Churchill on Islam

Comments (42)

1. I would guess by “science” he means technology, which made the West superior both militarily and economically.

   A lot of the rest of that quote would be considered shockingly xenophobic were some politician to utter it today.

   1. Were a politician to utter it? I think that this is often expressed (not so clearly or elegantly) by politicians around the world, especially in Europe and the US.

      1. Well, yes — but these days they usually manage to be subtler about it.

2. Churchill was writing about the British campaign to re-conquer the Sudan where he had taken part in the Battle of Omdurman (1898). In this battle a British-led force destroyed a much larger army of what were brave but poorly-armed tribesmen. As the Wikipedia article says:

   It was a demonstration of the superiority of a highly disciplined European-led army equipped with modern rifles and artillery over tribesmen with older weapons and marked the success of British efforts to re-conquer the Sudan.

   It may well have been that experience that prompted Churchill to write as he did.

   Whether or not Christianity can withstand Islam – or vice versa – I would suggest depends not so much on science and technology as on its popular appeal and power to inspire the devotion of its followers. Science and technology, after all, can be acquired and employed by both sides. The only difference might rest in the willingness to embrace science and adopt new technologies.

3. He said some other stuff too:
   “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph.”
   “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”
   “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

   1. Yes, Winnie is hardly an exemplar of enlightened thinking (but then, he was a Tory). I was merely interested in the claim that the only thing that allows Christianity to resist the encroachment of Islam is that it relies on science.

      Given that science is now common property (and even if you read it just as technology, explosives and the internet are being used as effectively by the Islamic world as by the Christian world), it looks like the resistance of some Christians to scientific ways of thinking, to modernism, are self-defeating.

      1. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the only thing that allows people to resist the encroachment of the dark ages represented by religion is science? Xianity has nothing to do with it.

      2. Yes, Churchill was a product of late-Imperial Britain and – at various times – a Tory. He was also a Liberal, (in the British sense) held ministerial posts in Henry Herbert Asquith’s administrations and was heavily involved in their programme of social reform. He loved his country and the Empire it had built up but he was not blind to their faults. As he wrote in a letter in 1909:

         For my own part, I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.

      3. Ian, my quotes came from this article (sorry, forgotten how to embed links):
         http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/books/review/Hari-t.html?pagewanted=all

         which makes the point that far from being a man of his times, “Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum”.

      4. To me, the type of book reviewed in the New York Times is best seen as a reaction to the hagiography that has surrounded Churchill. I call it ‘blackiography’ as it seeks to blacken the subject’s reputation while hagiography tries to whitewash it.

         As for Churchill being “seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum”, I am sure he is by some. But if you want the truly brutal and brutish face of the Empire you should look to someone like Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer who ordered the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, an action for which he was roundly condemned by Churchill in Parliament.

         1. I think the alternative to hagiography (sanctifying biography) has to be demonography.

            Winnie was bigger than life. So were his flaws. At times I love him dearly, and at other times I despise him. Sometimes on the same page. In that respect he’s a lot like another imperialist: Kipling. Dyer is a terrible person. Kitchner another, IMO, but then I’m a colonial.

      5. Ian, I can’t assess these claims myself – I lack the expertise. I do trust Harari’s judgment generally. I just wanted to point out that you misread the claim: the claim is that his contemporaries – not us – saw him at the brutish end.

      6. I think the alternative to hagiography (sanctifying biography) has to be demonography.

         That’s the word! Thanks, I simply could not think of it. Much better than my little neologism.

         Dyer is a terrible person. Kitchner another, IMO, but then I’m a colonial.

         Dyer seems to exemplify the worst of British Army officers from that period. I was slower to see how bad Kitchener was, partly because of his standing during the First World War, but I would agree now. Churchill was also highly critical when it was a risky for a junior officer to write such things about his commander-in-chief.

      7. Ian, I can’t assess these claims myself – I lack the expertise. I do trust Harari’s judgment generally. I just wanted to point out that you misread the claim: the claim is that his contemporaries – not us – saw him at the brutish end.

