ISLAM is an aggressively proselytising religion. It seeks to expand with a view to ultimate dominance in the form of a global caliphate.
When it is strong, it expands by waging open war on ‘the infidel’. When it is weak, it wages its war of expansion by stealth. As Muhammad said: ‘War is deceit’.
Another saying interpreted by the Muslim scholar, Ibn al-Munayyr, renowned for his meticulous analysis of the Hadith, is as follows: ‘The good war, which attains its complete objective, is the one involving deception, not confrontation, for confrontation involves danger, while deception achieves victory without risk.’
It seems that such a ‘good war’ is at present being waged against this country, with considerable success, by an expansive Islam; and as the confidence increases of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its placemen and myriad seeding groups, this is resulting in ever more obvious and offensive displays of supremacy to the dismay of the vast majority of the population. This includes both long-term immigrants who respect our way of life and came here to share it, and those Muslims who simply wish to conduct their religion in what they understand to be the orthodox way: in the mosque, or in decent privacy.
It is par for the course that people who believe their religion to be the final word of God should feel that they are doing the rest of us a favour by attempting to force-feed us with its precepts. What is extraordinary is that we should permit them to do so. At least, it would be extraordinary, if those wielding the levers of power in our institutions had not been industriously degrading our culture and chipping away at our confidence and self-respect as a nation for the past half century and more.
I belonged to one of the last generations to receive an education grounded in a grateful appreciation of our history, our religion, and our literary and cultural inheritance from classical times onward. The vestiges of Christianity still played an important part in our lives. Children went to Sunday school, even if it was only to give their parents an hour or so of peace after the Sunday roast. Prayers were said, and hymns sung, in school assemblies, and the Christian Union at my own school could fill one of the largest classrooms to overflowing. As teenagers, the church and youth clubs in the church hall were for many of us the centre of social life.
At that time, confidence in Western culture still held strong except in hubs of rarefied intellectual superiority in London and the ancient universities; nor had moral relativism displaced traditional values. In the suburbs and provinces, at least, people were still able to differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong – even between men and women. The press was restrained; the cartoon Jane, in the Daily Mirror, was the dailies’ only concession to nudity; and television, as it gradually superseded the radio, had no need of a watershed to protect children from gratuitous sex and violence. Times have certainly changed. Whereas, in those days, little girls in frilly ballet dresses pointed a satin toe and pretended to be fairies, nowadays I have more than once found myself nonplussed at the sight of a tiny granddaughter pouting and gyrating suggestively as she aped the hypersexualised performance of the latest pop celeb.
I wonder if the Muslims who refer to us with such contempt as promulgators of ‘corrupt thoughts and ideas’ and a ‘culture of violence, libertinism and delinquency’ in their ‘Strategy for Islamic Cultural Action Outside the Islamic World’ would have been just as assured of our moral decadence in 1950 as they are today? Probably, yes. After all, even then our women did not wear the niqab. But we would certainly have been able to defend ourselves against their accusations without blushing.
Yet despite the media’s promotion of a brave new world of unbridled sexuality; despite the pressure on men to be ashamed of their masculinity and emote like women, and women to be ‘strong’ and behave like men; despite the encouragement of divorce and abortion, and the taxes targeting marriage; despite policies designed to get mothers into ‘the workplace’, making way for the State as supreme arbiter of private life, while parents are reduced to mere ‘alsos’ in the child-rearing stakes; somehow, despite attacks from every side, the family hangs on by the skin of its teeth. Half of children in the United Kingdom are still growing up within the traditional, nuclear family. As Tom Holland has pointed out, we in the West are goldfish swimming in Christian waters, and most of us still cling instinctively to the norms instilled by centuries of Christian morality.
The Muslim Brotherhood believes this country to be ripe for the picking, ready to fall into the lap of Islam. This is not the case. True, for many a steady diet of materialism has resulted in a spiritual hunger which demands satisfaction, but Islam, so heavily focused on the control of outward behaviour through ritual and the halal-haram dichotomy (with the exception of Sufism, which the Brotherhood think heretical) no more fits the bill than the pseudo-religion of climate change. Britain may have lapsed from Christianity, but most of us would still prefer to wake up to the sound of church bells than to the alien intonations of the call to prayer.
To face this challenge, the Church of England clergy offer us, for the most part, nothing but an apologetic gaggle of social workers, one third of them, including some 20 bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury, being female, plus one male archdeacon who identifies as a woman. They are just the kind of people to inspire disdain and the certainty of conquest in the Islamic breast and to put off those tentative Christians who might be more inclined to go to church if they could look forward to a traditional service conducted by a traditional vicar, and a traditional liturgy straight from the Book of Common Prayer, as spoken by our ancestors from generation to generation, rather than some abbreviated version in chatty modern language (‘and with thy spirit’, for instance, really does imply something quite different from ‘and also with you’).
Sunday used to be a day set apart, distinct from the rest of the week; and a church was a place to receive spiritual sustenance, not to be harried into indignation about racism or transphobia or foreign wars, and chivvied guiltily into a political partisanship masquerading as Christian charity.
Our national church, emasculated by the ‘monstrous regiment of women’, has done all it can to bring Christianity into disrepute; yet there is evidence that young people, and especially young men, are resisting its best efforts, to the benefit, in particular, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Are we, perhaps, soon to see the final triumph of the Counter-Reformation? Will our ancient churches and cathedrals eventually revert to their mediaeval allegiance, now that this carries with it no dangerous political implications? Certainly these testaments in stone to a great many centuries of English Catholic faith do not deserve to be in the hands of the present Church of England establishment, who fritter away their resources on ‘addressing historical links to the slave trade’, and who have lost both the respect of dwindling congregations and the ability to understand the Gospel message in terms of anything other than Socialism.
Certainly there could be nothing worse than to see those churches taken over and adapted to the requirements of Islam; for bodies prostrated before a deity who demands constant demonstrations of submission to take the place of knees and heads freely bowed in adoration of the one true loving God.
In 1938, in his book, The Great Heresies, Hilaire Belloc wrote: ‘Anyone with a knowledge of History is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam upon Christendom.’
That future seems to have arrived.
Perhaps, then, we shall see an answering revival of Christianity if only because, as another quote from Belloc reminds us, when wandering into dangerous territory it is usually best to
. . . keep a hold of nurse,
For fear of finding something worse.
