261020 – Islam and Western Civilization

by | Oct 20, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

The Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity: Reading Pearce with Beaulieu

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

The question behind the question

Joseph Pearce is right that the Qur’an is not a founding text of the West, but his critics stumbled toward a more useful question: what, exactly, has Islam been to the West, and what is it now? Pearce’s essay, “Islam and Western Civilization,” first ran at The Imaginative Conservative in January 2023 and was reissued on October 19, 2026. It answered readers who had asked why his list of the “seven pillars” of Western civilization left out the Qur’an.

Among the commenters was Peter D. Beaulieu, author of Beyond Secularism and Jihad? A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity (University Press of America, 2012). His comment and his book supply what Pearce’s essay lacks. Pearce draws a line between two parties. Beaulieu argues that three parties sit at the table, and that the third, Western secularism, changes the shape of the whole conversation.

This essay reads Pearce with Beaulieu. It takes Pearce’s thesis seriously, adds Beaulieu’s two corrections, follows his “triangle” to its practical conclusion, and closes with notes on several historical claims in the essay and its comments that need correcting.

Pearce’s argument: the West as Christendom

Pearce’s case rests on a definition. He says a civilization is a coherent body of shared values, and shared values grow from coherent theological and philosophical principles. Western civilization is the meeting of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, and its fullness is Christendom: Greek philosophy and Jewish covenant fulfilled in the person of Christ and carried through history by His Church. His seven pillars follow from that definition: Homer’s two epics, Virgil, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante.

From the definition, the conclusion follows quickly. If Christ is who He claims to be, then Muhammad’s claim to correct and supersede Him is false. A text that denies the Incarnation cannot be the foundation of a civilization built on it. It can only rival it.

Pearce then turns to history. Islam conquered the Christian Middle East and North Africa, took Constantinople in 1453, and pressed into Western Europe in the eighth century. He invokes Lepanto (October 7, 1571) and Chesterton’s poem about it, and he asks what would have been lost had the Christian fleet failed: perhaps Rome, perhaps Cervantes, perhaps the novel itself.

The logic of the first half is sound on its own terms. Two faiths that make contradictory claims about the same Person cannot both be true, and a civilization defined by one cannot be founded on the other. The second half is weaker. It relies on a series of counterfactuals, and counterfactuals prove less than they seem. They also omit the ways the two civilizations touched beyond the battlefield. That gap is where Beaulieu enters.

Beaulieu’s first correction: the Word made flesh, and the word made book

Beaulieu’s sharpest point is that the usual comparison is the wrong one. Pearce sets the Bible beside the Qur’an, as if two scriptures were competing for the same shelf. Beaulieu says the Qur’an’s true counterpart is not the Bible but Christ. In Islam, the Qur’an is the uncreated speech of God, the eternal word made book. In Christianity, the eternal Word became flesh. The Bible witnesses to that Person, not His equivalent.

This matters for more than theology. In his 2017 interview with Carl Olson of Catholic World Report, Beaulieu applied it to the 2007 Muslim letter “A Common Word,” written in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address. The letter invited Christians, as fellow “People of the Book,” to a common word between the two scriptures. Beaulieu asks whether that framing quietly sets aside the Christian claim that the Word is not a book at all. In his phrase, Christians are not “people of the book” in the same way.

He draws the same asymmetry out of the Qur’an’s handling of the Gospel. Muslim commentators read Jesus’ promise of the Paraclete, the Comforter, in John 14 and 16 as a prophecy of Muhammad. They do this by arguing that the Greek paraklētos originally meant periklytos, “the praised one,” which corresponds to the Arabic Ahmad. Beaulieu cites Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s widely used commentary as the source for this reading. The move is revealing: the Holy Spirit, a Person of the Trinity, is reinterpreted as a human prophet. The Trinity has no place in the system, so the text is bent to fit.

