Lord Carey, Benedictus XVI, and today’s decayed Islam

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton defended the Pope’s "extraordinarily effective and lucid" speech. In his own challenge to "violent" Islam, Lord Carey said that the West had been largely responsible for "redrawing the map of the Middle East", and asked why Islam today had become associated with violence. An analysis

When a Pope quotes an Orthodox Eastern Roman Emperor and an Anglican authority supports the Head of Catholic Christianity, serious developments are logically expected; especially because all these events take place weeks before the Pope's visit to Turkey. In the perspective of a definite re-unification between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the debate about Islam runs high. It is even more so, as it coincides with the forthcoming adhesion of Turkey (the only Muslim country – candidate) to the (defunct or resurrected?) European Union!

In reality, Lord Carey supported the basic hint instilled in the words of the intellectual emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, namely that there seems to be an inner link between Islam and violence, especially highlighted in the concept of Holy War (Jihad).

Lord Carey reportedly (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2366419,00.html) said that Muslims must address "with great urgency" their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the "clash of civilisations" endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

In fact, a major misunderstanding seems to be the reason the two worlds (or rather parts of the world) do not communicate anymore, and arguments are exchanged without supporting mutual comprehension. We can enumerate some:

1. The West has been burdened with anti-Islamic religious literature going back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad. This literature emanates from different cultural backgrounds (today's West is not that of the 7th century, and today's Christianity is not that of the 7th century), but few among the Western scholars seem to understand that if you use an element (Manuel Paleologus' consideration of Islam) out of a different cultural background and you transfer it to a completely different environment (today's global world), you only contribute to confusion. Today's West must get rid of religious medieval considerations and evaluations of Islam; they would lead to nowhere.

2. Modern European Orientalist scholarship has failed to perceive correctly and to diffuse in the West and the rest of the World the Ancient Oriental Civilizations for which so great efforts and labours have been deployed from decipherments to excavations and from publications to tourism and average culture. Having failed to stand objectively and neutrally
a) toward Ancient Mesopotamian Civilizations (there was direct Democracy in Elam of the Sukkalmahhu era in the 2nd millennium BCE, more than 1300 years before the so ridiculously venerated Athenian Pericles of the Western epileptics), b) Ancient Egyptian Civilization (that was condition sine qua non for the later rise of civilization among the Greek peoples),
c) Ancient Hittite and Anatolian Civilizations (Hesiod's Theogony is an adaptation of Hittite epics, and Herodotus was an anti-Persian, Carian - not Greek Historian),
d) Canaanite and Phoenician Civilizations (Homer's Iliad is an adaptation of the Ugaritic Canaanite epic 'Kret', and Phoenicians developed first democratic practices in their Mediterranean colonies before diffusing the system among Athenians)
e) Iranian Civilizations (at the times of the erroneously described as 'Hellenistic Culture' – the correct term would be 'Orientalistic' – Mithra was diffused among Greek and Latin speaking populations throughout Europe – but not a single European knows today that there have been excavated on European soil more than 500 temples and shrines dedicated to Mithra)
f) Aramaean Civilization (Aramaic was the second international language after the Assyrian – Babylonian and thanks to Aramaic Manichaeism was the first religion to be diffused from Atlantic to Pacific), western scholars were by nature unable to develop a scholarly authoritative discipline of Islamology; they even did not have the interest for that!

What mattered to these idiotic minds who bear great part of responsibility for the rise of Islamic Extremism was to convincingly diffuse their personal approaches and ideas about Islam; quite unfortunately, these ideas were all wrong for Islamologists like Maxime Rodinson (former professor of mine at the Paris-based Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, IVeme section) wished to prove through them their preconceived philosophical and ideological schemes.

They violated therefore the discipline they were supposed to serve, they concealed part of knowledge, misinterpreted other part, and focalized on unimportant issues. At the beginning of their failure (that will fall upon the heads of today's European bogus-philosophers – ridiculous enfants gates of irrelevant and unrepresentative mass medias) is the fact that they even did not study properly Islam (less than 1% of Islamic philosophy, historiography and literature has so far been translated to modern European languages – and the same concerns numerous critical sources of knowledge written in Aramaic, Assyrian - Babylonian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Ancient Yemenite, Middle Persian, Gueze.

