In the United States today only two percent of
colleges offer Western Civilization as a course requirement. I teach Western Civ
in two parts, but they are not required, and I had to change the title to
“Sociology of Western Civilization” for approval. Since I decided to teach
this subject ten years ago, I have detected in new texts, and in newer editions
of older texts, a growing emphasis on Islam in their narration of the cultural
history of the West.
A well-established older text is The
Western Heritage, by Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank Turner. This is
a relatively conservative text by the standards of today. I have the tenth edition at hand, published in 2010 (a
new 11th edition has just come out). I can’t say when this text began to
include sections on “the Western debt to Islam,” cute captions on topics such
as “European Embrace of a Black Saint” or an alleged “Multicultural Book Cover”
from Carolingian times. But it is clear that the 2010 edition, in comparison to
the first editions, with the first going back to 1979, has felt the impact of
political correctness. The Wikipedia entry on the first edition(s) of
this text observes:
Considered conservative and old-fashioned when
it was published, reviewers chided it for ignoring the Byzantines and Ottomans
as well as giving short shrift to Russia and Poland. Others indicated lack of
attention to the role of the Islamic states and ignorance of Islamic sources.
But now in stark contrast it is
clearly stated in the Preface that a new feature of the 10th edition is a
greater emphasis on the West’s connections to the rest of the world, with a
series of comparative essays added at various points in the text under the
general heading of “The West & the World.” There is nothing wrong with
this per se. Students should learn about the West’s connections
with the world. But something else is going on here. Without getting into
details, older editions did not neglect these connections; the difference now
is that academics who still teach the West — as this course has been replaced
by more loving histories for Us All — feel that they can only justify the
teaching of the West as long as they frame its history as an inclusive affair
in which all the peoples of the world participated.
Most of the Preface reads like an effort to
placate those who think that the West should no longer be taught. They are not
calling for an end to the teaching of Western civilization; they are right wing
liberals who believe that the West represents the first magnificent example of
a civilization that speaks for humanity. The Preface notes:
Students reading this book come from a variety
of cultures and experiences. They live in a world of highly interconnected
economies and instant communication between cultures. In this emerging
multicultural society it seems both appropriate and necessary to recognize how
Western civilization has throughout its history interacted with other cultures,
both influencing and being influenced by them. For this reason,
we have introduced in this edition a new chapter on the nineteenth-century
European age of imperialism. Further examples of Western interaction with other
parts of the world, such as with Islam, appear throughout the text. (xxii)
Nevertheless, Western Heritage is
still a very good text. It is the textbooks being published in current times
that show the full impact of multicultural correctness. A recent text is
Clifford Backman’s The Cultures of the West: A History, first
published in 2013. This two-volume text calls for the inclusion of the Islamic
world in the West:
This book overtly . . . insists on including
the region of the Middle East in the general narrative, as a permanent
constitutive element of the Greater West. For all its current appeal, Islam is
essentially a Western religion, after all. . . . To treat the Muslim world
as an occasional sideshow on the long march to western European and
American world leadership is to falsify the record and to get the history
wrong (xxii).
Check its front cover here. What justifications Backman offers
for the “Greater West”? To students already accustomed to diversity and wobbly
images about connectedness, he says that the “European world
and the Middle Eastern world have been in continuous relationship for
millennia.” World historians, of course, follow this idea to its logical end:
Europe is a continent connected to Asia, and the history of the Middle East and
Asia constitute an amalgam of many cultures and civilizations, all of which
have been in continuous relation with each other and with Africa, and with the
Americas after 1500; therefore, a proper understanding of the history of the
West requires a history of the whole world.
But Backman is a modest man seeking fairness in
a world of extremes, he believes that it is possible to teach a course in
Western Civ as long as this civilization is conceived as “the Greater West,”
which, I might add, includes not just the Near East but Muslim India and Muslim
Africa. He thinks this “Greater West” is justified on the grounds that
nearly every one of the fundamental turning
points in European history . . . have been experienced jointly by the
European and Middle Eastern societies. (xxii)
This is a falsification of the historical
record. Nowhere in Backman’s textbook do we find a substantive argument
supporting this claim. For one, there is no way round the fact that the
classical Greek invention of deductive reasoning, disciplined infantry
warfare, invention of
prose writing,
analytic historical writing, discovery of
the mind, the
literary forms of tragedy and comedy, and citizenship politics were achieved
when Islam was not in existence, and so was the Hellenistic
revolution in scientific knowledge, the Roman invention of the legal persona, continuation of republican
institutions, and numerous novelties in warfare and engineering. The
Muslims played a role in retaining, commenting, and advancing some of
the works of the classical Greeks from about the 8th century until 1200, but
thereafter every single turning point in European history was accomplished by
Europeans.
