Many analysts have worked on the problem of Islam's political aspects, but few have tackled Islam philosophically as a whole. Rebecca Bynum does that. She discusses Islam and its status in the modern world with a depth and precision missing in many modern accounts and sadly concludes that the great hope of secularizing the Muslim world is a pipe dream. It is much more likely, according to Bynum, that the secular world will be Islamized. Overall, however, her analysis is hopeful and provides an important ideological tool for dealing with Islam which is to reconsider its classification. Bynum maintains Islam s current status as a religion, along with all the other religions of the world, is in error. She refers to Islam as the duck-billed platypus of belief systems and proposes it should be classified accordingly; as the hybrid religio-socio-political belief system it is. She also reminds the Western world about what religion itself actually is, not the caricature modern analysts often mean when they refer to "religious fundamentalisms." Bynum has given policy-makers a powerful tool for dealing with Islam. Let us hope they understand, and grasp, and choose to make use of it.

Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion

History

Rebecca Bynum

World

New English Review Press

The purpose of this book is threefold:  1. To further document cases in both the United States and abroad that verify Jonah Goldberg’s thesis that a considerable segment of the American public is misled by the use of the terms “RIGHT vs. LEFT,” which are  cliché ridden, and often erroneous in their presentation of the most essential relevant facts and the conclusions drawn.  2. To demonstrate that it is primarily the Political Left that has a vested interest in the continued use of this terminology due to the considerable inroads made by the liberal media on public opinion. Many political pundits have drawn on the prestige of major writers and Hollywood celebrities whose work was shaped by a critical view of American culture as the epitome of alienation, hypocrisy and crass materialism in modern society. Their assumptions are that other cultures and societies are more authentic, “holistic,” integral and devoted to a sense of solidarity and community. These views have been reinforced in popular culture, especially in film and popular song as part of the counter-culture that arose in the 1960s.   3. To show that antisemitism was not inherently a part of many nationalist “right-wing” movements and that it is generated today overwhelmingly from the Far Left under the encouragement of the wealth and power of militant Islam.

The Left is Seldom Right

Politics & Social Sciences

Norman Berdichevsky

Politics & Government

Theodore Dalrymple's work focuses on the moral decay of modern culture and the pernicious effect of political correctness on society. Anything Goes is a collection of some of his finest work written between 2005 and 2009 for New English Review. A note on the cover from New English Review Press: This jazz age photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston reflects the classical conviction that the human form expresses a spiritual level of beauty, the artwork of God, if you will. It is also a statement about the essential humanism of Dr. Dalrymple's work. One cannot look at that figure and see an animal or a machine. Rather one sees something truly beautiful and truly human.

Anything Goes

Literature & Fiction

Theodore Dalrymple

Contemporary

During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and somewhat primitive medieval culture. Pirenne’s findings, published posthumously in his Mohammed et Charlemagne (1937), were even then highly controversial, for by the late nineteenth century many historians were moving towards a quite different conclusion: namely that the Arabs were actually a civilizing force who rekindled the light of classical learning in Europe after it had been extinguished by the Goths, Vandals and Huns in the fifth century. And because Pirenne went so diametrically against the grain of this thinking, the reception of his new thesis tended to be hostile. Paper after paper published during the 1940s and ‘50s strove to refute him. The most definitive rebuttal however appeared in the early 1980s. This was Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, by English archaeologists Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse. These, in common with Pirenne’s earlier critics, argued that classical civilization was already dead in Europe by the time of the Arab conquests, and that the Arabs arrived on the scene as civilizers rather than destroyers. Hodges and Whitehouse claimed that the latest findings of archaeology fully supported this view, and their work was highly influential. So influential indeed that over the next three decades Pirenne and his thesis was progressively sidelined, so that recent years have seen the publication of dozens of titles in the English language alone which fail even to mention his name. In Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited historian Emmet Scott reviews the evidence put forward by Hodges and Whitehouse, as well as the more recent findings of archaeology, and comes to a rather different conclusion. For him, the evidence shows that classical civilization was not dead in Europe at the start of the seventh century, but was actually experiencing something of a revival. Populations and towns were beginning to grow again for the first time since this second century – a development apparently attributable largely to the spread of Christianity. In addition, the real centres of classical civilization, in the Middle East, were experiencing an unprecedented Golden Age at the time, with cities larger and more prosperous than ever before. Excavation has shown that these were destroyed thoroughly and completely by the Arab conquests, with many never again reoccupied. And it was precisely then, says Scott, that Europe’s classical culture also disappeared, with the abandonment of the undefended lowland villas and farms of the Roman period and a retreat to fortified hilltop settlements; the first medieval castles. For Scott, archaeology demonstrated that the Arabs did indeed blockade the Mediterranean through piracy and slave-raiding, precisely as Pirenne had claimed, and he argues that the disappearance of papyrus from Europe was an infallible proof of this. Whatever classical learning survived after this time, says Scott, was due almost entirely to the efforts of Christian monks. The Pirenne thesis has taken on a new significance in the post 9/11 world. Scott’s take on the theory will certainly ignite further and perhaps heated debate.

