{"id":5362,"date":"2017-08-07T11:22:05","date_gmt":"2017-08-07T11:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/08\/07\/islam-and-the-arts\/"},"modified":"2017-08-07T11:22:05","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T11:22:05","slug":"islam-and-the-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/08\/07\/islam-and-the-arts\/","title":{"rendered":"Islam and the (Destruction of the) Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the arts. Among the things that Islam finds offensive are paintings, statues, mosaics, music, and song. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the razing of the Roman temples and arches in Palmyra are just the most recent in a long line of vandalism that stretches back to Muhammad. According to culture critic Hugh Fitzgerald<\/a>, \u201cthe greatest destruction of art in the history of the world is that wrought by Muslims on the art (architecture, artifacts), sacred and profane, of non-Muslim civilizations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to resurgence of militant Islam we seem to have entered a new era of iconoclasm. And it\u2019s not just the arts that are being attacked, but also the people who patronize them. There have been a number of terror attacks against tourists at the ancient Egyptian Karnak Temple <\/a>near Luxor. In 2015, gunmen killed 19 people at the Bardo Museum<\/a> in Tunis. In 2002, 40 to 50 armed Chechen Islamists took 850 hostages during a musical theatre production at Moscow\u2019s Dubrovka Theater<\/a>. The three-day siege ended with the death of 130 hostages including 17 members of the cast and one-third of the orchestra. More recently, we\u2019ve seen the jihad attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris which resulted in the death of 130 people, many of whom were also mutilated, and the jihad attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England which left 22 dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

For all their antipathy to the arts, jihadists have an almost Hitchcockian sense of dramatic locations: the Temple of Karnak, the Bardo Museum, the Dubrovka Theatre, the Bataclan Theatre, the World Trade Center. They haven\u2019t gotten around yet to Mt. Rushmore and the Albert Hall, but it\u2019s quite likely that both are already on some jihadis to-do list. Fortunately, the authorities have discerned the pattern, and have begun to beef up security around museums and monuments. Nowadays, if you want to visit the Louvre or the Rijksmuseuem, you have to tiptoe around police and soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Many artists like to advertise their work as transgressive and even dangerous. That\u2019s becoming literally true, though presumably not in the ways that the artists intended. When you go to a concert or a museum these days, there is indeed a heightened element of danger.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be a mistake, however, to think that armed jihadists are the only danger to the arts and music. The other danger comes from Islamic culture itself and from the non-violent spread of that culture into Western societies. The trend has been referred to as \u201cIslamization\u201d and also as \u201cstealth jihad.\u201d For my own part, I prefer the term \u201ccultural jihad\u201d because at this point the advance is far from stealthy. The reason that citizens of the West don\u2019t see the cultural takeover in progress is that they don\u2019t want to see it. And they don\u2019t want to see it because they don\u2019t know what to do about it. Some of those who do see what\u2019s happening think the trend toward Islamic dominance is unstoppable. Here\u2019s economist Peter Smith <\/a>in Quadrant<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Tolerant societies in these politically correct times have no feasible way of countering intolerance when it is practiced and preached by a minority religion ready to claim victimhood at the drop of a hat. I entertained the thought that it could, but it can\u2019t be done.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether or not the trend is irreversible remains to be seen, but the trend has not been toward assimilation (as so many had hoped), but toward cultural conquest. And as Islamization continues, it will have a profound effect on the arts. Because where Islamic beliefs and laws advance, the arts retreat.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a matter of hostility to the arts, but indifference to them. Although some Muslim immigrants to Europe will acquire a taste for Chopin and Renoir, most will ignore the symphony halls and the art museums altogether. As the population continues to shift in the favor of Islam, those museums that manage to stay open will have to emphasize non-representational Islamic art and put the Renoirs in cold storage. As for the concert halls, many will die a slow death. Mark Steyn<\/a> puts it this way:<\/span><\/p>\n

When the demography changes, there will be no concert halls. Artists who take a multicultural view should be aware of this. Count the number of covered women in London\u2019s West End. In Birmingham, where I went to high school, you have a provincial symphony orchestra in a Muslim city\u2014I\u2019m not sure it will survive. All<\/em> art, all popular culture is endangered by Islam, because there\u2019s no room for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although Birmingham won\u2019t be a Muslim majority city for another twenty years or so, Steyn is right about the general trend. And he\u2019s right about the unawareness of \u201cartists who take a multicultural view.\u201d Those in the arts community who blindly celebrate diversity constitute, in effect, a fifth column that facilitates the invasion of Western society by an anti-arts culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

One has to wonder if they really love the arts or if they are more in love with the idea of being thought exceedingly tolerant and open-minded. People who love something are usually willing to fight to defend it. But there\u2019s scant evidence that the arts community will fight to preserve the culture they have inherited.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are exceptions, of course. The aforementioned Mark Steyn is one of them. By profession, Steyn is a music critic who specializes in writing about composers of popular music such as Cole Porter, Jule Styne, and Dorothy Fields. Yet shortly after 9\/11 Steyn branched out to political and cultural criticism with a particular emphasis on criticism of Islam and the lackluster Western response to its inroads. Why the foray into politics? As Steyn<\/a> puts it, \u201cThe point of politics is to free up time for what really matters\u201d\u2014which in his case is music.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another counter\u2013jihadist who would rather be doing something else is Ned May. He is the director of Gates of Vienna<\/em>, a website devoted to discussing the dangers of Islamization, both in America and Europe. Writing under the pen name Baron Bodissey, May produces a daily supply of knowledgeable and well-crafted columns. Yet his real passions are landscape painting and music. In a piece about Bach\u2019s choral prelude, \u201cO Lamn Gottes unschuldig,\u201d he writes <\/a>\u201c[Bach\u2019s music] is one of the principal motives behind my choice to continue the struggle against the Great Jihad. The music of J.S. Bach represents the apotheosis of the human spirit, and will remain such even as the civilization that created it turns to dust.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He continues: \u201cThere is no ideology in this [the music]\u2026 But ideology may well destroy it. Just as there are no longer any Buddhas at Bamiyan \u2026 there may come a day when all the pipes lay strewn across the paving stones of a shattered building, with no more fingers to race across the keyboards nor feet to tap the pedals. That is one of the main reasons why I do what I do: so that this shall not pass from the face of the earth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As they are willing to fight to preserve the music they love, Steyn and May deserve to be thought of as genuine music lovers. I\u2019m not so sure that the same can be said for those artists who rush to defend every diversity under the sun, but have little regard for the culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Cole Porter. Are they in love with art or are they more in love with a currently fashionable but ultimately destructive ideology about cultural diversity\u2014one that will spell the death of art and music?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here: Which brings us back to the arts. Among the things that Islam finds offensive are paintings, statues, mosaics, music, and song. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the razing of the Roman temples and arches in Palmyra are just the most recent in a long line of vandalism that stretches back to Muhammad. … Continue reading “Islam and the (Destruction of the) Arts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,180,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-and-aesthetics","category-decline-of-the-west","category-islamism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}