Clenardus and the Way Out of Islam
From the desk of Koenraad Elst on Fri, 2009-08-07 19:27
When I write that we don't have much to fear from the Islamic
aggressor, one reaction I often get is that I am overly and unduly
optimistic, making light of a massive threat. Recently someone
paraphrased my position as: "Europeans can go to sleep peacefully
tonight." This is an allusion to what, according to legend, the Dutch
Prime Minister Hendrik Colijn said in a radio speech on the eve of the
German invasion in May 1940, in a ludicrous world record of false
reassurance. In reality he said it years earlier, though on a related
occasion, viz. the German remilitarisation of the Rhineland. Moroever,
he said it after announcing a partial mobilization of the army, thus
presenting the common people's peaceful sleep as the reward for the
vanguard's vigilance. At any rate, I am not at all saying that
Europeans should go to sleep. On the contrary, my position is that we
should be alert and outwit the Islamic aggressor.
In this endeavour, we may take inspiration from some of our ancestors,
who faced the same problem. Not that they were successful in their
counterstrategy, we should learn from their limited results as much as
from their correct premises. They had at least got the basics right:
the solution for the Islam problem is to liberate the Muslims from the
mental prison-house of Islam.
The first Orientalists were Christians trying to re-establish contact
with the various Christian churches in the Muslim world, and to lay
the intellectual foundations for the conversion of the Muslim
heretics. (In Catholic theology, Muslims are not so much pagans, who
have never known Christ, but heretics, who have known Christ but
embraced a false doctrine about him, viz. that He was a mere prophet
and was superseded as such by Mohammed.) The most famous example
should be Raimundus Lullus, the polymath from Catalonia who went to
North Africa to preach, but died as a consequence of the stoning he
received. He is not known to have wrought any lasting conversions.
An example from the Netherlands was Nicolaas Beken Cleynaerts, better
known as Nicolaus Clenardus (1495-1542). He grew up in Diest, a town
in the eastern corner of Flemish Brabant, now called "Diestanbul" by
its fast-growing Turkish community. He spent most of his working life
teaching Greek and Hebrew in Leuven University. After studying Quran
Arabic on his own, he went to Spain and Portugal to learn spoken
Arabic, all while teaching his usual courses. He crossed to Morocco,
initially only to get to know the place, but took ill soon. Shortly
after his return to Spain, he died and was buried in the Alhambra in
Granada. So, mission not accomplished at all. A statue in Diest
commemorates him: "Verbo non gladio gentes Arabas convertere ad
Christianam fidem nisus est", "He made the effort to convert the Arabs
to the Christian faith with the word, not the sword."
Preaching on a town square in Tunis or Fez proved to be less than
effective as a method to free the Muslims from Islam. Elsewhere, even
military conquest rarely proved successful. The Russians left the
defeated Tatars and Chechens to their Islam, and the French, British
and Dutch colonial policies only strengthened the position of Islam in
their respective domains. So in that respect, the past does not offer
us much guidance. It is our own job to find better ways of reaching
out to the prisoners of Islam. If this lack of alternatives for
self-reliance is a reason for pessimism, then please consider that we
may not be all that important.
Can't you feel the impact of knowledge and its novel ways of direct
availability in colleges and private homes throughout the Muslim
world? The phenomenon of ex-Muslims speaking out openly and informing
their stay-behind relatives is slowly but surely changing the
ideological landscape of the Muslim world. The attempts by Muslims to
present their religion as tolerant and pro-woman are admittedly
untruthful but do nonetheless show an impact of non-Islamic values and
sensibilities that is bound to increase and hollow out the attachment
to Islam.
This wind was already blowing in the colonial age, when a full option
for modernization could have been the end of Islam. Through
calculations of short-term interest and a lack of ideological focus,
the colonial administrators instead chose the way of compromise with
the Islamic establishment, thus giving it an unnecessary new lease of
life. In the postcolonial age, de-islamization can no longer be
imposed from above even if we had wanted to, but it is now growing
from inside. It is up to us to find inconspicuous but effective ways
of strengthening this tendency. This is an appeal to European
alertness and resourcefulness.
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