“Europe has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith”
What to do? The most beautiful woman in the world complains that my articles are too long. My editor wants them to fill an entire page. The answer is easy: please Mrs Humayun Gauhar – sometimes – at the danger of displeasing Mr Arif Nizami. So here goes a shorter one this time as a New Year’s present to my wife.
Lest I forget, Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year to all of you. I am optimistic for humankind because I have this feeling that change for the overall better will start being perceptibly felt starting from 2016 onwards as the old global status quo and many national status quos start giving way to new and better dispensations, old European-determined states and boundaries in its former colonies that are now outdated for the needs of the people living in them may start being redrawn and the global centre of economic and political gravity visibly shifting. Don’t you see how Pakistan is on the cusp of change for the second time since 1971, with the Sindh vs Rangers propaganda by the People’s Party morphing into Sindh vs Punjab? If the power centres of Pakistan are not careful, things could get completely out of hand in the puerile pursuit of sham democracy that enables only the power elite and enfeebles the people and stupid ignorance of real democracy that would empower the people and disable the small power elite.
I have been careful with words in the foregoing but it’s worth stressing that it won’t all happen in 2016; that’s not what I am suggesting for a minute. Such things take time. But you will start feeling the shift from next year. So best of luck: eat, drink and make merry (but don’t overdo it) for tomorrow is not only another day but hopefully a better one. So keep faith and hope alive and wait for the new dawn.
We keep reading articles in leading western newspapers and journals about what is wrong with the way Islam is practiced by Muslims today, the roots of various world problems and how to deal with ideology of the ISIS and al Qaeda kind, forgetting that both, and more, are American creations with the help of its stooges in the Muslim world. Whether these creations have gone wrong and out of control or are they deliberating agents of change to justify future actions is moot.
Articles written by thinking Muslims get the most traction in the western media and, whether you agree with them or not, they are worth reading. I will share them with you some time but I have to be careful of closed minds.
We keep reading articles in leading western newspapers and journals about what is wrong with the way Islam is practiced by Muslims today, the roots of various world problems and how to deal with ideology of the ISIS and al Qaeda kind, forgetting that both, and more, are American creations with the help of its stooges in the Muslim world
Deluged as we are with western propaganda based largely on the uninformed, mired in prejudice and preconceived notions about Islam and Muslims, we also get to read pieces by western scholars about the problems the western mindset has with Islam and Muslims and about understanding them. I gave you one such piece last week, David Livingstone’s historical view spanning three millennia about ‘Terrorism and the Illuminati’ in his introduction to his book by the same name. You may not agree with all he says, but his thesis is compelling and gives those with open minds a great deal of food for thought. This is important if we are to understand the ongoing, seemingly perpetual global conflict that is upon us. I hasten to add though that the Muslim-Arab view about the Christian West, especially the Crusades, bears listening to as well to not complete but enlarge the picture.
It seems that Karl Marx’s thesis about conflict being inherent in human society that causes perpetual change, driven of course by the endless conflict between thesis and anti-thesis, is on full display – the global status quo morphing and shifting all the time like the Leviathan convulsing and shedding its skin and acquiring a new one from time-to-time and in the process causing much damage and destruction. Or, if you don’t like the Leviathan analogy, it’s like a Phoenix rising out of the ashes in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. And so life goes on, so the world goes on.
Having shared David Livingstone’s view with you last week, I now give you the view of another scholar, well-known historian and famous writer on civilisation Niall Fergusson that was printed by the Boston Globe on November 16, 2015, titled ‘Paris and the fall of Rome’. Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard University. This is what he has to say:
“I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud President Hollande’s pledge of ‘pitiless’ vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall.
“Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410 AD: ‘In the hour of savage license, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed… a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and… the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies… Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless…’
“Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?
“True, Gibbon’s ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn over a millennium. But a new generation of historians, such as Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth: a ‘violent seizure… by barbarian invaders’ that destroyed a complex civilisation within the span of a single generation.
“Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are.
“Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.
“The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from South Asia — but this time they have come in their millions.
“To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northward and westward without some of that political malaise coming along with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief
“It is conventional to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent, and that is doubtless true. But it is also true that the majority of Muslims in Europe hold views that are not easily reconciled with the principles of our modern liberal democracies, including those novel notions we have about equality between the sexes and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
“I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together in fact meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic pose.
“I do know that 21st-century Europe has only itself to blame for the mess it is now in. For surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term of my first year I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learned nothing that mattered. Indeed, we learned a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation-states worse, and empires the worst things of all.
“‘Romans before the fall,’ wrote Ward-Perkins in his ‘Fall of Rome’, ‘were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.’
“Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.”
Of course, here Niall Fergusson lays great emphasis on weak “defences” along with “great wealth” and complacency allowing people to migrate to Europe without “renouncing” their faith (they hardly ever have done throughout history). He likens the mess Europe and its western American periphery are entangled in to the fall of Rome and more or less acknowledges that the time for European civilisation may be over as too the era of western hegemony along with its now getting increasingly quaint notion of ‘western liberal democracy’. The west may be in the process of losing its political and economic pre-eminence, but the Muslims are not gaining it either. It’s going further east. As the first satellite China ever launched softly sang out, ‘The East is Red’.