Beaulieu goes one step further. He calls Islam a “natural religion” with borrowed Jewish and Christian elements, and he doubts that Muhammad ever heard orthodox Trinitarian teaching. Seventh-century Arabia knew mostly Nestorian and Monophysite Christianity, and the Qur’an’s polemic attacks a Trinity of God, Jesus, and Mary that no orthodox council taught. If so, Islam is less a Christian heresy, as Hilaire Belloc argued, than a home-grown monotheism that rejected a distorted Christianity. Beaulieu concludes that Christian–Muslim conversation is therefore interreligious, not ecumenical. It is a conversation between two religions, not a quarrel inside one family.

This correction strengthens Pearce’s thesis while changing its tone. The difference between Christianity and Islam is even deeper than two rival books. But the cause of the difference may be partly a failure of Christian witness in seventh-century Arabia, not only a rebellion against a truth fully heard.

Beaulieu’s second correction: Dante and the ladder of Muhammad

Beaulieu’s second point cuts against Pearce’s seventh pillar. Pearce writes as though Dante stands wholly inside Christendom, a monument Islam would have erased. Beaulieu reminds him that the Divine Comedy may owe something to Islamic sources.

The scholarship is real, though Beaulieu’s comment garbles its origin (see Note 3). In 1919, the Spanish priest and Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Dante drew on Islamic accounts of Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension, the Isrā’ and Mi’rāj, and on the mystic Ibn Arabi. The parallels he listed include a night journey with a guide, a hell arranged in descending tiers with punishments fitted to sins, and an ascent through the heavens to the throne of God. Thirty years later, in 1949, scholars published the Liber scalae Machometi, the “Book of Muhammad’s Ladder,” a version of the Ascension story translated into Latin and Old French at the Castilian court in the 1260s. Dante could therefore have read it.

Scholarly opinion has settled between the extremes. Few now accept Asín’s strongest claims of wholesale borrowing; some of his parallels have Christian and classical precedents (the Aeneid‘s underworld, the Visio Pauli). But many grant that Dante plausibly knew the Liber scalae and took some images from it.

If so, the picture is more interesting than Pearce allows, and no less Christian. Dante built his poem on Aquinas and the Bible. He placed Muhammad among the sowers of schism in the eighth circle of hell, and he placed Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo among the virtuous pagans. He could take images from Islamic legend and still judge Islam’s founder by Christian truth. That is what a confident civilization does with materials from outside: it baptizes what it can use and rejects what it must. Pearce’s own Aquinas did the same with Aristotle, much of whom reached Latin Europe through Arabic commentators.

The third side of the triangle: secularism

Beaulieu’s book is built on a geometric idea. Pearce sees a line with Christendom at one end and Islam at the other. Beaulieu sees a triangle, and he names its corners in his subtitle: the Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity. The Mosque is Islam as a unified way of life under Shari’a, the body of Islamic law. The Manger is Christianity, centered on the Incarnation. Modernity is the secular West that grew out of Christendom and then turned away from it.

The middle of the book compares the first two corners directly. For the Mosque, Beaulieu draws on Farooq Hassan’s The Concept of the State and Law in Islam, which presents the Islamic state as unitary: religion, law, and government are one. For the Manger, he draws on Heinrich Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought, which traces the Western distinction between Church and state back to its Christian and natural-law roots. Islam, Beaulieu says, did not fuse the two; it never conceived of separating them in the first place.

The triangle explains why the conflict feels lopsided today. A Muslim who looks at the West sees materialism, individualism, and sexual license, and he often assumes that this is what Christianity produced. The Christian must therefore distinguish himself from secular modernity before he can speak to Islam at all. Meanwhile secularism, which reduces religion to private taste, cannot understand either the passion of Islam or the faith of the Christian. Beaulieu’s compressed formula is that secularism removes God from the public square, while Islam “takes the public forum out of man.” One empties public life of God; the other leaves no private space in man where conscience stands apart from the community’s law.

Beaulieu also sees a surprising kinship between the two outer corners. Early Islam suppressed the rationalist Mu’tazilite theologians in the ninth century; the French Revolution turned Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason. One shut out reason to protect the will of God; the other shut out God to protect the will of man. Both, he suggests, end up with a God who does not enter history: an absent lawgiver in one case, an absent landlord in the other. Only the Manger claims that God entered history in person.

