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G. K. Chesterton and Islam
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2019
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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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.
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57 Ibid., 263.
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67 Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood, 174.
68 Ibid., 174.
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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.
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