         I’m sorry, Neil, you’re right, I did misread it.

         My impression is that Churchill was increasingly out of step with the temper of the times in the late twenties and early thirties and that on India in particular he was viewed as something of a political anachronism. I think it is true to say that he was viewed as “brutal and brutish” by those on the far left of the British political spectrum of the period but not that it was a widespread opinion.

4. “The Christians win, cause St. Paul’s got
   The Maxim gun, Mohammed not.”

   Thing is, over the last 100 plus years, every religious and political movement that rejects Enlightenment values has nevertheless wanted to avail itself of the advantages of technology, a phenomenon the historian Jeffery Herf famously defined as Reactionary Modernism. So you find the Nazis driving dozens of world class scientists to Britain and the U.S. while investing hugely in every kind of advanced terror weapon. And then there is the apparent affinity of Muslim Engineers for terrorism, not to mention the tendency of born again Christians, who don’t even accept evolution, to drool over Star Wars and killer drones. So far, attempts to get the technology without the values that traditionally go along with scientific inquiry have not worked out; but history isn’t over and maybe the next time the Muslims will be the ones with the Maxim guns.

5. More notable than the xenophobia, or the identification of science with technology, is Churchill’s identification of Christianity and “the West”. The passage makes much more sense if you read it as “were it not that [Christendom] is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall”

   Whatever it is that we think distinguishes the West from elsewhere these days, Christianity no longer seems to be it. At least, the sort of people who write here. The idea that the West is the same as Christianity is alive and well in some circles.

6. Here is the entire of the text online:
   http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/4/9/4/4943/4943.txt

   The quote you cited is not found in the book.

   1. Is that the 1902 single volume edition? It’s in the 1899 two volume edition. Wikiquotes states that it doesn’t appear in the later edition.

7. Yes, this is the 1902 edition I am citing. I wonder if the quote was removed why it was. I think that it would be important to physically check the 1899 edition instead of relying solely on Wikipedia which can be outrageously inaccurate at times.

   1. Wikipedia is getting better.

      See also this comment.

8. I suspect that Churchill saw the rise of the British Empire as a reflection of the power and culture that GB&I derived from its Christian culture and its pre-eminance in science and technology.

   So saying that Christianity was protected by science isn’t incorrect, Christianity = GB&I values, those values are protected by the advances in science and technology.

   As for mohammedans and science, they don’t seem to have had a happy relationship. Yes, I do know about the flowering of sciences in non-arab muslim lands (turkic and iranian mostly) but this phase was struck down forceably and today science isn’t a strong suit in muslim lands.

   They are happy to use technology, but there still seems to be a distrust of the basic science. Strange for a religion whose founder commanded them to seek knowledge in all lands and to become educated.

9. I find it interesting that you find this a remarkable quote. From whatever I know, at least in the colonial India, such arguments were/are dime a dozen in the hands of Christian missionaries. The notion of “rationality” of Christianity vs other religions I thought was a well-known colonial legacy- apparently not.

   I have slowly started wondering how many religion-friendly scientists are as aware as they should be on how their writings are being used against other religions by Christian missionaries – especially because most of these writings have an unconscious pro-Christian bias due to the fact that most of these scientists come from Christian backgrounds. You must have noticed how almost all attempt at bridge-building exercises/conferences between Science and Religion on the wake of “God Delusion” were dominated by explicitly pro-Christian people on the pro-religious side…

10. If memory serves me correct the Pope made this point in one of his first big speechs. Stressing the importance of the Western empirical project in comparison to the eastern mind.

    Edward Said drew attention to the issue a number of years ago.

    Its somewhat popular.

    It is somewhat unfortunate that people use science to justify their beliefs and politics in a somewhat distorted manner but I am not sure what evidence specificaly points to the fact that this activity is limited to Christian missionaries and scientists with an unconscious pro Christian bias.

11. Edward W. Said, Orientalisim,London 5th ed. 2003 p46-49.

    It occurs in a discussion of Kissinger’s essay “Domestic structure and Foreign Policy”

    I only read the book once a number of years ago and did not enjoy at the time, this was the only point I remember from it.

