Malraux on Islam rising, 1956

Writing in 1956, André Malraux saw that Islam posed a rising menace to our civilization. While it’s not precisely clear in what he thought the threat consisted, it is remarkable that he understood, even then, both the existence of the threat and the fatal Western conceit that “everyone is the same as us.” He grasped the futility and danger of our trying to share our political and spiritual goods with Muslims, since they have a quite different set of priorities about which we know nothing. The same ridiculous Western psychodrama continues today. We keep thinking that our troubled relations with the Muslims are the result of our failure to “reach out” sufficiently to them, so we try ever harder to reach out, whereas the Muslims couldn’t care less about us except as a source of unearned goods, booty, much as Muhammad regarded the infidel caravans crossing Arabia 1,400 years ago. We Westerners, imagining ourselves to be fairminded and generous, are in fact the most fanatically close-minded people on earth, since, thinking that other peoples are fairminded and generous like ourselves, we refuse to see them as they really are.

Thanks to the VFR reader who discovered and translated this Malraux passage for us.

The outstanding event of our time is the violent thrust forward of Islam. Underestimated by most of our contemporaries, the ascendancy of Islam is analogically comparable to the beginnings of communism at the time of Lenin. The consequences of this phenomenon are still unpredictable. At the outset of the Marxist revolution, people thought they could stem its tide through partial solutions. Neither Christianity, nor organizations such as corporations or labor unions, found a solution.

Likewise, today, the Western world is hardly prepared to confront the problem of Islam. Theoretically, the solution does indeed seem extremely difficult. Perhaps it would be possible in practice, looking at just the French aspect of this question, if the solution were thought out and applied by a genuine statesman. The current known facts of the problem lead one to believe that the various forms of Muslim dictatorship are soon to be established successively throughout the Arab world. When I say “Muslim,” I’m thinking less of the religious structure than of the temporal structure that flows from Mahomet’s doctrine. As of now, the sultan of Morocco is out-dated and Bourguiba will only stay in power by becoming a dictator of sorts. Perhaps partial solutions would have been sufficient to stem the tide of Islam, if they had been applied in time…Now it is too late! The “wretched ones” have nothing to lose. They would rather preserve their wretchedness within the Muslim community. Their fate will probably not change. We have a vision of them that is too Western. Rather than the benefits that we claim to be able to bring them, they prefer the future of their race. Black Africa will not remain much longer untouched by this process. All that we can do is to become conscious of the gravity of the phenomenon and try to slow down its progression.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 03, 2005 02:07 AM | Send