C. John McCloskey writes:
After 9/11, no one should be surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West’s superiority back on itself. What is surprising is that a lone historian saw this coming in the 1930s. [emphasis added.] The great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, friend of G.K. Chesterton and a prolific historian, was prescient as no other writer about the resurgence of Islam in our own era.
Here are just of the more salient passages from his work on the threat of Islam to the West:
- “We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise.”
- “The future always comes as surprise. . . .but I for my part cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”
- “And in the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world. . .lies our peril.”
- “There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war.”
- “[Islam] still converts pagan savages wholesale. . . .No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morality, its organized system of prayer, its code of morals, its simple doctrine. In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam on Christendom.”
You can read more in this same vein in The Essential Belloc: A Prophet for Our Times, edited by Scott Bloch, Brian Robertson, and myself.
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