Now, all over black Africa, and through money and money alone, Arabs have been attempting to spread Islam. Sometimes it is the Saudis, with those mosques and madrasas. Sometimes it is Muammar Khaddafy. A few weeks ago, as I said, I ran into an American couple, the wife a native of Togo, who had just returned from a year in Lomé. And their horror at the number of mosques from 4 a decade ago to 400, they estimated, today, and the sullen Muslims who have suddenly appeared everywhere, with a way of life distinctly different from that of the Christians, is not something that one would necessarily know about if merely looking at an Annual Yearbook and reading that Togo has a population that is 13% Muslim or some such figure. The American husband and his Togolese wife were equally scathing about the representatives of the U.N. and the F.A.O. and other putative aid organizations whose representatives drove about, they said, in their Mercedes the white version of East Africas waBenzi and saw nothing, understood nothing, stayed well above, in the sphere of the abstract, the reality of Togo, never daring or able to delve beneath the surface of life.
I asked them how it was that so many mosques had been built and how it was that all of these mosques had expensive P.A. systems that enabled the muezzins, five times a day, to force everyone, Muslim and Christian and animist, to hear the Muslim Call To Prayer. Oh, they said. Its the dictator, Faure Gnassingbé. Khaddafy gave him the money for an $800,000 Lamborghini (in a country where the average wage does not break a thousand dollars a year). Theres not much paved road in the whole country, but the dictator (the son of the previous dictator, Gnassingbé Eyadéma) likes to rev up his Lamborghini and go ten or twenty or even thirty miles in one direction, and then turn around and race back. And though this President-for-life is not known to have converted to Islam, what he has done is allow Khaddafy to give as much money as he wants in order to spread Islam in Togo, and to keep it spreading.
If one thought the American State Department were vigilantly monitoring the spread of Islam in Togo as elsewhere in East as in West Africa, and if one thought that people in the American government understood that the spread of Islam in black Africa is not in Americas or Europes or Africas interest, and that the West had to find a way to check this advance, not merely by relying on private efforts by Christian missionary groups, but by actively raising, at every meeting with every African leader, the matter of the spread of Islam, and of what great concern it is, and giving them the sign that they will be supported by the West if they deal with this problem in their own way, then one might be less worried.
-----------------------------
And the Western world does nothing. Or rather, it sends some military aid and advisers to countries near the Horn of Africa, and the rest is left up to the hapless locals.
What the Christians of Africa need is a dramatic sign of Western support in halting the progress of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. An obvious example presents itself: the Sudan. There, a few thousand troops, and a very few planes, could take care of the threat from the Arab north, and hold, and secure, both the Southern Sudan, and Darfur, as part of a well-publicized humanitarian mission that would be undertaken after, so President Obama could declare, every possible effort was made to allow the government of Sudan to change its ways.
------------------------
No doubt it is easier for the Western, non-Muslim world, to come to the rescue of people who, as in Darfur, are called Muslims, and to pretend, as such people as Samantha Power do, that such conflicts have nothing to do with Islam because all parties are Muslim. But it isnt true. The war in the southern Sudan, against Christians (almost all Catholics) and animists (about 1/6 of the population), is a classic war against Infidels. But the war made on the Muslim blacks in Darfur by other, but Arab, Muslims (or those who think of themselves as Arabs, and thus in a special and higher category of Muslim) is also attributable to another aspect of Islam Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism.
--------------------------
Is there, anywhere in the Pentagon, or the State Department, an office where people are working to figure out how to halt the advance of Islam here and there and everywhere?
-----------------------------
If you think that Islam is not a threat, but merely one of the worlds great religions that has been misinterpreted by extremists if that is, you wish to ignore the texts and tenets of Islam, and the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, then you will not worry overmuch about the spread of Islam in black Africa, nor worry about the arabization that inevitably accompanies islamization. You will find the suggestions I have made absurd, or even malevolent.
If, on the other hand, you are well-prepared, and know the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam, and are familiar with that 1350-year history of conquest and subjugation in which so many local histories, cultures, artworks were made to disappear, physically and from the minds of those conquered, then you may have quite a different attitude.
