G.K. Chesterton had a knack for anticipating future trends but when, in his 1914 novel
The Flying Inn,
he anticipated the Islamization of England, it seemed so far out of the
realm of possibility that it was difficult to take it as anything but a
flight of fancy.
True enough, the book has a whimsical, Pickwickian quality. It
follows the rambling adventures of two British stalwarts, Patrick Dalroy
and Humphrey Pump, as they try to stay one step ahead of the law,
dispensing free liquor as they go in an England where alcohol has been
banned. The “Flying Inn” is their motor car which they have furnished
with a large keg of rum, a cask of cheese, and a pub sign.
Roughly one hundred years later, Chesterton’s scenario no longer
seems improbable. Many observers believe the Islamization of England is
just a matter of time. For example, in her 2006 book
Londonistan,
Melanie Phillips presents a detailed description of the Islamic
“colonization” of England now underway and shows how it is made possible
by the governing class’ abandonment of cultural and spiritual values.
Chesterton was remarkably prescient not only in imagining that
Islamization might happen, but also in envisioning how it would
happen—through the instrumentality of a deracinated governing class. The
reason that alcohol is banned in Chesterton’s tale is because some
upper-class elites have become enamored of Islam and everything
Islamic—including the prohibition of drink. Chief among these is Lord
Ivywood, a Nietzschean diplomat who has enlisted the aid of a mysterious
Turk, Misyra Ammon, to spread the new gospel among the jaded upper
class who find exotic Islam to be more exciting than their own
traditions and religion.
Among other things, the establishment of the new order involves a
rewriting of history. As Ammon patiently explains to his sophisticated
audiences, England was originally an Islamic country. This is evident,
he says, in the existence of numerous pubs with Islamic names—“The
Saracen’s Head,” for example—as well as in the English fondness for the
word “crescent”—as in “Grosvenor Crescent,” “Regent’s Park Crescent,”
and “Royal Crescent.” Moreover, like today’s multicultural elite,
Chesterton’s “smart set” are all too happy to hear that this exotic
culture is superior to their own, and are quite willing to accept that
virtually all scientific and technical discoveries were first made by
Muslims. As one of the English characters puts it: “Of course, all our
things came from the East…. Everything from the East is good, of
course.”
One of the imports from the East is polygamy or, as Ammon calls it,
the “Higher Polygamy.” No one is as yet practicing polygamy, but it
eventually dawns on one of the young ladies in the story that this is
the direction in which things are trending—that Lord Ivywood’s mansion
is, in fact, designed to be a harem. Not quite as astute, the other
young ladies prefer to think, as Misyra Ammon tells them, “that women
had the highest freedom in Turkey; as they were allowed to wear
trousers.”
Chesterton was smart enough to realize that something like
Islamization could not happen without a prior undermining of the
existing culture. As Hal G.P. Colebatch
observes:
Chesterton was original not only in
seeing a then apparently down-and-out Islam was still a threat to
Europe, but also in seeing that the Islamic conquest would not be
possible without a preceding culture war to destroy the social agents of
resistance, that Islam had a certain seductiveness for a type of jaded
Western mind, and that the betrayers would not be the lower classes but
the wealthy elite.
As Chesterton foresaw, and as is the case today, naïve clergymen would also help to pave the way for Islam. In
The Flying Inn,
the great cathedrals replace the cross with a cross-and- crescent
emblem, and intellectuals believe that the time has come “for a full
unity between Christianity and Islam.” “Something called Chrislam
perhaps,” observes a skeptical Irishman. But others are convinced that
Christianity and Islam are “natural allies”—to use a term that is
currently in favor. In Chesterton’s Edwardian setting, progressives
believe that Christians and Muslims can work together to “deliver the
populace from the bondage of the all-destroying drug [alcohol].” Today,
some conservative Catholics
believe that Christians and Muslims can work together to fight
pornography and restore sexual morality. And then, as now, many believe
that we have much to learn from Islam. As Lord Ivywood puts it:
Ours is an age when men come more and
more to see that the creeds hold treasures for each other, that each
religion has a secret for its neighbour … and church unto church showeth
knowledge.
Or, as one contemporary
Catholic author
claims: “Islam has great and deep resources of morality and sanctity
that should inspire us and shame us and prod us to admiration and
imitation.”
Then, as now, part of the softening-up process is accomplished by
employing politically correct euphemisms to hide plain facts. The
reclusive Turkish warlord, Oman Pasha, who has taken the estate next to
Ivywood’s, and who, with Ivywood’s assistance, is secretly building a
Turkish army in England, is referred to by naïve neighbors as the
“Mediterranean gentleman.” “The description,” notes the author, “did not
illuminate and it probably was not intended to do so.” In our day, the
elites have invented a whole panoply of Newspeak terms designed to cover
up for Islamic aggressiveness. Thus, in England and Europe, Muslim
gangs that riot and rape on a mass scale are referred to in TV news as
“Asian youth,” or simply “youths.” And Islamic terrorists are routinely
designated by the generic, could-be-anyone label “violent extremists.”