This is where Pearce’s essay is most incomplete. His drama of siege and defense assumes that the West inside the walls is still Christendom. Beaulieu’s question mark in his own title points to the harder truth. The walls Pearce celebrates are now held largely by people who no longer believe what built them. A civilization that has forgotten its foundation cannot defend it, whatever the strength of its walls.

Natural law as a grammar for meeting

If the three parties cannot agree on revelation, Beaulieu asks what they can share. His answer is natural law: the moral order written into human nature and knowable by reason, apart from any particular scripture. Paul appeals to it when he says that Gentiles without the law show “the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15). The West helped to articulate it, from Aristotle and the Stoics through Aquinas, and then largely abandoned it. Beaulieu proposes it as the shared “grammar” for conversation between Western citizens and Muslims.

He is honest that, in his words to Olson, this is a thin reed. Islam has its own concept that resembles natural law: fitrah, the original disposition toward God with which, according to a well-known hadith, every child is born. But Islamic scholarship generally treats this original nature as Islam itself, making natural law a subset of the Qur’an rather than an independent court of appeal. The Qur’an tells believers to “enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil” (9:71), which sounds like the first principle of natural law. Beaulieu asks whether that principle protects all people or only the community of believers. If the moral law is owed only to fellow Muslims, it is not yet universal.

Still, natural law has two advantages that revelation does not. First, it requires neither side to concede its faith before talking. Second, it meets the ordinary Muslim where he actually lives. Beaulieu observes that ordinary Muslims recognize the moral law in their own hearts, even if they credit it to Muhammad. That recognition is common ground. The same is true of secular Westerners, who still feel the pull of justice, honesty, and care for the weak even after they have discarded the God who grounds them.

Natural law therefore serves the triangle in both directions. It calls secular modernity back to a moral order it did not invent. And it offers Muslims a standard by which every act, including an act done in God’s name, can be judged as just or unjust. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address made exactly this double appeal in 2006. He asked Muslims to consider that violence in God’s name contradicts a God who acts with reason. He also asked the West to recover a reason open to faith, rather than one that excludes it.

The Christian adds something further: the conviction that grace fulfills natural law, not replaces it. As the Second Vatican Council put it, Christ reveals man to himself. Natural law shows what a person is made for. The Incarnation shows Who he is made for.

What the comment section shows

The two dozen comments under Pearce’s essay act out the very problem Beaulieu describes. They fall into three kinds.

The first kind argues about transmission. One reader, Michael, notes that Islamic scholars passed Aristotle to Latin Europe and that Aquinas engaged Avicenna and Averroes. Another, Richard, goes much further and credits Islam with making the Renaissance possible. A third, Manny, replies that the Qur’an itself influenced no Western writer. Each is partly right, and they are talking past one another. Michael and Richard are describing Islamic civilization, which preserved and commented on Greek learning, often through Christian translators such as the Nestorian Hunayn ibn Ishaq, whom another reader mentions. Manny is describing the Qur’an as a text, which was Pearce’s actual subject. The question “Did Islam influence the West?” has a yes answer. The question “Is the Qur’an a foundation of the West?” has a no answer. Both answers can stand.

The second kind is represented by a reader who signs himself Thomas R and thinks Pearce is both too hostile to and too impressed by Islam’s power. He points out that Islam was never a single unified force and that Christians remained influential under Muslim rule for centuries. This is the historian’s caution, and it deserves a hearing.

The third kind moves from argument to anger. One recent commenter calls the Qur’an the work of a demonically possessed man and claims the “Dark Ages” were dark because Islam was rising. Another warns that Western civilization will be erased within a century. These comments make strong claims, and some may rest on real concerns. But the strength of a claim must be proportionate to its evidence, and several of these outrun theirs (see Notes 6 and 7).

The pattern is Beaulieu’s triangle in miniature. One side flattens Islam into a benign cultural contributor. The other flattens it into a demonic enemy. Neither side’s picture leaves room for the Muslim graduate student Beaulieu describes meeting after a talk at the University of Washington. That student was surprised to find American religion more alive than in some Muslim circles he knew. He is not a statistic in a clash of civilizations. He is a neighbor, and the Gospel is addressed to him.