12. The quote seems to set up a one-on-one opposition or enmity between Christianity and Islam. It’s much more complicated than that of course, and highly doubtful that “Christianity” did then or does now have any monopoly on science, or technology.

    Said’s “Orientalism” remains a seminal though controversial text, so much so that it became a kind of stigma for an academic to be accused of being an “Orientalist”. The area I work in used to be a Faculty of Oriental Studies but somehow turned into a Faculty of Asian Studies not too long after the controversies engendered by Said’s work erupted. Said is seen as an important progenitor of the post-colonial school.

    One of Said’s assertions was that Western scholarship was consciously or unconsciously serving the European imperial project; critics have pointed out that many (though not all) of the early experts on the “Orient” in fact often openly disapproved of colonial expansion, and that some leading scholars of Asia were German – when Germany had no empire to speak of, especially after World War I. Perhaps more cogent were Said’s objections to the exoticisation and “othering” of the “Orient” evident in much of the Western scholarship about Asia and the Middle East, implying a patronising and infantilising attitude to rich and sophisticated cultures.

    By the way, it may have been OK for Churchill to use the term “Mohammedan” , but it is rather un- PC these days. That does not affect the valid point about Islam’s intellectual and even technological superiority to Europe in the Middle Ages, which it somehow gradually lost after about the 16th century.

    1. I don’t mind being un-PC.

       I’m not sure why you write somehow lost about the intellectual and technological superiority (was the even meant to imply some doubt about their technological superiority?).

       They lost it because the caliphate deliberately crushed the non-theology scholars, so they could copy what they already had but could not investigate and improve except privately and very carefully.

       For the same reason you’ll be hard pressed to find a philosophy department in a muslim university today. Lots of the states (different muslim states have different shariah and accepted hadith) have large theology departments but no philosophy independent of the koran.

       The government of Bangladesh, to its great credit, does allow science sans theology and ousted rioters who demanded that all science be subject to fatwah (theological ruling) as to its acceptability prior to being taught in schools and universities.

       1. “They lost it because the caliphate deliberately crushed the non-theology scholars, so they could copy what they already had but could not investigate and improve except privately and very carefully.”

          Could you clarify this a little? I’m not sure which version of caliphate this is, and when it did it.

          The last version of the real thing, exercising power from Baghdad, was terminated by the Mongols in 1258. But if the suppression or non-theology was before the time of Alhazen, a couple of centuries earlier, it was rather an awful failure. Was the suppression, then, in this period?

          That Muslim science amounted to less and less after 1600 or so is not in question. So, is it claimed that Islamic practice of science collapsed some centuries before that? This seems questionable.

    2. Said’s book annoyed me on a number of grounds. I just read a review of Walter Mignolo’s “The Darker side of the Renaissence by Alexandra Walsham.

       I think she pointed out the ironic nature of the more conservative, dogmatic and entrenched and repetative forms of post modernisim rather well.

       “There is something distinctly self- contradictory about spending a third of ones book unmasking history as a tool of cultural imperialism only to use it as a weapon against colonialism’s intellectual legacies in the late twentieth century.”

13. Churchill, I don’t remember when, viewed harshly, Hinduism and Hindus as well. We in India remember Churchill for the famine he enforced during WW2. As also for the gentle rap the great Gandhi delivered in response to Churchill’s huffed up jab about the half-naked fakir going to parley with the Emperor, “he was dressed enough for both of us,”!

    1. Churchill did sent the food supplies of the Empire elsewhere, for what he thought was the greater good of the Empire.

       Was he correct in his actions?
       Feed fighting troops and workers on the war front or divert supplies to feed others. A call I would hate to ever have to make.

       He didn’t forced local profiters and hoarders (Indians in the main) to act as they did.

       Some of us recollect our parents mentioning those Indians who fought for the Japanese both inside and outside India during WWII.
       Just mentioning it because politics makes for seemingly strange/stupid/evil alliances and actions in wars.