Meanwhile, in public and private schools, children are learning that
jihad
is an interior spiritual struggle to become a better person. Perhaps
the mother of all euphemisms designed to keep us off guard is the
oft-repeated assurance that Islam is a religion of peace. That phrase
doesn’t appear in Chesterton’s story, but Misyra Ammon assures his
listeners that Islam is a religion devoted to serving others.
Chesterton’s prophetic novel hits uncomfortably close to home. One
thing he didn’t anticipate, however, is that the final Islamization of
England could be accomplished without importing a foreign army. Since
modern England has already imported enough Muslim immigrants to engineer
a significant cultural shift, an occupying army won’t be needed.
Otherwise, Chesterton was right on target. He foresaw that an Islamic
takeover would be facilitated by cultural elites eager to show their
tolerance for new ideas and fashions and their corresponding disdain for
traditional culture. In Chesterton’s day, the cultural elites were
referred to as the smart set; today they are the multicultural and media
elites. And, as in Chesterton’s story, they are quite willing to
believe that Muslims discovered or invented just about everything under
the sun.
Recently, for example, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey,
claimed that Muslims were the first to discover America and this, no
doubt, will soon be taken seriously by Western educators.
Multiculturalists would love to believe that America was discovered not
by a light-skinned European Christian but by a dark-skinned Muslim. It
would fit in nicely with their decades-long campaign to undermine the
Western tradition. Thanks to his teachers, the average Western student
doesn’t know much about history, but he does know that he was born into a
rotten culture with an appalling history of racism, sexism, and
imperialism.
Much of what Chesterton foresaw has already come to pass.
Cross-crescent emblems haven’t yet appeared on the cathedrals, but
several churches in the West have been sold to Muslim groups and
subsequently turned into mosques. And just recently, in a gesture of
Chrislamism, the Washington National Cathedral opened its doors to a
weekly Muslim prayer service. Meanwhile, a senior Church of England
bishop
recommended
that Prince Charles’ coronation service should be opened with a reading
from the Koran. The gesture, he said, would be “a creative act of
accommodation” to make Muslims feel “warmly embraced.”
In the England of Chesterton’s imagining, polygamy was just a gleam
in Lord Ivywood’s eye. Nowadays, for all intents and purposes, it is an
institution. Although polygamy is still against the law, it is, in fact,
a growing practice
among Muslims of Great Britain. Instead of enforcing the law,
culturally sensitive police and courts look the other way, and the
welfare agencies do their best to provide material support. A Muslim man
with four wives can
expect a welfare check for each of them—and all signed over to his name.
One of the things Western citizens take comfort in when contemplating
Islamic radicalism is that we possess powerful armies and well-trained
police. Once again, Chesterton skewers our illusions. As it turns out,
the England of
The Flying Inn has been disarming itself
militarily as well as culturally. It gradually dawns on the citizenry
that police are few and far between, and many of those who remain have
taken to wearing Turkish fezzes. They also discover that while Ivywood
and Pasha have been quietly bringing in a Turkish army, the “British
army is practically disbanded.”
I don’t know if the British police are declining in number, but
whatever their number, they have become one of the most politically
correct organizations on the planet. For example, the London
Metropolitan Police Authority recruitment target for 2009-10 required
that 27 percent of all new recruits must be black and minority ethnic
and 41 percent must be female. Many of them might as well be wearing
fezzes or hijabs because, if you say something critical about the
religion of peace, you will quickly find yourself in front of a
magistrate on charges of Islamophobia. When, for example, Parliamentary
candidate Paul Weston stood in a public space and read aloud Churchill’s
unflattering assessment of Islam in
The River War, he was promptly arrested.
As for the British army, it hasn’t been disbanded yet, but the armed
forces of the UK are not what they used to be. The same can be said for
NATO forces in general. They can be relied on to march in the local gay
pride parade or help out with ebola patients or even launch an
occasional “overseas contingency operation,” but major wars on multiple
fronts are another matter. The United States, the largest NATO member,
has been drastically reducing the size and strength of its military. The
U.S. plans to shrink its Army to pre-World War II levels, the number of
ships in the Navy is lower than in 1917, and, according to several
reports, the Obama administration has been quietly conducting a massive
purge of top military officers.
Just at the point when Islam is advancing by stealth jihad and armed
jihad all over the world, the West is letting down its guard, both
literally and metaphorically. And all the while, the Lord Ivywoods of
the world assure us that we have nothing to fear from Islam. What at one
time seemed merely a fanciful fiction is fast becoming fact. Chesterton
would not have been surprised.
(Illustration credit: Washington Times
)
William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the
author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including
. He is also the author of a new book entitled
. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including
. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.
