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G. K. Chesterton and Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2019

Tom Villis
Tom Villis*
Affiliation:
Regent's University London
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

G. K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism has attracted much scholarly attention, but his views on Islam have largely passed without comment. This article situates Chesterton's writings in relation to historical views of Islam in Britain and the political, cultural and religious context of the early twentieth century. Chesterton's complex and contradictory opinions fail to support easy conclusions about the immutability of prejudice across time. His views of Islam are at times orientalist and at other times critical of imperialism and elitism. As well as drawing on medieval Catholic ideas about the “heresy” of Islam, Chesterton also links Islam with Protestant Christianity. From another perspective, his views of Islam draw on liberal traditions of humanitarian interventionism and democratic patriotism. Finally, he also used Islam as a symbol of a corroding modernity. This study suggests the need for a historically sensitive genealogy of the evolution of anti-Muslim prejudice which is not predetermined by the politics of the early twenty-first century.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 47 - 69
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

1 See, for example, Nick Milne, “Chesterton and Islam,” 6 Feb. 2006, at http://chestertonandfriends.blogspot.com/2006/02/chesterton-on-islam_06.html; William Kilpatrick, “Chesterton's Islamic England,” Crisis Magazine, 9 Dec. 2014, at www.crisismagazine.com/2014/chestertons-islamic-england.

2 For two book-length treatments of Chesterton's anti-Semitism see Mayers, Simon, Chesterton's Jews: Stereotypes and Caricatures in the Literature and Journalism of G. K. Chesterton (Marston Gate, 2013)Google Scholar, which is largely critical; and Farmer, Ann, Chesterton and the Jews: Friend, Critic, Defender (Kettering, OH, 2015)Google Scholar, which is broadly supportive. For an example of G. K. Chesterton being used in the cultural battles of the twenty-first century see Hal G. P. Colebatch, “Chesterton's Prophesy,” The Spectator, 21 Oct. 2017, at www.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/chestertons-prophesy. See also Jaki, Stanley L., “Myopia about Islam, with an Eye on Chesterbelloc,” Chesterton Review, 28/4 (2002), 485–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stenhouse, Paul, “Chesterton's View of Islam,” Chesterton Review, 30/1 (2004), 208–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are works which mention Islam in a less politicized way, especially Stapleton, Julia, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Plymouth, 2009)Google Scholar. Another recent work which engages with Chesterton's negative views of Islam is Wood, Ralph C., Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Waco, 2011)Google Scholar, although Wood does feel that he should be motivated to justify Chesterton's essential humanity, seeing his task as “to determine where, within Chesterton's work, there may be found a distinctively Christian and nonreductive way of engaging Muslims.” Ibid., 109. A book-length work in French, Maxence, Philippe, Chesterton face à l'Islam (Paris, 2014)Google Scholar, is also sympathetic to the author.

3 Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (1997), at www.runnymedetrust.org/companies/17/74/Islamophobia-A-Challenge-for-Us-All.html.

4 G. K.’s alleged anti-Semitism was much discussed while he was alive. See, for example, the interview with G. K. Chesterton and the response to it in “G. K. C.: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle,” Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 1911, 18. For a discussion of contemporary attitudes see Rapp, Dean, “The Jewish Response to G. K. Chesterton's Antisemitism, 1911–35,” Patterns of Prejudice 24/2–4 (1990), 75–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 This is particularly true of some of his biographies, such as Pearce, Joseph, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London, 1996)Google Scholar; and Coren, Michael, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton (London, 1989)Google Scholar. The more recent and scholarly Ker, Ian, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is still almost universally positive.

6 See, for example, Sykes, Alan, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke, 2005), 73–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Colin, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London, 1979), esp. 210–16Google Scholar; Cheyette, Bryan, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Julius, Anthony, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010), esp. 288, 305, 422Google Scholar; and Cesarani, David, “Joynson-Hicks and the Radical Right in England after the First World War,” in Kushner, Tony and Lunn, Kenneth, eds., Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester, 1989), 118–39, at 127Google Scholar.

