Dick asked me at the Longhorn Diner, “When did the Muslim Empire begin to decline?
I stated that it began to noticeably decline about 1400 C.E. after the sinful Crusades of the Church were over. From Mohammed in the early 600’s up to that time they mainly knew victory and advance.
During the Crusades the Europeans learned from the Muslims several things that they brought back to Europe. The Muslims had a superior medical and scientific knowledge, a great literary and poetry tradition and the idea of romantic love which the crusaders brought back to Europe. Europe began to awaken intellectually and build nation states and the Islamic world began to decline after the Crusades.
Inherent in the Qur’ an and Islam is the idea that if you follow the prophet Mohammed in serving Allah you will be victorious, you will be number one. The Islamic world was more open so long as it was winning in the competition. But with the decline and retreat began a withdrawal from interfacing with the world because if you were not number one it was hard to hold your head up.
As the Western world modernized the Islamic world stagnated and went backward educationally. This process accelerated beginning about 1800. The expansion of the British Empire among many things fueled feelings of insecurity and inferiority that could not be admitted.
In the twentieth century Western politics and greed for Arab oil thoughtlessly mistreated the Islamic world and faith in many ways. This thoughtlessness in the 1950’s helped create the rage that birthed the modern Islamic Fundamentalist movement . This rage boiled because of the inherent arrogance in the religion that they should be number one. This arrogant rage has led to the shouting, “Death to America and Israel!”
This same religious arrogance is found in the Old Testament in Dueteronomy which says, ” If you keep God’s Commandments you will be the head and not the tail.” Prosperity gospel TV preachers like to quote this often forgetting that it is balanced by other scriptures like Job, some of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes and the prophets which teach that the righteous often suffer unjustly and this cannot always be explained. And then there is Jesus who dies an unjust, horribly cruel death as a very poor man.
But the arrogance of Islamic terrorists is not as threatening to our long term well being as the arrogance of the fear mongers in our pulpits, talk shows and political offices. Recently Dick and Liz Cheney and Newt Gingrich have implied that anyone is stupid that does not recognize American exceptionalism. They mean that we are the best nation that is or ever was. We are number one and the world needs to acknowledge this.
But America will only be great as long as it listens to the criticism of itself with humility and moves to correct its great errors of arrogance. Have we already past the point of no return on doing this?
The above is American civil religion at its worst and it sounds full of rage just like the Islamic Fundamentalists. Our own arrogance is far more frightening to me than that of our enemies. A lot of Americans share in this arrogance and it what will destroy us, not that which is from without. As Walt Kelly’s character Pogo said, “We have found the enemy and he is us.”



