Overtaking Oxford

From Mark Steyn:

In my book (coming soon to a Canadian courthouse near you!), I cite a famous passage of Gibbon's:

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but, if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was “an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.”

Peter Hitchens in today's Daily Mail:

The deeply English, deeply Christian city of Oxford, one of the homes of free thought, is now being asked to accept the Islamic call to prayer wafting from mosque loudspeakers over its spires and domes.

If that is not a threat to our "way of life", then I don't know what is. Allowing the regular electronic proclamation of Allah's supremacy in a British city is not tolerance, but a surrender of the sky to a wholly different culture. Just you wait and see what opponents of this scheme are accused of.

It may be a "wholly different culture," but unlike the spires of those empty Anglican churches it represents the demographic energy of today's England.

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We're caught in a struggle of civilizations, but where I disagree with many of our leaders is the idea this struggle will be settled on the battlefield.

"Gibbon would have been surprised to learn the lesson that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military weaknesses of the Muslim world."

The West is dying through a Gramscian campaign that erodes its institutions and self-confidence. Even as Westerners express uneasiness over the future, there's nothing around which to rally. God? That's now a private matter, not a tie that binds a people. Country? Patriotism was used to sell an unnecessary war, so now even the patriot pauses at the call to sacrifice.

I'm a firm advocate of liberty, to include freedom not to trust in God or one's own country. But there are consequences to emptying the public square of common values while throwing the doors open to a worldview that acknowledges no peers. Ironically, the Christianized system of thought that eventually spawned tolerant, participatory government is now tolerating the demographic and institutional rise of a worldview hostile to its host. Even worse, we're dismantling key restraints on government because of that worldview's threat! I predict within a generation the British will go from having to hear the daily calls to Muslim prayer to having to answer them on pain of penalty. The real Long War continues.