Homo Kaplanensis: “Europe Was Defined By Islam. And Islam Is Redefining It Now.”

by Hugh Fitzgerald (May 2016)

Robert Kaplan, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, has just published a piece on Islam and the future of Europe. He claims, startlingly, that Europe “was essentially defined by Islam,” by which he means that before Islam swept across North Africa, Europe consisted of a single civilization, on both banks of the Mediterranean — that of the Roman Empire — and that Islam’s arrival severed “the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves.” It is true that Muslim conquerors swept across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, but not quite true, pace Kaplan, that they “extinguished Christianity there.” Millions of Coptic Christians remained a majority in Egypt until the 14^th century (that is, for at least 700 years after the time that Kaplan claims Muslim armies “virtually extinguished Christianity” in North Africa). And while it is true that the Roman Empire was sundered, it was not only by the forces of Islam, as Kaplan appears to believe: before the Arab armies arrived, others had been seizing territory from Roman control, including the Visigoths in Spain and the Vandals, who conquered the Roman province of Africa in 433 and held it till 539.

Racing through the centuries, Kaplan in the same sentence leaps from “the breakup of the Roman empire” (into East and West, but he says nothing further about the colossal effect of that split) to “that northward migration” which “saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization.” This is a doubly bizarre remark, since it was their southern migration which brought the Germanic peoples within the borders of the Roman Empire and ultimately to Rome. And it was the Romans of both the Western and Eastern Empires, not the Germanic tribes, who forged more than the rudiments of Western civilization, including such monumental achievements as, in the Eastern Empire, the Code of Justinian.

Kaplan fleetingly mentions, exactly three times, what should be at the center of any history of Europe: Christianity itself. He writes that the Slavs and Magyars “adopted Christianity,” that European unity began with the concept of a “Christendom” in “inevitable opposition to Islam,” and that Muslims in Europe today “have no desire to be Christians” – and that’s all he has to say on the subject of Europe and Christianity. He does not discuss what Christianity has contributed to forming the European mentality over the last two thousand years, or how it has influenced, even shaped, Europe’s art and music, its literature, its philosophy, its political thought, its mores, none of it thinkable without taking into the account the influence of Christianity. Kaplan has Islam on his mind, and were he to do justice to Christianity, his readers might begin to see the sense of insisting that it was not Islam, but Christianity, that “defined Europe.”

If Islam and the Muslim armies hadn’t existed, Europe’s civilizational boundaries would be different – could still extend into North Africa and the Levant — but the nature of that civilization would not be different from what it was, and is. Europe would still have been a child of Greece and Rome and ancient Israel. Islam did not contribute to those many things – art, music, literature, philosophy, political theory – that we mean by “ western civilization.” Islam created in its adherents a mentality that abhorred novelty, or bida, that held to a kind of inshallah-fatalism based on the view of an Allah who could interfere, at whim and subject to no laws, with the lives of men, that encouraged a habit of mental submission rather than of skeptical inquiry. European civilization stood in stark contrast, promoting rather than anathematizing the new, believing in a God who was not whimsical but rationally prepared to obey His own laws, and promoting critical thought and inquiry.

Kaplan several times mentions Edward Said’s book Orientalism favorably, claiming that it set out how “Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing what it was against. Europe’s identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery.” What Said mainly tried to do in Orientalism was different: to endow with a new and insidious meaning the word “Orientalist,” which hitherto had referred neutrally to Western scholars of the languages of the Levant (especially Arabic), and of Islam and Islamic civilization. Said claimed that these “Orientalists” studied Arabic as part of a deliberate campaign to justify and help the project of Western imperialism by means of their putatively unsympathetic or hostile treatment of Oriental peoples. The devastating detailed critique of Said’s use of “Orientalism” as a term of polemical abuse, delivered by Bernard Lewis in 1982, and which many considered a knockout blow, apparently has not yet reached Robert D. Kaplan.

