Their Jihad and Ours

Ever since the seven century, we are all constantly reminded, jihad has been a one-way ticket to Islam.  The jihad warriors conquered the ground, sweeping out of Arabia, westwards along the south shore of the Mediterranean and north through Spain, eastwards across the ancient lands of Persia and the great civilization of India.

But they were not just nomad bands, strewing destruction in their wake.  They offered a remarkable proposition to the peoples that they conquered, as Lee Harris makes clear in his review of The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

The Muslim victors could have condemned their victims to everlasting servitude, but they didn’t.  They gave them a choice.  They could stay as they were, a conquered and humiliated people, or they could join the victors and surrender to Islam.

Quite a concept, writes Harris.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any method by which a quicker pacification of a conquered people could be achieved than by allowing them to make a swift and easy transition from being outsiders to being insiders

If you were a Christian or a Jew, you were permitted a middle way, of dhimmitude.  You could keep to your religion of the book, but you had to acknowledge the supremacy of Islam.

It has been a remarkably successful proposition down the centuries.  Very seldom has Islam retreated from the lands it had conquered not just by the sword but with the word of Mohammed. 

So the question is: How can we, in the enlightened tolerant west, contest on equal terms with such a powerful ideological force

The answer is that we have a pretty powerful jihad concept of our own.  Just like the Muslim jihad it is a program of world conquest.  And it offers a remarkable menu of benefits to those that surrender to its will.

You already know its name.  It is the movement of democratic capitalism informed by the spirit of Christianity.

It began in the despair of Jewish defeat in the Roman Empire and grew with the conversion of rich women in the cities around the Mediterranean.  From monasteries in northern Europe in the dark ages it took over the minds of the feudal nobility.

And then about half a millennium ago in the aftermath of the religious upheaval we call the Reformation it started to go global.  It was a force of remarkable power and it spread across the world, for its strength was not just spiritual, but economic, political, cultural, and military.

In place of tribal gods it offered the God that saved all of mankind.  In political terms it offered the community of language to transcend the community of the kindred.  In economic terms it offered a community of trust that was proven by acts of trustworthiness.  In cultural terms it offered a separation between cultural power and religious power, and in military terms it offered the strength of the western team and delegation combined with the economic power of the community of trust.

And anyone could join.  All they had to do was to liberate themselves from the limited trust boundaries of the blood kindred—the tribe or clan—and learn to expand the boundaries of trust as far as they could tolerate, beyond the boundary of blood kin, even beyond the boundary of language and religion to the horizon of humanity itself.

The chief block against the expansion of this European idea was Islam.  On the west was the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean; on the east was the implacable foe of Islam.  But the development of ocean transportation in the fifteenth century allowed the jihad warriors of capitalism under Christianity to outflank Islam in the east by establishing trade routes to India around the continent of Africa and migrate westward across the Americas and thence to China.

Growing slowly at first and then with gathering speed, the capitalist Christian jihad has finally achieved the capitulation of the two great ancient cultures of the world: India and China.  Now we are left with a single holdout, Islam, inoculated against the western virus by its own jihad faith, is facing what may be a final challenge.

In the tumultuous confrontation between two jihad armies, can the jihad of Islam survive?  Will the next century see the final annihilation of Islamic jihad in a double envelopment, the traditional German Kesselschlacht?  Or will the jihad warriors achieve a breakout from the Middle East into the population collapse of western Europe?

That, of course, is the Question.  President Bush has made the first steps to oppose the breakout and to divide up the homelands of jihad.  It will be up to his successors and up to us what happens next.

For it is true that, just as we understood in the Cold War that communism and capitalism were in a contest for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world, the outcome of the present war depends upon a similar understanding, a multigenerational covenant to contain and neutralize the virus spreading out of Araby.