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8 Quoted in Gilliat-Ray, Sophie, Muslims in Britain: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2010), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Quoted in ibid., 6.

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17 Gilliat-Ray, Muslims in Britain, 32.

18 Ibid., 27.

19 Ibid., 40.

20 Ibid., 42; Islamic Review, March 1924, 117; Cobbold, Lady Evelyn, Pilgrimage to Mecca, biographical introduction by Facey, William and Taylor, Miranda, notes by Professor Turkistani, Ahmad S. (London, 2008; first published 1934)Google Scholar.

21 Gilliat-Ray, Muslims in Britain, 42.

22 Ibid., 42.

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24 Ibid., 33.

25 A notable exception is Malak, Amin, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English (Albany, NY, 2005)Google Scholar.

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27 Hussain, Dilwar, “The Impact of 9/11 on British Muslim Identity,” in Geaves, Ron, Gabriel, Theodore, Haddad, Yvonne and Smith, Jane Idleman eds., Islam and the West Post 9/11 (Aldershot, 2004), 115–29Google Scholar.

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32 The film 300 (dir. Jack Snyder, 2006) is a particularly striking example.

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37 Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, 91, quoting G. K. Chesterton, “The Nature of a Religious War,” Daily News, 19 Sept. 1903, 6.

38 G. K. Chesterton, “Paganism and Some Protests,” Daily News, 10 Sept. 1904, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 2: 289–92, at 291.

39 Quoted in Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, 91. For the arguments over the controversy see G. K. Chesterton, “Turkey and the Liberals,” Daily News, 9 Oct. 1911, 6. See also letters by Edmund D'Auvergne and M. D. Eder in response: Daily News, 10 Oct. 1911, 4; and Chesterton's response and letter from a Turkish official, Daily News, 13 and 17 Oct. 1911.

40 G. K. Chesterton, “Impotence,” Daily News and Leader, 19 Oct. 1912, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 8: 176–9, at 176.

41 G. K. Chesterton, “March of the Black Mountain,” in The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, 121–3, at 122.

42 G. K. Chesterton, “A Dilemma about Demons,” Daily News, 18 Jan. 1913, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 8: 225–8, at 226.

43 Quoted in Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, 187.

44 Ker, G. K. Chesterton, 416.

45 Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, 28.

46 Ibid., 29.

47 Ibid., 30.

48 Ibid., 28.

49 On völkisch thought in Germany see the classic accounts by Mosse, George L., The Crisis of Germany Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; and Stern, Fritz, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (London and Berkeley, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Chesterton and landscape see Susie Byers, “‘Nearer to the Roots of Things’: Nature in the Ideological Imagination of G. K. Chesterton” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Australia, 2014), esp. 159–61 for nature in relation to Chesterton's views of Islam.

50 G. K. Chesterton, Lord Kitchener (Lanham, 2014), at www.gutenberg.org/files/25795/25795-h/25795-h.htm, 7.

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52 Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, 26.

53 Ibid.

54 Farmer, Chesterton and the Jews, 47.

55 G. K. Chesterton, “The Orientalism of the Empire,” Daily News, 11 June 1910, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 6: 262–5.

56 Ibid., 262.

57 Ibid., 263.

58 Ibid., 263–4.

59 George Bernard Shaw, “Belloc and Chesterton,” New Age, 15 Feb. 1908, 310.

60 Belloc, Hilaire, The Great Heresies (London, 1938), 76–7, 92–3Google Scholar.

61 Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (Mineloa, 2007), 228Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., 233.

63 Chesterton, Kitchener, 7–8.

64 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 230–31, original emphasis.

65 Chesterton, G. K., A Short History of England (London, 1917), 62–3Google Scholar.

66 One exception is the unpublished lecture by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, “British Muslim Integration: The Perspectives of G. K. Chesterton and H. Belloc,” Cambridge Muslim College Public Lecture, 2011, available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvq5Hh0ymc.