Conclusion: beyond the siege

Pearce is right on his central claim. The Qur’an is not a pillar of the West, and a Christian cannot honestly call it one, because it denies the very Person on whom Christendom was built. Charity does not require pretending otherwise.

But Beaulieu shows that the siege image, true as history, is not enough to guide the present. It sets two parties on either side of a wall. In fact, there are three parties, and the most consequential change of the last two centuries happened inside the wall: the West’s own loss of the faith and the natural law that made it. A secular West has no answer to Islam’s claim to be a complete way of life, because it has no complete account of life to offer. It can tolerate, regulate, or fear. It cannot persuade.

The Christian can. On Beaulieu’s account, his task is threefold. First, to be what the Church is, rather than a religious wing of secular culture. Second, to recover natural law as a public language, so that justice can be argued with a Muslim neighbor and a secular one in terms both can recognize. Third, to bear witness to the one thing neither corner possesses: not a better book, but a Person. Newman’s motto, cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart, names the method. Civilizations clash; persons meet.

Chesterton’s Lepanto ends with Don John riding home from the Crusade. Beaulieu’s book ends, fittingly, with a question mark. The battle Pearce describes was won. The question now is whether the West will remember what it was defending, and whether Christians will offer it to their Muslim and secular neighbors as a gift rather than hold it only as a fortress.

Notes and corrections

  1. On the book itself. The full text of Beyond Secularism and Jihad? is not freely available (it is a 478-page academic title, priced near $120 in hardcover). This essay draws on the publisher’s description, the library catalog’s chapter list, Beaulieu’s comment on Pearce’s essay, and his own extended account of the book in two Catholic World Report pieces (the 2017 interview and an earlier letter to the editor). The chapters run: “New York to Rome and Istanbul,” “Islam and the Map,” “The Mosque: Shari’a and the World,” “The Manger: The Human Person in the World,” “Modernity: Monologues and Conversations,” and “Present to the Presence.” Anything attributed to the book here should be checked against a copy before publication.
  2. Pearce on Tours and Hagia Sophia. The battle of 732 was fought between Poitiers and Tours, in west-central France, not northern France. Hagia Sophia became a mosque in 1453, a museum in 1934, and a mosque again in 2020.
  3. Beaulieu on Dante. Alfred Guillaume did publish the first English translation of Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, The Life of Muhammad, in 1955. But the thesis linking Dante to Ibn Arabi and the Ascension literature is Miguel Asín Palacios’s (1919), not Guillaume’s, and the “Madrid” in Beaulieu’s comment probably reflects Asín, a Madrid professor. Dante composed the Comedy over roughly 1308–1321, finishing near his death in 1321. The Latin Liber scalae Machometi was published in 1949 by Enrico Cerulli and, separately, José Muñoz Sendino.
  4. The Paraclete reading. The Qur’anic verse usually cited is 61:6, where Jesus announces a coming messenger named Ahmad; 7:157, which Beaulieu cites, speaks of the unlettered prophet foretold in the Torah and Gospel. The proposed Greek original periklytos has no support in any surviving manuscript of John, all of which read paraklētos.
  5. “A Common Word.” Beaulieu’s 2017 interview places it in late 2006. The 2006 response to Regensburg was an open letter from 38 Muslim scholars; “A Common Word Between Us and You,” signed by 138, followed in October 2007.
  6. Claims in the comments. The period 450–1200 began roughly two centuries before Islam existed, and the idea of a “Dark Age” began with Petrarch’s lament for lost classical learning in the West; it cannot be blamed on Islam’s rise. The often-repeated comparison of Spanish and Arab book production comes from the 2002 UN Arab Human Development Report, which concerned translations into Arabic across the Arab states, not total books across all Muslim nations. The John Quincy Adams passage a commenter quotes is authentic (from his 1830 essays on Russia and Turkey), as is Huntington’s “bloody borders” line (1996).
  7. Scale. For proportion against the commenters’ forecasts: Pew Research estimated Muslims at about 4.9% of Europe’s population in 2016, with projections for 2050 ranging from roughly 7% to 14% depending on migration (approximate, from memory; verify before publication).

Sources

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