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy

Emmet Scott

Europe

Jerry Gordon has done an invaluable service in this collection of interviews with some of the brightest minds of our time conducted between 2008 and 2012 for New English Review. These are remarkable people actively striving to defend and to define what is best in Western culture, including politicians such as Geert Wilders and Arieh Eldad, intellectuals such as Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or Richard L. Rubenstein, Sam Solomon, Nina Shea and David Yerushalmi, activists such as David Beamer, Elsabeth Sabaditsch Wolff, Lars Hedegaard, Jonathan Hausman and Charles Jacobs, cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks, and journalists Erick Stakelbeck and Kenneth Timmerman. All of them provide fascinating insights into their efforts to fight the complacency and resignation that has contributed to the current state of Western decline and Islamic resurgence.

The West Speaks

Jerry Gordon

Farewell Fear is a collection of Theodore Dalrymple’s finest essays covering a wide range of topics written for New English Review between 2009 and 2012 plus one or two which have never been published before. His first such collection was the best-selling Anything Goes (2011).

Farewell Fear

Philosophy

The single greatest contribution to Shakespeare scholarship in recent memory. Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays:    Presents the most compelling and original reading of Hamlet since A.C. Bradley;   Dispenses once and for all with the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play;   Explains the actual meaning of the Oedipus myth;    Provides the "smoking gun" which establishes Shakespeare's true identity;   Explodes the fable of Shakespeare's appearance; and  In the process of correcting misreadings of Shakespeare's poetry and drama, Hamlet Made Simple offers vital insights and indispensable guidance on how this challenging writer can be fairly and productively approached today.  Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays is the definitive exposition of Shakespeare in our time. Nothing else compares.

Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays

David P. Gontar

Dramas & Plays

During the latter half of the twentieth century, the late J.B. Kelly was the foremost authority on the Persian Gulf. He wrote the standard work on the subject, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880 (Clarendon Press, Oxford). Now, for the first time, his articles, essays (one previously unpublished) and book reviews for the period 1956-1970 have been collected in this volume, Fighting the Retreat, for the convenience of all readers who are interested in the history of Arabia and the Gulf, and the antecedents of today’s troubles in that strategically critical part of the world. The topics cover: the history of Britain’s position in the Gulf, the Buraimi Oasis Dispute, the Persian claim to Bahrain, the frontiers of Eastern Arabia, Sultanate and Imamate in Oman, the Red Sea and Palestine, the Kurds of Iraq, Kuwait, Aden, Egypt and Arabia, Arab Nationalism, the USA and the Arab World, Saudi Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, the Yemen, Islam and the European Empires, and Britain and Russia in Persia. There is an introduction and a postscript about the author, as well as an index and endorsements from other noted writers on the subject.