14. Some of us recollect our parents mentioning those Indians who fought for the Japanese both inside and outside India during WWII.
    Just mentioning it because politics makes for seemingly strange/stupid/evil alliances and actions in wars.

    My mother was born in Burma and lived in Burma and Northern India the first 32 years of her life. My father was an officer in thr Royal India Army for six years and then in the Indian Civil Service for three years after the war. Amongst other things he interrogated Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, after the war. Aung San, like many Asians, fought with the Japanese during the war because they believed that the Japanese, themselves Asians, would help them to overthrow the European imperialism a perfectly rational behaviour and in no way strange, stupid or evil. Only with time did they become aware of the fact that the Japanese were just as imperialistic as the Europeans.

    My father, by the way, taught at SOAS that is the School of Oriental and African Studies and it’s still called that!

    1. Thony,

       It is strange in hindsight as we now know what we know, just as Churchill’s action about letting Indian’s starve, seems to be evil/strange/stupid to many today. He may have done it because he didn’t like Indians or because he thought his actions where for the greater good; I’ld go with the greater good but I could be wrong.

       So, with hindsight, the Indians and others who fought with the Japanese against the Empire seem to have done something odd because the Japanese fooled them and they didn’t see the Japanese Empire for what it was and what it did to conquered people, so calling it stupid (based on inaccurate and poor research with a bias against the Imperial status quo) isn’t incorrect in hindsight.

       They may have seen it as being for the greater good of their causes, with hindsight it wasn’t.

       The point I’m trying to make is that hindsight isn’t the best tool to try and measure these things.

       Oh, my parents (NCOs) fought in the European theatre (RAF), one of my Uncles (NCO) fought with the 14th Army.

15. Chris, Churchill wasn’t the first British despot to starve India and the other colonies. There were others before him.
    Madhushree Mukerjee’s “Churchill’s Secret War” is however about Churchill’s orchestrated famine, which according to a reviewer of the book, he (gleefully?) inflicted upon “a land whose “beastly” people had turned “seditious”.” We are talking of about 3-5 million deaths in Bengal alone. It also helped that the local profiteers and hoarders (Indians in the main) were steadfast loyalists of the Crown.
    I am surprised at the comparisons drawn between Kipling and Churchill. Kipling had some humanitarian concern though he would be an annoyingly paternalistic bore today. But he had some love for his land, and felt it in his bones – Kim for instance is the tale of a modern day Krishna. And his Gunga Din, with its very real sketch of the battlefield and the sarcastic sting before the tail,

    At the place where ‘e is gone —
    Where it’s always double drill and no canteen;
    ‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
    Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
    An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

    We like to think Kipling had other reasons to choose cremation.

    1. jefferey,

       I didn’t make a comparison with Kipling, the Great White Ape did.

       I totally agree with you about Kipling, yes there was parternalism but also an obvious love of and for India and Indians as well as the Empire.
       He also wrote powerfully against the class bias as well as racism and stupidity that he saw in the later period of the Empire that he lived in.
       The Empire was a strange thing in many ways.

       On Ms. Mukerjee’s book you mention, is the reviewer quoting Chuchill? I suspect he isn’t. Though he may be taking it out of context as I’m sure Churchill didn’t have fond thoughts for those Indians undermining the war effort.
       This site gives a different opinion when reviewing the book, as well as giving a detailed account about what was happening at the time, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/966-without-churchill-indias-famine-would-have-been-worse
       and the exchange between Amery and Churchill, as well as the arguments in the cabinet, doesn’t show Churchill in a good light but deliberate starvation enforced by Churchill is far from the truth.

       1. And note that I only compared the two in that I love and despise them at different times. But I do agree Kipling is the more consistently agreeable person.

16. Churchill was once described as the last of the Victorians, and I think that sums him up rather well. The Victorians were a brilliant people, but they still had a considerable amount of the bigotry of their forbears, and often they confused their bigotry with their science.

    Churchill said and did a good many things that make it hard to defend him, and even at various points in his long and storied career his closest allies had a hard time defending him. He was a maverick in every sense of the word; for better and often for worse.