67 Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, 174.

68 Ibid., 174.

69 It is worth pointing out that this association that Chesterton makes between Islam and Protestantism is the opposite of the argument made about Islamophobia by Jo Carruthers. Carruthers suggests that in Islamophobic discourse, simple Protestant “Englishness” is contrasted with the elaborate and foreign nature of Islam. See Carruthers, Jo, England's Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (London, 2011), 96–121Google Scholar.

70 G. K. Chesterton, “The Thing Called a Nation,” Daily News, 28 June 1916, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 8: 240–43, at 240.

71 Ibid., 241.

72 Ibid., 242.

73 Chesterton, Short History, 63.

74 See especially Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood.

75 Chesterton, G. K., The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London, 1904)Google Scholar.

76 Chesterton, G. K., Autobiography (London, 1936), 94–5Google Scholar; quoted in Ker, G. K. Chesterton, 32.

77 John Coates labels the set of ideas that Chesterton was reacting against as the “Edwardian cultural crisis.” See Coates, John D., Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, 1984)Google Scholar.

78 Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, 35.

79 Ibid., 36.

80 G. K. Chesterton, “Fear,” Daily News, 6 Aug. 1910, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 6: 306–8, at 307.

81 G. K. Chesterton, “The Garden of the Sea,” Daily News, 20 Aug. 1910, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 6: 313–15, at 314.

82 G. K. Chesterton, “The Madness of the Omarites,” Daily News, 7 March 1901, in G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 1: 44–7, at 45. This article is a part review of The Book of Omar: The Book of Omar and Rubáiyát: Being a Book of Miscellanies, Biographical, Historical, Bibliographical and Pictorial Notes of Omar of Naishapur and his Inspired Quatrains (New York, 1900)Google Scholar.

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84 Surette, Leon, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston, 1993), 224Google Scholar.

85 Ibid.

86 Bramble, John, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke, 2015), 3Google Scholar.

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88 Review of The Flying Inn, The Academy, 7 Feb. 1914, 177–8, at 177.

89 Patrick Wright, “Last Orders,” The Guardian, 9 April 2005, at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/09/britishidentity.society.

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91 Quoted in Coates, John, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, 1984), 87–8Google Scholar.

92 John Coates has argued convincingly for the themes of the novel to be taken seriously, although his reading of Chesterton's views on Islam differ from the one presented above. See Coates, John, “Symbol and Structure in ‘The Flying Inn’,” Chesterton Review 4/2 (1978), 246–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coates, , “The Philosophy and Religious Background of ‘The Flying Inn’,” Chesterton Review 12/3 (1986), 303–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 This bill was not actually passed as it was rejected by the House of Lords.

94 Belloc, Hilaire, The Servile State (London and Edinburgh, 1912)Google Scholar.

95 For details on the Marconi scandal see Villis, Tom, Reaction and the Avant-Garde: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2006), 80–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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97 Chesterton, G. K., The Flying Inn (London, 1915), 17Google Scholar.

98 Ibid., 65.

99 Ibid., 107.

100 Ibid., 38.

101 Ibid., 202.

102 Ibid.,170.

103 Ibid., 260.

104 Ibid., 260.

105 Ibid., 263.

106 Ibid., 237.

107 Ibid., 276.

108 Ibid., 49.

109 Ibid., 151.

110 Ibid., 271.

111 Mayers, Chesterton's Jews, 25–6.

112 In one article, for example, Chesterton accuses Jews of an “obscure conspiracy against Christendom,” of having “fattened on the worst forms of Capitalism” and of taking refuge in Communism. G. K. Chesterton, “The Judaism of Hitler,” G. K.’s Weekly, 20 July 1933, 311, quoted in Mayers, Chesterton's Jews, 82.

113 Linehan, Thomas, “Comparing Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Asylophobia: The British Case,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12/2 (2012), 366–86, at 380CrossRefGoogle Scholar.