Kaplan appears to believe that European unity in the early modern period could not have been achieved without Europe’s “inevitable opposition” to Islam. This “inevitable opposition” to Islam was, Kaplan says, “a concept that culminated in the Crusades.” No, the Crusades were not the culmination of some “inevitable opposition” to inoffensive Muslims. Rather, Europe’s opposition to Islam “culminating in the Crusades” was fed by centuries of Muslim attacks up and down the coasts of Europe (and not the other way around), and the Crusades were undertaken initially in order to repel an assault by Muslim Seljuk Turks on Anatolia, and the Christian effort then broadened into an attempt to retake the Holy Land because, for a century, Muslims had made life hell for Christians in the Holy Land, beginning with the almost-total destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the orders of the Caliph Al-Hakim in 1009, and attacks on Christian pilgrims that kept them from travelling freely to, and within, the Holy Land. This understandable response to continuous Muslim aggression hardly required an “inevitable opposition” to “Islam.”

Kaplan mentions Europe’s “sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery” as building its identity. Curiously, he doesn’t mention Islam’s far greater sense of superiority to the Christian world on its periphery. Nor does he mention that Europe had been quite capable of uniting and building an identity without needing Islam to measure itself against – or has he forgotten about the Roman Empire?

And Kaplan continues in the Saidian vein of grand pronouncements, and like Said, turns out to be wrong in many of his details.

He writes that “imperialism proved the ultimate expression of the evolution” from the “inevitable opposition to Islam” to that European “sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world.” That’s the grand pronouncement. And here’s the cavalier way with history: “Here modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and – most crucial – inferior.”

What happened was this: Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798. Far from this representing the beginning of Europe’s conquest of the Middle East, all French forces had left Egypt by 1801, and no European forces “conquered” any part of the Muslim Middle East or Muslim North Africa until the 20^th century, with the single exception of Algeria. But Kaplan appears to believe that Napoleon entered Egypt, and then those Europeans, “starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East.” He may not know the true sequence of events: save for a three-year stay by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt, and the annexing of Algeria by France in 1830, the Europeans had little to do with the Arab lands until just before World War I. Scrupulosity with the facts of history is indispensable, but Kaplan dispenses with it, and how.

And having misstated so much about early modern Europe in relation to Islam, in treating of the present day Kaplan, consistent in his inaccuracies, does not disappoint. He claims that “Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant.” Could it be that Europe’s “sense of cultural preeminence” needed no buttressing from the existence of Arab “police states,” but reflected an unapologetic awareness of Europe’s, and especially of France’s….”cultural preeminence”? And when one thinks of those places where French cultural penetration has been most pronounced, and thus French cultural “preeminence” most clearly on comparative display, they have been Lebanon and Tunisia, the two Arab countries that have been least like police states.

Kaplan writes that “hundreds of thousands of Muslims are filtering into economically stagnant European states…” True? A moment’s glance at the news tells us that these Muslims are in fact headed as quickly as they can for the most well-off European states, to the Scandinavian countries and, above all, to Germany, and not to the “economically stagnant” states, such as Spain or Greece or Italy.

“The migration,” he claims, is “driven by war and state collapse.” But not only that. What about the availability of more boats, run by better-organized smuggling networks? What about the refusal of Western navies to enforce blockades as they once would have done, because of the power of the bien-pensants who have convinced Europeans (with Pope Francis now taking the lead) that they have a duty to accept these “refugees”? Above all, surely the greater migration today is the result of the widespread availability of cell phones and computers in the Third World, spreading tantalizing information about the quality of life in Europe, which would-be migrants assume will be theirs, too, if only they can reach those distant promised lands. Many of those claiming to be “Syrians” fleeing war-torn Syria, or “Iraqis” fleeing war-torn Iraq, turn out to be Muslims from dozens of countries, including Turkey and Pakistan and Kosovo and Russia and Serbia, that are far from collapsing and hardly, right now, war-torn.

Kaplan ends: “If [Europe] cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. This would signal the end of ‘the West’ in Europe.”

First published in Jihad Watch.

 

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Hugh Fitzgerald contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all his contributions, on which comments are welcome.