Religion has long since been “tamed” in the West, segregated from political affairs, especially international ones. In 1936, when the white men of Europe were preparing for another huge and fratricidal war, Islam was not a player. Europeans assumed that the Muslim countries were too backward ever to recover their former glory (though Hitler would later make alliances with some Muslims, finding their attitude toward the Jews to his liking).
But in that year, the reactionary Catholic Hilaire Belloc reminded his readers that only Islam had ever come near to destroying Christian civilization and that it had done so fairly recently (while the English were settling in America); and he warned that it might yet revive and renew its assault.
Belloc was ignored. But what sounded far-fetched in 1936 is now starting to sound prophetic. . . .
Belloc had a gift for seeing patterns in history that were invisible to complacent liberal opinion, which expected progress in the form of continued secularization. As science and reason advanced, religion would die out and peace would ensue.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way. As Belloc observed, Islam still retains its fervor, tenacity, and resistance to conversion. Today we are shocked to find that young men born and raised in Western countries can become fanatical terrorists, willing to kill and die for Islam. The ancient desert faith erupts unnervingly in the heart of civilized London. . . .
Mohammed’s conception of Allah was a severe one: an almighty and arbitrary deity (though “compassionate” and “merciful”), not a loving Father in Heaven. Mohammed rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, which he absurdly misapprehended, thinking Christians believed that the three Persons were God the Father, Jesus the Son, and Mary the mother of Jesus. Nobody knows where he got this idea, but he denied Jesus’ divinity while honoring him as a prophet. (Curiously, Mohammed accepted the Virgin Birth, and he both affirmed and denied the Resurrection.) Believers in the Trinity, he taught, will be damned.