    Still, he can be forgiven a considerable amount for his tireless struggle during the mid 1930s and through to 1945 against Hitler. I think it’s a bridge too far to say that he saved Western civilization, but certainly he has to be given credit for keeping Britain psychologically afloat until the Russians and American would or could join the battle, and for the near-constant efforts to keep that coalition alive.

    I’ve read his History of WWII, and while I’m sure there’s some self-aggrandizing going on (he’s been criticized for his insinuations that he was a mover and shaker in bringing the Baldwin government down, for instance), the one thing I walked away from the monumental experience was just how busy he was. The only other historical figure I can think of who had that much energy, that much intellectual prowess, was Napoleon.

17. @Porlock Junior 12th Oct

    This site http://www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%208.htm gives more detail than I can, and doesn’t ascribe the failure to religion or a religious suppression rather to decilining wealth for various reasons. Though I do disagree about the supposed lack of naval power the muslim nations had in the Indian ocean, Oman wasn’t a minor naval power.

    It is interesting to note that the centres of science moved around the muslim empire depending on the prevailing local ruler.
    Science Thrives Only in Affluent Societies: Ibn Khaldun

    This site gives a slightly different reasoning and looks more at the religious effects of science and learning http://www.chowk.com/articles/9555 the fact that science wasn’t taught in madrassas is also a factor.

    As does this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/islam-science-muslims-religion

    This one focuses more clearly on the religious reasons, the religion aided both its rise and fall http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/Chaney/files/MuslimScience.pdf

    As for the superiority of technology in muslim controlled lands until the 1600, this may be a case of catch up once the west got going. I don’t know of much new science from muslim controlled areas after the 1400s, a lot of refinement and improvement to existing technology did occur in various places.

18. Chris,

    Thanks for the review of Mukherjee’s book. Even if it’s been written by a member of the American Enterprise Institute, it does provide a counterpoint of sorts. However the author of that review does not seem to have read up very much on the Great Bengal (Indian) Famine. Amartya Sen (among several others) has studied the period at length and has authored some of the most widely read analyses. Sen isn’t the first to point it out, but has made a better case than others that the famine was not caused by a failure of the harvest. It was the administrative policies, in pursuance of a general mobilisation, a failure to ensure market access for the poor, and a disruption of the traditional distribution networks (the British administration confiscated boats and commandeered elephants) that led to a scarcity and then famine. That is why Sen insists that famines don’t occur in democracies or at least open political cultures. I don’t buy into it entirely, because although India may not have suffered famines since independence, there are still millions in many parts of the country that are under(mal)nourished.

    I am not sure how to take the reviewer seriously for lines like these
    Many local officials were either absent (Bengal’s governor fell ill and died), distracted by the eruption of Bose’s Quit India movement; or simply too slow and corrupt to react. The governor died, so officials were absent? And the administration was slow and corrupt? I guess it wasn’t the colonial administration the reviewer is talking about! Bose left India in late 1941, over a year before the Congress launched the Quit India movement.

    Here’s another review of Mukerjee, with excerpts from an interview. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266849interview

    The WW2 is among the great defining events of British, European, Russian and Japanese history. But for other nations there are other events (which even if they ran concurrently) that are more significant. I do not believe that for the US the WW2 is as important as the culmination of FDR’s New Deal that marked the beginning of its passage from a pre-modern oligarchy to a modern welfare state. For India and China their respective struggles for independence and for the former the horrific famine and partition are of greater significance. For Mexico and the rest of Latin America, and that continent of a billion we often dismiss as if it is one country – Africa, what did the WW2 mean for them? For Australia, New Zealand and Canada that paid a great price in blood, although their borders were not at war (yes, I know Japan was never too far, but seriously?) pursuing a matter of principle, what was it like back home?

    1. I don’t agree with you about the New Deal being more important to the US than WWII. In fact, I’m not sure, legitimately, that we should separate the two for the purposes of assessing the effect on US culture, politics and economics during the period from the mid-1930s until 1945.