Fighting the Retreat from Arabia and the Gulf: The Collected Essays and Reviews of J.B. Kelly, Vol. 1

J.B. Kelly

Ibn Warraq makes an invaluable corrective contribution to our understanding of literature and its impact on popular conceptions of history. Warraq takes for his study the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and makes a facinating comparison between the novels (and Scott's sources) and what is known from the Arab sources and biographers of Saladin and the Crusades. Then he discusses the work of many other scholars of this period so the reader comes away with a well-rounded view, not only of the Crusades, but the scholarship of the period as well. Beyond that, Warraq discusses antisemitism and the Jewish plight during the Medieval era, (as well as their oppressed status under Islamic rule) on through to the early Christian Zionist movement in literature focusing especially on the work of George Eliot and Charlotte Elizabeth. Warraq ends by discussing the primary importance of freedom of expression and how that is threatened in the modern world. He holds up the South Park Affair as a prime example of the West's tendency of to fold before Islam "like some third rate poker player who throws in the cards at the first aggressive bluff when he is in fact holding the winning hand." Ibn Warraq is the rare scholar who still believes in objective truth and that that truth may be found (or at least approximated) by a thorough and dispassionate examination of the evidence. His is the calm voice of reason in a world carried away by hyperbole. Read him and be wiser.

Sir Walter Scott's Crusades and Other Fantasies

Ibn Warraq

History & Criticism

According to Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton University, during “most” of the Middle Ages, “it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization and progress, but the world of Islam in the middle. It was there that old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences created; there that new industries were born and manufacture and commerce expanded to a level previously without precedent.” (Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? (2002), p. 156) Lewis’ comments may be regarded as fairly representative of contemporary academic thought. Indeed, the civilized and progressive world of medieval Islam is often contrasted favorably with that of medieval Christianity, which is almost universally viewed as backward and hidebound by superstition. Yet it is questionable whether in any other field of study an opinion so diametrically opposed to the truth has ever gained such wide currency. At the dawn of the tenth century most of Europe was a rural backwater. All of the lands east of the Elbe (and almost all east of the Rhine) were barbarian-infested wastelands without a trace of literate civilization. Those to the west, in Gaul and Britain, and even in Italy, were not much better. Yet by 1492, when Columbus set out on his great voyage of discovery, Europe stood on the verge of world domination. The continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, was full of towns and cities built partly of stone and brick, with dozens of universities and a thriving economy. The whole of Europe was crisscrossed with roads which conveyed an astonishing array of wealth and produce from one region to another. Printed books were everywhere, and literacy was extremely common, even among the relatively poor. In the Islamic world we see the same process in reverse. The House of Islam began the tenth century as possibly the most splendid civilization on the earth. It possessed great cities like Baghdad, Samarra, Damascus and Alexandria, some of which had about 500,000 souls. Its civilization at the time was suffused with the spirit of Sassanid Persia and Byzantine Syria and Egypt, whose wealth, learning and population it had inherited. Yet five centuries later the whole region was a declining relic, in some places a wasteland. The contrast with Europe could not be greater. In his new book The Impact of Islam, historian Emmet Scott explores the origin of the “progressive Islam” myth, and comes to some startling conclusions: It was Christianity, he finds, not Islam, which civilized barbarian Europe between the tenth and eleventh centuries. What Islam did bequeath to Europe at this time was war, piracy, and a massive revival of the slave trade – just when Christianity had almost succeeded in killing it off. Even worse, by their example, the Muslims seem to have influenced the growth in Europe of several toxic ideas between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, ideas which were to have far-reaching consequences. Amongst these were the concept of “holy war” (utterly alien to Christianity), the use of violence to suppress religious dissent, the judicial use of torture, and the acceptability of violence against the Jews. All of these things were found in Islam before they were found in Christianity. In addition to this, Scott finds that the Turkish conquests in Europe from the fourteenth century onwards severely stunted the development of those regions, and that the example of the Ottoman slave trade, which was massive, in all likelihood inspired the Spaniards and Portuguese to initiate the Atlantic slave trade during the sixteenth century.

The Impact of Islam

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