The latest Frankenstein's monster is a revitalisation of the Dark Ages
PAUL JOHNSON
I n these times when we are being made frighteningly aware of the implacable ferocity of the East, I have been turning to Kipling, who devoted his genius to making fine and clear distinctions between different kinds of mentalities created by religion, race and history. The more I read Kipling's haunting poems and tales, the more I am astonished at his achievement in penetrating the depths of human minds — white and coloured, Christian, Muslim, atheist and animist, polytheist and monotheist, Sikh and Hindu, of both sexes and all ages, of every caste and class. He must have been the oldest teenager in wisdom who ever lived, and at 18 he was already a magus. He saw race as the product of geography, history and faith. No man was less of a racist than he, for he sympathised with all; but no man was more insistent that race should never be left out of the equation that enables us to understand human behaviour.
Last week I reread two of his greatest tales, On the City Wall and The Man Who Would Be King (available in the same volume of Oxford World Classics paperback). This first is a sinister exposure of the soul of Wali Dad, the half-Westernised intellectual overwhelmed by the dark instincts of his inherited beliefs. The second is a horrific account, on a level with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, of how two devilish adventurers from the West seek to exploit the frenzied mentalities of Afghanistan, and meet their nemesis. If only Kipling were alive today to advise us. But at least we still have his words. For three generations. left-wing critics and English teachers have tried to belittle Kipling and steer the young away from his works. Instead, they upheld, as the key to the East, that pallid Bloomsbury E.M. Forster who, as V.S. Naipaul recently reminded us, had only the most superficial knowledge of India, derived chiefly from his pursuit of paederasty. The Indians now laugh at Forster's pretensions — if they read him at all — whereas many of them now regard Kipling as the greatest writer that India has ever produced.
Naipaurs interview in the Literary Review ought to be read in full, for the sensational press reports of it convey no idea of its real meatiness. In particular, Nalpaul is rightly anxious to get to the roots of Muslim–Hindu discord, and to stress the cultural devastation wreaked by the Muslim conquest, which he sees as the cause of India's poverty. This devastation continues to this day, as we see from the blowing up in Afghanistan of ancient colossal statues of Buddha, just as significant to his followers as the twin towers of the World Trade Center were to Americans. We know vaguely that Islam is engaged in a constant effort to erase Christianity (as well as Judaism) in Africa — especially in Nigeria, the Sudan and Eritrea. We are less aware of its savage efforts to destroy the indigenous religions of Asia. in a vast area stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the Philippines.
These faiths, as well as Christianity, have been under threat of conquest by Islam since its inception in the 7th century AD. Muslims have always believed in conversion at the point of the scimitar; and the only punishment for one thus converted, who repudiates his compulsory religion, is death. Even as I write, a group of aid workers in Afghanistan are on trial for their lives for allegedly telling people about Christianity. The nature of Islam is little understood here. Last year, much against my better judgment, I took part in a television programme about God. I refuse to appear on the box as a rule because it does not so much simplify as falsify complex issues. On this occasion the topic of the Crusades came up, and everyone except me condemned them as racist, genocidal, etc. I disagreed, but did not have time to explain that the Crusades were merely one episode in a conflict between Christianity and Islam that has been going on for nearly a millennium and a half. Islam began this perpetual war of conquest. It not only subdued and eradicated Christianity in the Middle East and north Africa, but also got nearly as far as Paris, and held most of Spain for seven centuries. It devastated Sicily and attempted to conquer Italy many times. The Crusades were no more than a belated and ultimately futile attempt to recover the lost territory of the Holy Land; their real error was fatally to undermine the last bastion against Muslim aggression, the Byzantine empire. When that fell, Islam, in the persona of the ultra-militant Ottoman sultanate, rolled up the possessions of Venice throughout the eastern Mediterranean, invaded the Christian Balkans and attempted to take Vienna, in the heart of Christian Europe, as late as the 1680s. The Crusades were merely one long moment in the history of Christianity. The Islamic equivalent, the jihad, is permanent.
It is possible to argue, indeed, that Islamic expansion continues today, thanks to the high birth-rate among immigrants. That lies at the root of the trouble in former Yugoslavia, where the Orthodox Serbs are terrified of being overrun by the Muslims, as they were once conquered by the Ottomans. But they repeated the errors of the Crusaders in reverse; instead of making common cause with the Catholic Croats, they attacked them too, thus isolating themselves. But the problem is broader than the Balkans. Muslim illegal immigrants, chiefly from Albania, are invading Italy in huge numbers, and other Muslims, chiefly from the Maghreb, are invading Spain. At the rate things are going, both Italy and Spain will be predominantly Muslim countries long before the end of the century, thus repeating the pattern of Dark Age Europe. Nobody is doing much about it because, as with terrorism, each country is meeting the threat individually and there is no Western strategy, let alone a global one.
It is wrong to see Islam as a unity: like Christianity, it has many subdivisions. Sunni Muslims are less extreme than the varieties of Shia, and the majority of Muslims want to live in peace with their neighbours. But Islam is notorious for its periodic outbreaks of revivalism, which usually take a militant form, and the world is certainly experiencing one at the moment. Last week's television spectacle of Muslim women weeping and dancing with joy at the destruction of lives in America illustrated, perhaps for the first time for many Westerners, the human depth of the problem we face. It would not have surprised Kipling, who knew all about it. Among other things, he knew that Islam — unlike Christianity, which was modernised by the Reformation and CounterReformation, and Judaism, which came to terms with modernity thanks to the 18thcentury Jewish Enlightenment — is an unreformed, essentially early mediaeval system of belief and law. We must all hope that the long-delayed and overdue reformation of Islam emerges from the present spasms of dark reaction, as it probably will. But there is no sign of it yet. For the moment, then, we need stout shields of many shapes and sizes — and great sophistication as well as simplicity — to protect our rule of law and culture whose roots lie in Judaeo-Christianity.
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