The Giant of English Literature who Predicted the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism
By: Frank Parker
Tags: Economic Theory, Anti Semitism, Islamophobia, English Literature, Twentieth Century Poetry

The Giant of English Literature who Predicted the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism Frank Parker Follow Nov 28 · 3 min read

Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash

It is more than sixty years since I took the English Literature examination for what was then called the General Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level or GCE ‘O’ Level. And yet there is something from one of the books we studied that lives with me still, and probably influences much of my own writing. The book was Belloc’s Essays. The piece that so influenced me was The Mowing of a Field, a glorious evocation of rural life and the pleasures to be gained from performing simple tasks and communing with nature.

Despite the pleasure I gained from reading that essay I had never since had the inclination, or the time, to discover more about its author and his other literary works. Until recently, when, for a creative writing workshop, I was asked to offer for consideration a favourite poem. I had a vague notion that Belloc was a poet as well as an essayist. It was time to explore his life and his poetry.

A young Hilaire Belloc. Image found at Poetry Foundation where it iscredited to Harvard University.

Hilaire Belloc was born in France in 1870 of a French father and English mother. When he was two, his father died and the mother returned to England with Hilaire and his sister. He grew up in Sussex. Holding dual citizenship, he signed up for army service with a French regiment before attending Balliol College in Oxford.

He was a devout Catholic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic. He was a Liberal member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910 but hated the way politicians who argued against each other in public were chummy in private.

He was a contemporary of Shaw, Chesterton and Wells with whom he conducted a long-running feud. He condemned both Socialism and Corporate capitalism, favouring a system in which the state-protected small farmers and traders from monopolies and foreign competition. He deplored colonialism.

He was a prolific writer, orator and polemicist. Like some today, his anti-Semitism is rooted in his hatred of corporate capitalism. He deplored the excessive influence he believed to be exerted by Jewish bankers. He also saw danger in the presence, in Europe between the two World Wars, of so many Jews. Nevertheless, he opposed Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, as well as social discrimination against Jews, which he encountered in elitist country clubs in the USA.

Reading of his dispute with Wells I wondered at the motives of the members of the Cambridge exam board who chose both men to be studied. Interestingly, Wells’s tale of a young man, bored with his job and an unsatisfactory marriage, who runs away to tramp the countryside before settling down as a gardener, handyman and ferryman in a riverside inn, evokes similar emotions to Belloc’s bucolic essay. Both hanker for an imagined pre-industrial past when it was possible to lead a contented life divorced from the horrors of Victorian mills and mines.

The dispute raged over every aspect of each man’s system of belief. Belloc, the devout Catholic, opponent of evolutionary theories, dismissive of Socialism; Wells, the Darwinian science devotee, Socialist and atheist. Shaw, another Socialist, sided with Wells, whilst Chesterton, whom Belloc employed as an illustrator, was an Anglican who embraced Catholicism in later life. Shaw coined a derogatory name for the pair: the Chesterbelloc.

His Islamophobia stemmed from his belief that the crusades had failed in their mission to destroy Islam. Whilst the Mohammedan religion was held partially in check by Christian colonialism, he did not believe this would last. In chapter four of his book The Great Heresies (1938), he warns: “It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.”

I can well imagine that he would have seen 9/11, and everything that has happened since, as fulfilment of that prophecy.