L’espresso running an article reviewing a new book by Roger Scruton, an English philosopher and essayist, formerly a professor at Birkbeck College in London and at Boston University.
Right from its opening lines, the book goes against the canons of political correctness:
“Samuel Huntington’s celebrated thesis that the Cold War has been succeeded by a ‘clash of civilizations’ has more credibility today than it had in 1993, when it was first put forward.”
But what follows is even more abundantly surprising. If the liberty of which Western civilization boasts also includes the possibility of that civilization’s rejecting itself – and Scruton reserves one of his most brilliant chapters to this pervasive culture of rejection – then “this is a matter of a civilization aiming at its own destruction.” Likewise, Islam defines itself not in terms of liberty but in terms of submission, and this submission is also self-destructive. It is the prisoner of a sacred text, the Koran, which will make every Muslim a rootless person so long as it is read outside the context of history and the present. In the preface to the Italian edition of the volume, Khaled Fouad Allam – an insightful intellectual of the Muslim diaspora, Algerian by origin with Italian citizenship – fully attests to this condition of the disappearance of the self, for Islam within modernity. …"
“…“The spectacle of Western freedom and Western prosperity, going hand-in-hand with Western decadence and the crumbling of Western loyalties, is bound to provoke, in those who envy the one and despise the other, a seething desire to punish.”…”
"…Other splendid passages of the book include those that criticize the tendency to create transnational legislation, international criminal courts, and the European Union itself as a superstate, a tendency which is in reality a new “invisible hand of imperialism” and “a political expression of the culture of rejection.” In Scruton’s judgment, only territorial jurisdiction and national fidelity can provide the foundation for a shared and welcoming sense of citizenship, including for the Muslim. In the West, it is the United States that is holding steady this awareness:
“The triumph of America is that it has beeen able to persuade wave after wave of immigrants to relinquish all competing attachments and to identify with this country, this land, this great experiment in settlement, and to join its common defense.”
Roger Scruton, “The West and the Rest. Globalization and the Terrorist Treat,” ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 2002, pp. 188.
her “the West and the rest,” even amid religious diversity. The Christian faith “tells the Christian to look upon the other, not as a threat, but as a summons to hospitality.”
But at the same time, Christianity imposes the duty of defending those who are under attack. This is because Jesus preached a message of peace, but not of pacifism:
“The idea of forgiveness, symbolized in the Cross, distinguishes the Christian from the Muslim inheritance. There is no coherent reading of the Christian message that does not make forgiveness of enemies into a central item of the creed. Christ even commanded us, when assaulted, to turn the other cheek. But …] he was setting before us a personal ideal, not a political project. If I am attacked and turn the other cheek, then I exemplify the Christian virtue of meekness. If I am entrusted with a child who is attacked, and I then turn the child’s other cheek, I make myself party to the violence. That, surely, is how a Christian should understand the right of defense, and how it is understood by the medieval theories of the just war. The right of defense stems from your obligations to others. You are obliged to protect those whom destiny has placed under your care. A political leader who turns not his own cheek but ours makes himself party to the next attack. By pursuing the attacker, however violently, the politician servs the cause of peace, and also of forgiveness, of which justice is the instrument.”…"
"…As the examples of bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the September 11 terrorists demonstrate, Islamism is not a cry of distress from the “wretched of the earth.” It is an implacable summons to war, issued by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy, and most of them sufficiently well versed in Western civilization and its benefits to be able to exploit the modern world to the full. …] With al-Qaeda, we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this “base” is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of permanent exile, while at the same time resolving to carry out God’s work of punishment …] on his enemies, wherever they are.
"