3. In addition, to false perception of the Oriental civilizations, the Western Intellectual establishment stuck disastrously to a false, erroneously conceived, today entirely obsolete (because of numerous discoveries), model of Greco-Romano-centrist of History and Humanities that, even more disastrously was extensively diffused among colonized elites. In this sense, European Colonial academic establishments fell in the trap of their arrogant egocentrism twice: engulfing themselves in the Falsehood of Greco-Romano-centrism, and engulfing others. Only recently, and thanks to anti-colonial intellectuals in America, Martin Bernal, Edouard Said and several Africanists starting shaking the foundations of the Greco-Romano-centrist lunacy. But if the local elites in Iran, Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and Syria had not fallen victims of the European universities where they went to study, they would be able to reveal to themselves and to their peoples their respective cultural identity, different per country, and like that confirmed cultural identity would prevent the despair of the extremist nihilism.

4. Even worse, the Colonial empires pursued and obtained a most redoubtable victory over the Islamic Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. Soon, they will regret but one should probably expect terrible bloodshed to come before. The French adventures under Napoleon in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire were a viciously perceived and rancorously executed plan of Hatred against the political supremacy of the Islamic World. It would be very naïve for the murderous gangs that supported the Colonial Scheme to truly believe that they would go unpunished. They will be punished, and the tool of their punishment will be precisely their own creature: the illiterate, analphabetic, fanatic, uneducated and uncultured masses that they needed atop of shamefully detached bogus-states like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, etc.

One has to admit that for inner reasons, due to philosophical – ideological developments that took place within Islam, the Ottoman Empire was in decay since the beginning of the 18th century. If the European interest had been innocent and benign, if the Europeans truly wished to study and diffuse knowledge pertaining to Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, Anatolia, Islam, etc., then the European intellectuals would have done their best to properly diffuse this knowledge among themselves, readjust their preconceived falsehood, and then spread the light among the already in Darkness Muslim masses.

They would have helped Muslims find the equivalent of Ratio, Freedom, Grace, Justice, Discipline, Responsibility, Gratitude in Islam, they would have drien them to rediscover their Great but Lost Islam. But the Colonial Scheme was the most malignant conception human minds had achieved. They wished to dismember the only power that would save them: the Ottoman Empire. What happened after the collapse of the caliphate is very significant: Turkey made a real cultural revolution and became a culturally and politically Western state (not without terrible efforts and many fights against the forces of darkness, illiterate sheikhs who had lost their spiritual and political power). It would not be proper to compare Turkey to Sweden but politically Turkey is far closer to Scandinavia than to Syria.

What happened to turkey, would have happened to the entire Ottoman Empire if left united from Algeria to Oman and from the borders of Russia to the frontiers of Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. The entire area would not be perhaps an ideal democracy like Switzerland but it would never produce Terrorists like the September 11 humanoids.

5. The West kept working on disastrous plans during the 19th and the 20th centuries, diffusing a false theory, namely the Arab nationalism or Pan-Arabism.
Idiotic colonial diplomats thought that by plunging the local masses into a false identity they would besot them eternally and they would therefore extract the entire economic and political profit. They did plunge all these non-Arabic masses to absolutely false identity and culture concepts, but they had not studied the Depth of Despair. Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Nietzsche and William Blake had not explored enough the depths of a befallen and undeservedly mortified soul.

Perhaps today, in the light of September 11th and the Cartoons War, illuminated theologians like the Pope Professor Ratzinger and Lord Carey will understand that there is a Need in the West to explore and study a befallen and undeservedly mortified soul. Like this, they may finally conclude that the Islamic terrorism will be duly tackled only with a pertinent dismantling of the Colonial Scheme. They will find not interlocutors in the Islamic World, not among the official - academic and political - elites that are all the result of the barbaric machinations of the colonial powers. But they must search, stick to the Western Ideals of Freedom (that is equally a Great Ideal for the Real Islam), and never condition their fight to political needs of a Europe in decay. Two worlds in decay, Europe and Islam, will never communicate; one must be alive, and the good intentions will matter. By respecting the original Islam, you will civilize the decayed Muslims of today: this is the real challenge!