Author Sven Hedlin was profoundly impressed by the people he found himself among. They were refugees in their own country, disinherited and robbed of their national pride by the Jewish agents of the United States and Britain, but their ancestors had once been the shining lights in a dark world: scientists, religious scholars, artists, architects and musicians, and Hedlin saw that greatness would come again.
The tide was turning, and their rage would not be contained for ever. A people, he wrote, who ‘are daily growing stronger and who, owing to a shortsighted and malevolent policy have been obliged to develop their resources within the bounds of an abnormally circumscribed territory … will one day reach a culminating point of exasperation when no dams and no barrier will any longer hold back their pent-up fury. And then that war which nobody wants will break out, and their pressure to the west and east will ease.”
To those concerned about the course of events in the Islamic world, Hedlin’s book is worth finding. Of course they’ll have to look fairly hard: published in March of 1938, Germany and World Peace is not the sort of title that lingered long on publishers’ lists. As for copies in the private libraries of elderly Western liberals, you’d do better looking for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A lot better.
It’s understandable, of course. Something of a hush tends to fall on suburban dinner parties when it emerges, courtesy of a radio broadcast or the clank of tank tracks outside in the shrubbery, that the man one has been hailing as a dynamic revolutionary has decided to spend his waking hours planning your incineration.
But still, it seems extraordinary that the liberal advocates of ‘root causes” — the culturally suicidal attempt to blame all fanatical aggression and religious barbarism on Western achievements — should have forgotten so completely about their ancestors’ apologies for Hitler. They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes, but it seems that those who actively disown it are doomed to read The Guardian, send £5 a month to a black child in Africa, and take full responsibility for being on the wrong bus at the wrong time on 7/7.
The parallels between the German tyrant and the uni-browed wheel-tapper currently in charge of Iran are fairly clear even to amateur loony-spotters: a divine mission, utter contempt for international treaties, an all-consuming hatred of Jews, and a populace drunk on militant nationalism and entitlement. But the Reich and the self-appointed defender of the Prophet differ in one profound way. Germany was a broken, ragged shell of an immensely advanced society. Iran at its best is a shithole.
Which is why one needs to question whether the current violence in the Muslim world is a religious backlash, or something more, something bred out of the failed states, tribal theocracies and oil-mafia fiefdoms that have the nerve to call themselves countries. In other words, something political, if politics is not too complex and sophisticated a concept for the medieval patronage that passes for policy in the Middle East.
To the agnostic in a secular society, Islamic jihad and Christian fundamentalism seem to be what happens when one child says his imaginary friend can beat up another child’s imaginary friend. But one must concede that belief is powerful, and that blasphemy is heinous to a great many people in a great many religions.
So is the rage about blasphemy? If it is, why should any secular societies care? Since when do religious laws apply to sovereign secular states 4 000 miles away? If Muslims are outraged by blasphemy and sacrilege, why did they not utter a collective peep when the Taliban blew up ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan? (One can’t, in the current climate, even begin to suggest that the demolition of a religious shrine may have been somewhat more extreme and offensive than a drawing in an obscure Danish newspaper …) And if the destruction of embassies is a legitimate response to such excesses, was it supernaturally Zen of the Buddhist governments of Thailand and Tibet not to call for the gory massacre of every Muslim who’d ever set foot in Afghanistan?
But of course religion is not at issue here. All religions are as perfect as their most perfect followers, and as debased as their most backward. Islam is enlightened, liberal, progressive and peaceful. It is also bloodthirsty, expansionist, homicidally anti-Semitic and brutally misogynistic. It just depends where you look. And if you look at Iran, Yemen, Somalia and other similar armpits, you find your answer: powerful and ambitious tyrants, using an infinitely malleable faith and a backward, superstitious populace to foster their political ends. That the Prophet was clumsily satirised (a fate suffered by every other religious icon) is almost beside the point: if the eating of potatoes were anathema to Arabic cuisine, the mullahs would have the mob burning McDonalds outlets if it meant they could flex their political muscle.
Why did it take four months to erupt? Why now, as Iran gives the finger to the world and a leading British jihadist rants in the dock? And one last question nags at the infidel: if images of the Prophet are banned, how do we know that it’s Him in the cartoons?
Watch this space, Mr Hedlin.