Confronting a Common Enemy

Below is a guest contribution by James Gibb Stuart for issue 22 of Common Sense. 

In the Coronation Oath of our British sovereigns there is a Latin phrase, Fidei Defensor, which has customarily been rendered in English as Defender of the Faith. But our Crown Prince, Prince Charles, has shown that the Latin is ambiguous when he chooses to translate it as Defender of Faith.That subtle shift in interpretation should be seen as highly significant by the millions of Muslims who have chosen to remain as loyal citizens of the great Commonwealth within which they and their forbears were born. It is faith that has been enshrined, not just the Christian faith of Britain's Anglo-Saxon heritage, but in a wider sense, the devotions, moral standards and disciplined lifestyles of those other millions who look upwards and outwards to a Supreme Being.

In an increasingly secular world, dominated by malign forces that defer much less to God than to Mammon, believers of whatever creed or denomination should feel impelled, as never before, to stretch out the hand of friendship and fellowship across the oceans and the continents towards peoples of diverse races and cultures with whom the only common bond may indeed be faith itself. Muslims have every right to be actively involved in this metamorphosis, for despite centuries of suspicion, strife, antagonisms and bloodshed instigated by errant followers of both great religions, the Muslim and the Christian faiths have in their more tolerant doctrines all the elements of a benign co-existence. A Scottish Presbyterian, I have not been privileged to study the Holy Quran in its original Arabic, gaining my impressions only from French and English translations, but in my readings I have seen nothing which offends my Christian conscience. The Prophet Muhammad never failed to accord respect to Jesus Christ, His predecessor on Earth, and if, as noted, followers of both spiritual beliefs have at times become embroiled in bloody conflict, it has not been at the behest of the Masters Themselves.

Nowadays there is a new urgency for relationships to be based upon mutual appreciation and understanding, for the whole of modern society is threatened by a greedy and hedonistic philosophy which occasionally exerts its power through international capital markets, and bids to destroy governments and peoples who try to stand in its way. Recently Mahatir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, spoke out indignantly against the international speculators who had been attacking his country's currency, threatening inflation and a collapse of living standards. For his courage and frankness he was promptly assailed by George Soros, an Eastern European whose chief claim to celebrity status was when he mounted a multi-million dollar speculation against the British pound. Soros had the arrogance to call Mohamad “a menace to Malaysia”, and with his statement achieving worldwide publicity, the inference was clear - that governments and prime ministers are no longer in charge of their national affairs where such issues clash with the speculative aims and objectives of the international money mafia.

There is an answer to all this - and the Muslim World should not endure its hurt and humiliation in resentful silence, for within the Christian West there is growing opposition to the vicious and wickedly irresponsible power-play that was turned against Malaysia, and with it comes a perception that people of faith should stand together. How often has a Muslim thinker told me, with a sad inclination of the head, that his co-religionists are pathetically divided? How often, because of such divisions, have Western multinational companies and financiers profited from their outrageous schemes to control and manipulate Muslim resources? To what extent can it be said that the critical factor which is currently holding the usury-driven finance system in place is the compliance - either through fear or ignorance - of Arab and other Muslim-orientated governments? For sure, a military threat exists. The terrible preponderance of sophisticated firepower brought to bear against Iraq during the Gulf War showed that what has come to be known as the military-industrial power complex will not readily be countered by military means alone. Those who express their natural resentment by guerrilla tactics of urban terror, by attacks upon Western installations and even upon civilian populations, are pursuing courses which must in the end prove counter-productive, making it easy for the propaganda machines to create fear and animosity between nations and cultures, thus laying the necessary groundwork, should the global interests which are fast taking over the planet, decide the time is ripe for another war. In Hidden Menace to World Peace, my latest analysis of the subject, I felt it advisable to warn that after the rapprochement of the main European powers within the proposed continental union, followed by the collapse and subsequent dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, the warmongers who profit from international conflict may just be running short of traditional adversaries. An armed and largely disaffected Islam, smarting from its rebuffs and humiliations at the hands of a technologically superior West, might just be persuaded to create a situation in which it could be portrayed by skilful and inflammatory propaganda as the last enemy of civilisation. Predictably there would be pre-emptive strikes to secure vital resources and supply lines, national pride would be offended, and outraged fanaticism would do the rest. If that sombre hypothesis is even a remote possibility, then Muslims must talk to Christians with mutual respect and frankness, so that there can never be that 21st century re-run of the mediaeval crusades. And the ground upon which they can unite their faiths and their principles is an enlightened understanding of the finance-driven global power structure which threatens to impose economic enslavement on Christian and Muslim alike. Its most potent weapon is debt, the creation of an international climate in which it was once seen to be modern and progressive for the technically backward nations to borrow heavily from Western bankers, allegedly to provide finance for their infrastructures, develop their resources and improve the living standards of their peoples. Generally the results have been the opposite of what was intended. They have left many of those developing economies crippled with the payment of interest. Governments have lost their freedom of action and sense of independence. They have adjusted their policies so as to make the bankers' dues a first charge upon their national revenues, and their peoples have suffered in consequence. Even as good Muslims, they have become the servants and dependants of their lenders. The Holy Quran tells them it is wrong, yet for years they have done it, and gone on doing it, because they felt there was no alternative if they wanted to share the benefits of Western technology.

Now they should know better. Western technology is real. It has been acquired and consolidated by two centuries of industrial and scientific development. But is has been welded into an instrument of seigniorage and coercion by the very financial strategem that both Christ and Muhammad condemned, yet which so many of their errant followers have accepted as the Holy Writ.

Usury! the illegitimate creation of almost all our new money as an interest-bearing debt by the Western banking industry! The virtual enslavement of entire populations by the enactment of massive dollar loans! The misery, poverty and degradation that has ensured! These are matters of common concern to peoples of all cultures. So let Christian and Muslim speak of them together. For there truly is an answer - one of which both the Holy Prophets would mightily approve.