Islamophobia

I have recently been reading Paul Scott’s series of novels about the last years of British India. It’s hard not to notice that the British rulers of India, especially the military men, rather favored Muslims over Hindus. You get the same impression from Kipling’s stories, and from George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. There was a perception that Hinduism was a bit snivelly, pacifistic, commercial, and lower-middle-class. This is very unfair to Hinduism, whose most sacred text, after all, is a battlefield conversation, and whose military castes could, at the height of their vigor, have given any samurai or ghazi a run for his money. (And that’s not even to mention the fightingest Hindus of all.) The perception was plainly there, though.

It was much fortified in later years by Gandhi, with his doctrine of non-violence, his spindly frame, his fussiness about diet and sex, his high-pitched voice and his clerkish glasses. (Gandhi’s War Medal — for organizing a battlefield ambulance corps in the Boer War — was conveniently forgotten.) Hindus were wimpy; Islam was a fighting faith, a manly faith.I think what worked against Hinduism here was the caste system. Sure, there were fighting Hindus, but they were a caste, a well-defined fragment of the population. The other castes prayed, ruled, made money, or cleaned out the head, but they weren’t expected to bother much about fighting.

In Islam, by contrast, every man, however he makes his living, is a soldier of the faith. This resonated with British military men. To this day, if you show up at a recruiting station to join the British army, the NCO will tell you: “Yes, you may get trained for something useful. You may become a cook, a driver, an engineer. There are great opportunities. But first we’ll make a soldier out of you.” In an Anglo-Saxon army, everyone — from the guy in the landing-craft to the rearmost of the REMFs — is a fighting man, who knows how to use a weapon and keep it clean. Islam’s a lot like that. I think that was the appeal to India’s British rulers.A fighting faith is of course a proud faith, and nothing pumps poison into the bloodstream like pride brought low.

Inside every Muslim today there is a voice whispering: “Our faith is so pure and true, our civilizations lasted so long and ruled so many, our God was so potent: yet here we are in the modern world, backward and poor except where accidents of nature have blessed us, our rulers corrupt, our culture mocked or ignored, our people squabbling among themselves, or fleeing the homelands to work as taxi drivers and menials in the great glittering cities of the infidels, those homelands themselves part-stolen by the wretched Jews. It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong! Grrrrr!!!”

That’s the Islam we’re up against. I don’t myself believe we can do much to reform it. Muslims have to do that for themselves. Any helping hand we reach out will be spat upon. While they sort out their problems, though, I do think we should keep Islam at arm’s length, for our own safety. Keep ’em out; fence ’em off; send Muslim visitors home; keep a wary eye on Muslim citizens. Leave them the consolations of their faith, though; stop trying to convince me that there is no good at all in that faith; and, if you’re the praying type, pray that the good will prevail at last. Continue to the full article here.....

——————————**Note on the word “Islamophobia”: Roger Kimball tells me this is the wrong word. A phobia (says Roger) is an irrational fear of something. Fear of Islam is perfectly rational! I leave you to discuss this among yourselves.John Derbyshire on Islam on National Review Online