated in
editorial columns, has vanished from the media in
their entirety.
I had not heard a word about this person or his work.
The blackout has been quite effective so far.
According to Spengler, the new Pope holds the same view of Islam
that Morey does: it cannot adjust to modern life. But he has not said
this in public.
In Spengler's article, "When even the pope has to whisper," he
argues that the United States is blind to the
obvious: more democracy in the Middle East will mean more Islamic
theocracies. The Administration has yet to adjust.