Proponents of connectness never care to pose
why all the turning points in the making of modernity happened inside Europe;
if Europe was connected to the Muslim world, and the Muslim world was connected
to Europe, why can’t they point to a single turning point inside the Muslim
world? Even the Twelfth
Century Renaissance
was a uniquely European phenomenon, and so was, in fact, the Papal Revolution of the eleventh century, and
numerous technological
inventions and innovations.
Volume 2, which is three times the length of
Volume 1, commences with the “Renaissances and Reformations,” pluralizing these
two terms so as to give the impression that there were renaissances and
reformations in the Middle East and North Africa. But since Backman cannot
marshal a single argument demonstrating any degree of Muslim responsibility for
these turning points, he is compelled to create separate sections for the
Muslim world with bits of information about trade connections and European
impacts on this world, as well as events in this world, none of which can be
framed, however, in terms of anything that could reasonably be called a
renaissance or a reformation.
The net result of making space in the text for
events outside Europe is the diminution and suppression of key formative
events, intellectual figures, and even whole epochs in the making of the actual West.
He leaves out all the great artists of Renaissance Italy: Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Botticelli, to name a few. There is nothing
about how Italian merchants created modern
double-entry accounting.
In separate sections, he tries to create the
impression that Muslims were at the forefront of modernity; for
example, in the championing of the rights of women (807). We are supposed to
have a picture of Muslim co-participation in the Industrial Revolution simply
on the strength of the eventual adoption by a Muslim country of techniques
invented in Europe. Forget that not a single technology of this revolution is
shown to have been invented in the Muslim world.
Students are actually made to think that if
there was any opposition to modernity it came from the nasty Catholics. In a
section, “The War on Modernism,” Backman writes:
To many in the broader Western society, the
[Catholic] church’s war on modernism seemed a painful embarrassment, not merely
a flat-out inability to understand modern scientific and textual thinking but a
petulant refusal by pious ideologues to think or to allow others to do so.
(773)
This description actually applies to Backman.
It is well known in the narrow circles of medieval scholarship that the
Catholic Church played a crucial role in the development of Western modernity
starting in the Middle Ages, as Thomas Woods explains in How the
Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Rodney Stark in Victory of
Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, and Edward Grant in The
Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. In the words of J. L. Heilbron of
the University of California, Berkeley:
[The] Roman Catholic Church gave more financial
aid and social support to the study of astronomy over six centuries, from the
recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the
Enlightenment, than any other, and probably, all other
institutions.
Yet, Backman, an expert in medieval European
history, though the “social history” type, ignores this literature. He
acknowledges that “few of the advances and discoveries of the 19th century made
much of an impact in the Islamic world,” but then asks his students to show
sympathy for Muslims and disapproval of Europeans:
[Muslim] opposition was not merely a knee-jerk
rejection of innovative thinking. Rather it was a rejection of European
political imperialism. (779)
In the introduction Backman portrays himself as
an edgy professor willing to rock the boat, a man with a peculiar talent for
“eccentric” ideas, a dissident in a world of conformity; in short, the one and
only proponent of the “Greater West.” The truth is that this idea has been
in the air for some time, proposed by Ian Morris in Why the West Rules — For Now, by many advocates in the West (and
the Islamic world) of an “Islamo-Christian
Civilization.”
As I explained at length in a two part paper, the idea that Europe’s history has
to be seen in connection to the rest of the world cannot be divorced from the
political promotion of the colonization of Europe by non-Europeans through mass
immigration and indoctrination. This political agenda is being pursued by all
the established parties and institutions. Backman is another pawn pushing in
the same direction. Deep down he knows it is about politics, and says as much
in the concluding pages of his text dealing with Europe after 2001. “To center
Western identity on Christianity is just bad politics.” Why? Because “the
Western world is increasingly Muslim” (1154).
Good politics equals the rewriting of the
history of the West so as to justify the current reality of Muslim mass
immigration. It does not matter that the historical evidence invalidates the
concept of a “Greater West”; students must be made to believe in this concept;
they must accept the current Third World colonization of their homelands. “We
have often forgotten that Islam has been a Western religion from the start”
(1156). From the start? There was no Islam in the Middle East through the
entire epoch of classical Greece, Hellenistic times, the long reign of Rome,
and the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Historical veracity is not the
issue. The goal is to create students who will view an increasingly Muslim
Europe as a natural phenomenon consistent with the past.
Will these students, then, see the Rotherham
rapes as a
“Western” problem committed by ethnic groups that were British “from the
start”?
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