Renan Revisited

by Theodore Dalrymple (June 2016)

My wife and I were browsing in a bookshop at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris recently when she called out to me ‘Here’s the Islam section.’ Actually, it was the Islamic terrorism section, and very extensive it was too, at least for the size of the shop. There were whole shelves of books on the subject. Islamic terrorism has taken over from the Occupation as the favoured theme of non-fiction in France. I am a good customer for such books, even if I can never quite remember the names of the individual terrorists or of the various terrorist groupuscules that they have joined. Publishers can’t go too far wrong, it seems, with books about Hitler or the Occupation, and these days with books about Islamic terrorism.

The fact that terrorism ought not to be a suitable subject for reading matter in an airport on a passenger aircraft suggests, however, that in our hearts most of us believe that we are statistically not very likely to be victims of it, and that Islamic terrorism is a vile and stupid nuisance rather than the existential threat to our civilisation as some have claimed it to be. The main danger is from our reaction to it, enfeebled or destructive of our civil liberties (or both) as the case might be.

I picked a book suitable for my short flight: Un Silence religieux: La gauche face au djihasisme, (A Religious Silence: the Left in the face of Jihadism), by Jean Birnbaum, literary editor of Le Monde newspaper. The latter is itself left-inclining, but only in a thoroughly bourgeois intellectual way.

The left, says Birnbaum, is so now thoroughly secular in its outlook that it can no longer take religion or religious ideas seriously as a possible motive for human action. For most of the left religious belief is a mere illusion, a hangover from the past, an irrational refusal to face reality or a fig-leaf for personal interest. Therefore, when someone says ‘I did this for God’s sake,’ he is mistaking his own motivation. Really he was furious at his conditions of life, or he had a personal problem to resolve, or he was acting in a way that he supposed to be the political interest of people like himself. What by definition he does not do is actually act for God’s sake: for you cannot, on the left’s view, do something for the sake if a non-existent being.

This, of course, does not follow in the least. People may go into the Tasmanian bush, and indeed have done so, to search for the Tasmanian tiger convinced that it still exists when in fact it went extinct about three quarters of a century ago. The things that people are prepared to do for the sake of a belief have no bearing on the truth or otherwise of that belief.

To this day, according to Birnbaum, the French left has not acknowledged fully the Islamic aspect of the Algerian revolution: of the hundreds or thousands of books on the subject, only a tiny handful even so much as mention it (and almost all serious books on the subject are written from the left). In like fashion, the left today is reluctant or unable to recognise that religious roots of Islamic terrorism.

In this sense, the extremists seem to me to have the better of the argument. They have understood that, where the survival of their religion is concerned, it is all or none. They have seen what happened to religious faith in England and France once such faith was treated as a merely private matter, freely subject to criticism either serious or mocking. And since they are instilled with the notion that there is in Islam an essence that is uniquely precious, they cannot accede to the scheme of the moderates, which will lead to its de facto extinction. The extremists, then, are more consistent, far-seeing and realistic than the moderates, though morally grossly their inferiors.

In like fashion, the sophisticated Moslems whom I have met, however decent, civilised and tolerant, believe something similar of Islam, that at its core it has unique value, notwithstanding the chronic backwardness and chaos of most of the Moslem world, what Ernest Renan called a century and a quarter ago ‘the decadence of states governed by Islam, the intellectual sterility of races that derive their culture and education from that religion alone’. No one gives up his basic world outlook lightly or easily, and if there is one thing in which Islam has been brilliantly successful it has been in its instillation in countless generations of people of presuppositions and a world outlook that are difficult for them to abandon later in life.

 

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Out Into the Beautiful World from New English Review Press.

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