Moslems: Their Beliefs, Practices and Politics - Part 2

Following on from our recent blog post entitled Moslems: Their Beliefs, Practices and Politics, we are pleased to deepen the study of this important subject loosely based upon an article published by the Italian priest and scholar Don Curzio Nitoglia who is connected to the journal SiSiNoNo.

Prologue

To understand what is happening today in regard to the Western World and the Middle East we must understand the main branches of contemporary Islam. They are a) Pan-Arab nationalism, and, b) Takfiri Jihadism which has roots in both the Middle Ages and the nineteenth-twentieth centuries.

It must be recognised that Classical Arab culture (not the religion of Islam, especially when interpreted in its fundamentalist and fideist form derived from Al-Ghazali) is not a course or rough Bedouinism, devoid of substance and depth (which Al-Ghazali reduced it to), which is how it is commonly presented by a politically-correct Western media today.

In fact Classical Arab culture is humanistic and scientific (originating in India and China and then transmitted to Europe by way of Arabia). Arabic Aristotelian philosophy (Avicenna, Averroes) touched great heights of development in the Middle Ages before its decline. The decline, primarily theological, philosophical and exegetical, influenced by the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, became far-reaching, but didn’t replace the Classical Arab culture that underwent a revival under social Pan-Arab nationalism. Pan-Arab nationalism is fundamentally opposed to Takfiri Jihadism which is bankrolled by the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In the Middle Ages Thomistic metaphysics, based on Aristotle, corrected and purged Arabic philosophy of its rationalistic defects and also perfected the doctrine of being as the final act of essence.

The philosophy of the West, which is the theoretical foundation of Neo-Conservative politics, is Enlightenment Empiricism influenced by Nominalism leading to Agnosticism, and which, according to St. Pius X, is “the evil of the modern world” and the basis of theological Modernism.

So Empiricism is radically opposed to sound scholastic philosophy, theology and metaphysics. The mediaeval Arab world was only imperfect in respect to it, but not opposed to it.

Eventually, if we study a) mediaeval Jewish metaphysics (especially Maimonides), which despite some healthy theological and metaphysical principles borrowed from Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna, flows into Nihilism, and b) contemporary Jewish philosophy (Buber and Levinas) which is Subjectivist, Structuralist and Nihilistic, it is clear that there exits a radical incompatibility between them and right reason, sound theology and divine revelation.

When we objectively and dispassionately study mediaeval Arab, Jewish and Christian metaphysics and Western Empiricism, we find that a much greater opposition to classical Greek-Roman metaphysics and to Christianity (patristic, scholastic and social doctrine) comes from Jewish Nihilism (Maimonides), Anglo-American Neo-Conservative ideology (Burke, Strauss, Kristol, Popper, Hayek, Mises and Friedman) and Zionism (Buber and Levinas), than from the metaphysics of mediaeval Arabia and modern Pan-Arab nationalism.

By going back to the origins of current events we can distinguish:

1)      The incompatability in religion between Christianity and Islam, which is, however, less than that which exists between the Gospel and Hebrew Talmudism;

2)      The affinity between mediaeval Arab and Thomist metaphysics, which are to one another as potency is to act, and less perfect to more perfect;

3)      The irreconcilability of Western Agnosticism with right reason and the Christian Faith, which stand against each other as black and white, yes and no;

4)      The unitary design of Jewish-Anglo-American Globalism which uses the Takfirism-Salafism-Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia to undermine and destabilise the foundations of lay Arab States, causing division and chaos in countries once socially and economically ordered and not morally corrupted by the immanent subjectivism of Western modernity.

The existing branches of Islam

Classical Islamic theology and culture was formed in Arabia in the seventh century. Towards the end of the thirteenth century it began to decline and towards the end of the eighteenth century, with the expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt, came the eruption of European Enlightenment modernity.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and the fragmentation of the Arab world into French/Anglo colonies there was a renaissance in the Arab world in the form of a social-orientated nationalism as a reaction to the forced establishment in Palestine, in 1948, of the State of Israel.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990, a radical anti-nationalist, and anti-Arab, Islamicist ideology funded by the United States, the Gulf States and Israel, with some co-operation from Turkey, became prominent. These Islamicists were first deployed in the 1979-89 proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and have been operating as a proxy force in Chechnya ever since, in Iraq since the Second Gulf War of 2003, in numerous countries afflicted by the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ that began in earnest in 2011, and in the central regions of Africa.
To be continued.