El Cid Versus the Mosque: Finale

Tonight we wrap up the El Cid screening with the final of seventeen parts of the classic movie from 1961 starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. This viewing has been hosted to support the El Cid Project, which responded to all the brouhaha over the proposed Ground Zero mosque by offering to screen the movie for Mayor Bloomberg and Imam Rauf at Ground Zero.


El Cid (the historical figure, not just the movie) leaves us with some things to ponder:
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1.		He fought the Moorish invaders from North Africa, and can therefore offer an encouraging model for the Counterjihad.
2.		Yet he allied himself with other Muslims — his homies, Moors from neighboring kingdoms.
3.		From the Muslim point of view, this seems contradictory, given that Koran very strongly condemns a Muslim who harms a fellow Muslim.

Reconciling #2 and #3 may help us understand Islam better.

My guess is that the Moors who allied with Iberian Christians managed to find Koranic justification for what they did. Their scholars of Islamic law undoubtedly exercised some convoluted logic that told them what they planned to do was for the larger good of Islam, and then issued the appropriate fatwas.

Similar examples may be found closer to our own time. For instance, during the Great War, the Arabs of the Near East joined with the British to fight the Turks, whom they hated. Muslim-on-Muslim violence was all right with them then, because an Arab victory would promote the interests of the Ummah in the long run — or at least we may presume that some such self-serving rationalization was employed.

What these examples have in common is that they occurred when the Ummah was weak, and in the process of retreating from infidel advances.

This can give us some insights into what to expect in the future. If our leaders ever manage to gather their wits and their courage enough to actually fight this war, instead of playing games with ideology, they will discover that Muslim political solidarity fractures easily under stress. When the Ummah is in the process of losing, it breaks up into ethnic/tribal groups who act in their own self-interest.

Since Islam is inherently weak — the current craze for Salafist renewal is evidence of how brittle it really is — we may look forward to an eventual scenario in which parts of Islam turn on other parts. Sunni versus Shi’ite, Arabs versus Indonesians, secularized versus fundamentalist — there are numerous fault lines that can be exploited by opponents who know how to play chess, as opposed to checkers.

The big question is how much of Western culture will be destroyed before the remainder comes to its senses and starts thinking seriously — and strategically — about Counterjihad.


Visit the El Cid Project for more information, and see Part 1 for a fuller explanation of what this is about. Here are Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, and Part 16.