WHAT APOSTATES FROM COMMUNISM AND ISLAM CAN TEACH THE WEST

According to polling data released April 24, 2007, the preponderance of Muslims, from Morocco to Indonesia, share the goal of reestablishing an Islamic Caliphate.¹⁸² A rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4,384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006, and February 15, 2007—1,000 Moroccans, 1,000 Egyptians, 1,243 Pakistanis, and 1,141 Indonesians, revealed that 65.2 percent of those interviewed—almost two-thirds, hardly a “fringe minority”—desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate.”)¹⁸³ The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result:

65.5 percent of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict application of Sharia law in every Islamic country.”¹⁸⁴

Publication June 7, 2011, of the landmark “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” study provides irrefragable evidence that 81 percent of this nationally representative sample of US mosques—consistent with mainstream Islamic doctrine, practice, and sentiment since the founding of the Muslim creed—are inculcating jihadism with the goal of implementing sharia here in America.¹⁸⁵ These mosque data represent another manifestation of institutional American Islam's jihadism expressed clandestinely twenty years ago in a Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991, written by an acolyte of Brotherhood “Spiritual Leader” Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.¹⁸⁶

Whittaker Chambers offered these insights from Witness that explain how American Muslims could rationalize such seditious behaviors—consistent with Islamic doctrine—and why this phenomenon remains largely incomprehensible to non-Muslim Americans, despite its existential threat to them.

What went on in the minds of those Americans...that made it possible to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as problem of conscience, but a problem of operations..

The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it. It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.¹⁸⁷

Chambers’s pellucid formulation of the Communist threat—whether covert or overt—was rooted in his thorough doctrinal and experiential understanding of Communism. Elsewhere in Witness he states,

No one knows so well as the ex-Communist the character of the conflict, and of the enemy.. For no other has seen so deeply into the total nature of the evil with which Communism threatens mankind.¹⁸⁸

But for all his ambivalence—at times, verging on despair—about the trajectory of Western civilization, Chambers was motivated by a burning desire to preserve what he loved about the West, and its institutions. Chambers’s ongoing, deep affection for the civilization of the West was perhaps most evident in his celebratory, luminous seven-part essay series, “The History of Western Culture,” published in Life magazine between April 1947 and June 1948.— His opening essay on the Middle Ages, while acknowledging that “life for the mass of medieval men was hard and often brutal,”¹⁹⁰ also recounts how medieval man

was the creator of arts and master of a craftsmanship that has never since been equaled.

In the last centuries of the Middle Ages medieval mind burst into creativity in its three ultimate glories: the Gothic cathedrals, the philosophy of Aquinas, the poetry of Dante.¹⁹¹

Not unexpectedly, Chambers sees medieval man's “supreme craving” as one for light, ultimately directed, in hope, toward God.

Light had been the supreme craving of medieval man— light after historical darkness, light in ignorance, light in human despair, light as God. It was given to Dante to see this light in Heaven: “O supreme Light, Who liftest Thyself so high above mortal thought, lend me again a little of that which Thou didst seem; and give my tongue such power that it may leave even a single spark of Thy glory to all men to come.” Medieval man could do no more. And as he looked back, in the evening of the Middle Ages, at the darkness from which he had come and the heights which he had achieved, he could say with Dante, climbing out of the pit of hell: “And thus we emerged again to see the stars.”¹⁹²

Ever skeptical of rationalist excesses, Chambers's essay “The Age of Enlightenment,” opens with a humorous anecdote that parodies the “supremacy” of reason.

Mademoiselle de Coigny kept a corpse in her couch. The Age of Reason was dawning in France—it was the 18th Century—and there were otherwise just not enough minutes in those days of wonderful Enlightenment for mademoiselle to pursue, like other dedicated bluestockings, the fascinating study of anatomy. But with corpse handy and her scalpel as keen as M.

Yet Chambers also pays unequivocal tribute to the living legacy of the Enlightenment’s vision—Western freedoms, including those embodied in America’s Bill of Rights.

The vision of the Enlightenment was freedom—freedom from superstition, freedom from intolerance, freedom to know (for knowledge was held to be the ultimate power), freedom from the arbitrary authority of church or state, freedom to trade or work without vestigial feudal restrictions. This vision was embodied in the American Bill of Rights (for 18th century America was also part of the Enlightenment).¹⁹⁴

Mirroring the ex-Communist apostate, Chambers vis- à-vis Communism, Ibn Warraq, the contemporary Muslim apostate, combines a highly informed, profound appreciation for his adopted Western civilization, with a deep understanding of the doctrinal and historical threat Islam poses to the West.

Warraq's books and essays have critically examined Islam's origins, tenets, and history.¹⁹⁵ His scholarly 2003 analysis of apostasy in Islam—illustrated by extensive, poignant testimonies from modern Muslim apostates—remains a landmark work documenting this unresolved global human rights tragedy.¹⁹⁶ More recently. Warraq produced an expansive, breathtaking overview of the West's contributions to art, literature, and philosophy, which was combined with a sound debunking of post-modern, anti-Western charlatanism, epitomized by the sorry “oeuvre” of Edward Said.¹⁹⁷ During a debate with the duplicitous Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Tariq Ramadan, Warraq offered this passionate defense of the West:

In the West we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live the lives of our choosing.

While Chambers’s defense of the West hinged on deep religious faith, he respected, within severe limits, the Enlightenment legacy of reason, particularly its role in shaping American freedom.

Judeo-Christianity introduced the ethical concepts of love, compassion, and forgiveness, expressing a new sensibility, a new responsiveness to human suffering, and a refusal to accept the normalcy of evil. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount [Matt.5-7] exhorts each person to take responsibility and assume all consequences for human suffering, even though he is not the original cause. Christian love demands each individual to go the extra mile for the neighbor, a timely reminder that we are responsible for bearing the cares of the world, that we have a debt to acquit, and must act accordingly to fight evil on behalf of all humans for as long as suffering exists. Our humanity lies in our responsibility for others.¹⁹⁹

Whittaker Chambers’s ex-Communist colleague Arthur Koestler famously told Richard Crossman, editor of The God That Failed,— an anthology of essays written by apostates from Communism,

You hate our Cassandra cries, and resent us as allies— but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it is all about.²⁰¹ Crossman added this germane observation to the anthology’s introduction, after studying the diverse experiences of the ex-Communist contributors:

Silone [Ignacio Silone, author and former head the Italian Communist Party underground] was joking when he said to Togliatti [a close friend of Silone, and former secretary of the Italian Communist Party] that the final battle would be between the Communists and ex-Communists.. But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy and Communists as political opponents can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.²⁰²

Ibn Warraq synthesized and updated these observations to highlight their urgent relevance to Islam’s resurgent modern jihad against the West. Barring the very dubious prospect that “a reformed, tolerant, liberal kind of Islam” emerges imminently, he warned

[P]erhaps the final battle will be between Islam and Western democracy. And these former Muslims, to echo Koestler’s words, on the side of Western democracy are the only ones who know what it’s all about, and we would do well to listen to their Cassandra cries.²⁰³

We ignore Warraq’s plea—repeated by legions of Muslim apostates—at our existential peril.