Islam: The Religion of Sauron

From Jihad Watch:

In my last column I suggested that even as we groan and strain in the fight against an aggressive, intolerant religious ideology, we must not forget the virtues that distinguish us from our enemies: grounded openness, principled tolerance, the flexibility and fair-mindedness that helped advance science, art, and even religion in the West. It's important to remember these from time to time, to hector ourselves on the subject, to avoid becoming what we hate. As a wise old friend of mine summed it up, after reading that column: We must fight the temptation to try to use The Ring against Sauron.

In part because Allah as Islam conceives him indeed seems more like Sauron--obsessed with order and power, devoid of love--than the God of Abraham, Tolkien seems exactly the right author in this context; I am happy to see that his trilogy is increasingly being treated as the epochal work of literature that it is. Indeed, I think his works will be read and treasured when most other 20th century authors in English have dwindled to the status of mere curiosities. (James Joyce, once de rigeur for educated readers, is now mostly ignored outside of graduate schools. In 200 years will anyone be reading him at all?)

As Tom Shippey points out in the best Tolkien study I've read (unlike most critics, Shippey knows the Nordic tongues and myths that inspired the author), Tolkien didn't intend his works as "fantasy" entertainments or even modern novels. An Oxford scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien was troubled by England's lack of a vital national myth. The Arthurian romance, he groused, was a Celtic story overlaid by French inventions. The Anglo-Saxon ethos, which Tolkien held (with Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, among many others) was the source of Western liberty, was nowhere adequately expressed.

So Tolkien decided to express it, and craft what he hoped would form the new English national mythos. He combined the findings of his scholarship with the moral and psychological insights that began when he was fighting in the trenches of World War I (where three of his closest friends died alongside him). It seems to me that Tolkien succeeded, in works that are nevertheless profoundly modern, amounting (as Shippey observes) to extended reflections on the meaning of human mortality, and the moral limits of technology and power.

The Ring we must reject is ideology, the "secondary reality" (cf. Eric Voegelin) created by pseudo-philosophy and ersatz religion, that rests on unquestioned premises. Ideology is not political philosophy that reflects on how man should be governed; instead it is a technology of power, of power over the minds of men. And this is precisely what we object to in the religion concocted by Muhammad. Unlike every other historic faith before it, Islam seems to have been created with political purposes in mind, designed to appeal to bellicose and directionless young men and give them a powerful motive to obey orders, kill, and die. 

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