Lewis Namier, the great British historian, once called 1848, the
year of unsuccessful revolutions in continental Europe, “the
turning point where history didn’t turn.”
It’s a pithy apothegm that reveals something often overlooked in
history — how different things might have been if small things
hadn’t happened.
I’d like to nominate a non-turning point from American history
— February 25, 1964, 43 years ago this week, when Cassius Clay, a
young Olympic champion from Louisville, Kentucky, won the
heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston, a surly, seemingly indomitable
ex-convict who had pulverized the previous champion, Floyd
Patterson, much to the chagrin of the boxing world.
Upon winning the title, Clay promptly announced that he had
undergone a religious conversion. Abandoning his Southern Baptist
roots, Clay said he had become a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, the
spiritual leader of America’s Black Muslims. Symbolically, he was
changing his name to Muhammad Ali. As a newly converted Muslim, he
urged other African Americans to renounce the “slave religion” and
adopt the true religion of the black man.
It was a pivotal moment. The Black Awakening was in its earliest
stages. Mississippi’s “Freedom Summer” would begin only a few
months later. The Civil Rights Bill was still making its way
through Congress. All the major urban riots lay ahead. On the other
hand, the Black Muslims, formed in the 1930s, had thrived in the
prisons, steadily gaining membership until early 1960s when it
snared its most visible convert, Malcolm X. Clay’s conversion
offered a completely new direction for the impending
revolution.
Yet it didn’t happen. And, black and white together, aren’t we
glad?
Imagine what this country would be like now if African Americans
constituted an Islamic fifth column in alliance with Muslims
throughout the world. It is no exaggeration to say that America
would probably be torn apart. Why didn’t it happen? There is only
one answer — Christianity.
The appeal of the “slave religion” proved too strong for the
vast majority of black Americans. Martin Luther King — an ordained
minister — obviously played the key role. Through slavery,
Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Christianity had been a centerpiece of
African-American life and remains so today. Politicians seeking
their way into the black community always start with the churches.
This allegiance prevented African Americans from becoming
completely alienated from Western civilization.
A religion is a template for a personality. Parts of every
individual are formed by his own experience but parts are provided
by the culture, which generally means religion.
We are just beginning to recognize this in Iraq. Four years ago
we went in bearing the flag of democracy and offering Iraqis the
opportunity to participate in a contemporary society. Now we find
they aren’t much interested. They are more concerned with religion.
In his excellent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City,
Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports how officials of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, from Jerry Bremer on down, repeatedly
underestimated the hold that the mullahs have over the population.
Ann Coulter has been pilloried for arguing we should deal with
Islamic terrorism by “killing all their leaders and converting the
people to Christianity.” Her remarks are obviously inflammatory,
but in truth she cuts a lot closer to the mark than President
George Bush’s vain hopes of planting democracy in the Middle
East.
Religion is particularly important in socializing young males.
As anthropologists continually intone, each new generation is
essentially a horde of untamed savages whose instincts must be bent
to norms by the culture. The family is the proving ground on which
this initiation takes place. Young men are always full of fire and
aggression and want to go out and conquer the world — impregnating
every desirable girl they meet in the process. Only through
cultural norms are these biological drives steered in socially
useful directions.
In Western Christianity, the ideal is the intact family, which
provides insulation from the outside world along with clear goals
for assuming adult roles when young people reach maturity. Monogamy
gives each male a reasonable chance of achieving this goal.
Islam sanctions polygamy, however, and that reduces opportunity
for individual males. With polygamy, there are not enough women to
go around. Females become a scarce commodity and must be hoarded by
their families in anticipation of a “bride price” — the hallmark
of polygamous societies. Muslim women are veiled and kept out of
public life so their personal desires do not conflict with the
family’s plans of offering its daughters to the best match.
When low-status men become surplus, their instincts toward
conquest take over and a subculture of violence emerges. Family
formation among African-Americans broke down in the 1970s and 1980s
under the incentives of the welfare system. The result was a social
catastrophe — a subculture of street violence that is still with
us today.
Muslim countries — long accustomed to this dilemma — strive to
turn these aggressive instincts outward, with “jihad” the social
ideal. It doesn’t always work. The history of Islam is one long
depressing chronicle of high-status men monopolizing women in
“harems” while excluded males go off in the desert and decide that
what is being practiced by the elite is “not the true Islam.” They
crash back upon the centers of power, overthrowing the established
order and setting up their own polygamous regimes. Very few caliphs
ever died peacefully.
What American faces across the world today, then, is a vast
horde of unattached, unsatiated young men. In Iraq they are the
“bad guys,” loosely defined as all males between ages 16 and 24.
Having failed to implant democracy, the job of the U.S. Military
has become to keep this population in check. Their job is hardly
different from that of the police in American cities, who are
constantly facing hordes of “crime-prone” young men. It is an
endless task.
But there are things for which we can be thankful. In Iraq,
Muslim culture — however flawed — does provide a stable family
background that prevents violence from becoming completely random
and steers it into specific channels — i.e., killing rival
religionists. And in America, however unhinged the underclass
culture may have become, it has never developed an
ideology or religion that would universalize its
grievances against Western society.
As we go about our lonely task trying to keep peace and order in
the world, we can at least be glad of this much. In the 1960s,
African Americans resisted the call to join a religion that would
have eventually put them in league with our enemies.
Things could have been a whole lot worse.
