Amid the news that France’s lower house of parliament voted yesterday to ban women from wearing face-covering veils, a pathetic piece of populism aimed at exploiting fears about Islam which has already been condemned by Amnesty, it is something of a relief to come across a more pragmatic, no-nonsense assessment of where the real sources of global tension will be in the future.
Professor Nicholas Boyle, president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a scholar of German and European history, has just published a book titled 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis. Many might expect such an imminent doomsday to involve terrorism of some sort (probably Islamist, as that’s the kind of terrorism most people seem to fear), or militant jihadism spilling out of Afghanistan, through Pakistan and into central Asia and the Middle East, destabilising all those pro-western autocracies we’ve propped up for so long.
Four years is too soon for the “couple of generations” that one Mail columnist has warned is all there is left before “Islam will be in control in Europe”, but something on those lines, some tipping point in birth rates, perhaps, could soon be upon us. Or so many seem to think.
Not at all, says Boyle. “It would,” he writes, “be a mistake to include [among the worst-case scenarios] a supposed clash of ‘western’ and ‘Islamic’ civilisations.” How so? I’m going to quote the swift paragraph with which he dismisses such fears in full, as it’s such a surprisingly different perspective:
It is not a profound source of tension in the world, of the kind that moves economies and armies. The apparent significance of the western-Islamic divide is a consequence of the dependence (in the drug-addicted sense) of the USA on Middle Eastern oil and of the disproportionate leverage on American foreign policy exercised by states in that region, from Saudi Arabia to Israel. If in the course of the 21st century that oil runs out, or alternative sources of either oil or energy in general become available, the late-20th-century concern with the culture and politics of these small and otherwise unproductive countries will seem as obsolete as 16th- or 17th-century concerns for the control of the Spice Islands.
Boyle clearly makes several assumptions here, not least that the spread of violent radicalism to what are certainly not small countries — Pakistan, for instance — is contingent on backing by oil money. And his rather rude description of the Gulf states makes it unlikely that his book will fly off the shelves in Doha or Bahrain, let alone Tehran or Riyadh.
But he is not a great Islamophile or “apologist”. His assessment, which has no cause to be partial with regard to religion, is simply that those who constantly warn of cataclysms and “Eurabia” are wasting their time. You’re worrying about nothing, he says. And with that one paragraph, he is done with the likes of Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips et al. As I say, a bracingly refreshing view indeed!
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