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Is a war of civilizations coming?
Clearly, not a few in the Islamic world and the West so
believe, and ardently desire. And, with the War Party cawing
for an attack on Iraq, with Sharon unleashed after the
atrocities in Jerusalem and Haifa, with the U.S. press
calling for a reappraisal of our ties to Saudi Arabia and
Egypt, a clash of civilizations has moved from the possible
to the probable.
President Bush, however, seems instinctively aware such a
war would be a disaster. For no matter how many deaths or
defeats we inflict, we cannot kill Islam as we did Nazism,
fascism, Japanese militarism and Soviet Bolshevism. Islam
has survived for nearly 1,600 years; it is the predominant
faith in 57 countries; it is indestructible.
Astonishingly, 63 years ago, when Islam lay dormant under
the heel of Western empires, a famous Catholic writer
predicted Islam would rise again. Wrote Hillaire Belloc: "It
has always seemed to me... probable, that there would be a
resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would
see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the
Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand
years its greatest opponent."
Islam was a Christian heresy, Belloc believed, whose strength
lay in its "insistence on personal immortality, the Unity and
Infinite Majesty of God, on his Justice and Mercy [and] ... its
insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their
Creator." While The Prophet "gave to our Lord the highest
reverence, and the Mother of God was ever for him the first of
womankind," he rejected the Incarnation. Mohammed "taught that
our Lord was the greatest of all Prophets, but still only a
prophet, a man like other men." Belloc believed Islam to be a
"Reformation" movement with parallels to "the Protestant
Reformers – on Images, the Mass and Celibacy."
When Christians were illiterate, Islam spread "for 700
years, until it had mastered the Balkans and the Hungarian
plain, and all but occupied Western Europe itself," almost
destroying Christendom "through its early material and
intellectual superiority." Three heroes saved the West.
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In
732, at Poitiers, Charles Martel, the Hammer of the Franks,
stopped Islam's invasion in France. In 1571, the Christian
fleets of Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles
V, destroyed the Mohammedan armada in an epic battle
immortalized in Chesterton's "The Ballad of Lepanto." And
Polish Catholic King John Sobieski stopped the Turks at Vienna
"on a date that ought to be famous in history, September 11,
1683."
One of history's great questions is why the Islamic world
collapsed. A century before Yorktown, Constantinople was
superior in arms. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the
Islamic world was not only superseded by the West, it fell
backward – in technology, industry, communications, arms and
governance. The Ottoman Empire became "the sick man of
Europe." Colonization by the West followed. In the 20th
century, only at Gallipoli – the 1915 battle that cost its
architect, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, his
post – can one recall an Islamic victory over a Western army.
But if a clash of civilizations is coming, how stands the
balance of power? In wealth and might, the West is supreme –
though wealth did not prevent the collapse of the Western
empires and did not prevent the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Rome was mighty, and early Christianity pathetically weak.
Yet, Christianity triumphed. If belief is decisive, Islam is
militant, Christianity milquetoast. In population, Islam is
exploding, the West dying. Islamic warriors are willing to
suffer defeat and death, the West recoils at casualties. They
are full of grievance; we, full of guilt. Where Islam
prevails, it asserts a right to impose its dogma, while the
West preaches equality. Islam is assertive, the West
apologetic – about its crusaders, conquerors and empires.
Don't count Islam out. It is the fastest growing faith in
Europe and has surpassed Catholicism worldwide. And as
Christianity expires in the West and the churches empty out,
the mosques are going up.
To defeat a faith, you need a faith. What is ours?
Individualism, democracy, pluralism, la dolce vita? Can they
overcome a fighting faith, 16 centuries old, and rising again? 
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