       First of all, it all happened (save for the dying days of WWII) under the same Administration. I would argue that the New Deal probably kept American industry afloat, allowing it in 1940 to rapidly move into Lend-Lease and US military production. The New Deal gave the government the experience necessary for basically turning the United States into the greatest war production factory in the history of our species.

       The New Deal certainly created a modern Federal government, though in all honesty it had been moving that way ever since the Civil War, the Depression merely giving impetus for more obvious changes. But the real shot across the bow had been the anti-trust legislation three decades before, which saw a blow to the oligarchic capitalism that had dominated the latter half of the 19th century.

       WWII deeply altered the economic and social landscape of the United States. While women had stepped out into the work force during the Depression, the war effort, particularly as the United States Army was rapidly enlarged leading up to Pearl Harbor, and particularly afterwards, was the first real taste of the world outside the kitchen for many women, even if they had had the vote for decades. It also altered the US’s perception of itself, from a state that tended between bouts of imperialist zeal (ie. the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War) to go into navel-gazing isolationism. For better or for worse, WWII permanently altered the US’s place in the world, and how it saw its role in this new world order.

    2. jeffrey,

       ensure market access for the poor which government has ever done this? I know a lot of politicians talk about it but has any government actually done it?

       As you write, a lot of the aggravating causes where due to mobilisation, the Empire was a war a war to the death on multiple fronts. Lots of bad things happen in war and it returns to my comment about the greater good.
       Which would have been for the greater good:
       1) losing India to the Japanese (not seen as unlikely at the time) or losing people to a famine?
       2) feeding the fighting forces in Europe and weakening our chances against Germany or losing people to a famine?

       For the Empire, all of it, WWII was a defining period. After it came the dissilution of the Empire.
       The Empire, for good or ill, died in that war.

       Why did Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Nigerians, South Africans, Kenyans, Guyanans, West Indians, Pacific Islanders etc etc fight and die for freedom and liberty against the evils of Nazis and the cruel rule of the Japanese? What a strange question.
       The Empire was one, the Japanese and Germans had attacked the Empire so the Empire fought back.
       Most fought for honour, many out of loyalty to the Empire and its manifest benefits. They fought because they valued freedom.
       To comment on your aside, Japan was a threat to Australia and New Zealand. Do you believe that they would have stopped unless forced to stop by force.
       Oh yes, China was also fought against the Japanese and the war help to define China’s future as well. It marked the philippines with terrible scars and memories after the Japanes raped and murdered their way through that country.

       As for Africa, did you forget about the minor skirmishes across Libya and the rest of the Magreb http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/africa.htm or aren’t Nth Africans african. Perhaps Ethiopia and Somaliland are forgotten. Perhaps East Africa doesn’t count http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignsNearEast.htm
       The battles of Gabon and Dakar are forgotten http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/790481
       The effect of the war on South Africa http://countrystudies.us/south-africa/23.htm

       Mexico fought on the side of the Allies http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/thehistoryofmexico/a/09mexicoww2.htm

       The first major naval engagement occurred in Sth America http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/battle_of_the_river_plate.htm

       It isn’t called a world war because of eurocentric biases, just as WWI was world wide as well. Though Sth America did avoid it in the main.

    3. WW II was the point where America became a world power and first defined itself as the world policeman. Even after WW I America broke up its amy and retired behind its oceans, after WW II it set up a standing army and established itself at the centre of the world stage. WW II is the absolute defining moment in modern American history.

19. Churhill’s concern is with civic virtue I suspect. The last line seems to indicate that he is reflecting on the fall of the Antient Republicks.

    This comes from a post 1938 speech on Civilization.

    “But it is vain to imagine that the mere perception or declaration of right principles, wether in one country or in many countries, will be of any value unless they are supported by those qualities of civic virtue and manly courage-aye, and by those instruments and agencies of force and science which in the last resort must be the defense of right and reason.”

    The East has the individual male qualities needed to support such virtue but the social organisation of the Muslim world is not up to the task of building on this in contrast to the West that can build the civic infrastructure needed for its defence. The agencies of force and Science, its last resort.

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