Exactly one century ago, the renowned British writer G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), called by his admirers the greatest writer and thinker of the twentieth century, published a curious novel titled The Flying Inn. On the cusp of World War I, he imagined the Ottoman Empire conquering Great Britain and imposing Shari'a law.
 Notoriously absentminded, G.K. Chesterton tended to do his writing wherever he found himself. |
Chesterton rides this implausible scenario as a vehicle to ridicule progressivism – that same arrogant, "scientific," top-down, and leftist approach to government that characterizes the age of Obama. "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes" Chesterton rightly explained, and The Flying Inn mordantly exposes their failings. Along the way, his vision of an Islamized sceptered isle has arresting features deserving celebration on its centenary.
Chesterton tells of a war in which "the greatest of the Turkish warriors, the terrifying Oman Pasha, equally famous for his courage in war and his cruelty in peace" wins a famous victory over British forces, leading to the occupation of England, to Turks taking over the constabulary, and the growing influence of an "eminent Turkish mystic," one Misysra Ammon, who argues for such Islamic customs as not eating pork, prohibiting representative images, taking one's shoes off at the front door, and practicing polygyny.
But the most prominent Islamic custom, and the one around which The Flying Inn revolves, is Oman Pasha's decree for the destruction of vineyards and the banishment of alcohol. Lord Philip Ivywood, an eager, progressive dhimmi adept of Ammon, passed in 1909 a prohibition of alcohol which allowed only minor exceptions: buildings with inn signs outside them (pending their universal disappearance) and two famous watering holes for (of course) members of parliament, Claridge's Hotel and the Criterion Bar. Otherwise, pubs served lemonade, tea and other of what Chesterton dubs "Saracen drinks."
 The Old Ship is a common name for pubs and inns. This one is in Aveley, England. |
Taking advantage of the former loophole, a valiant Irish sailor and an English publican roll through the countryside carrying with them the sign of "The Old Ship" pub, a giant keg of rum, and a great drum of cheddar cheese. Their bacchanalian exploits, and Lord Ivywood's growing fury, make up the bulk of this fantasy novel, culminating in an English revolt against Ivywood, against Londonistan, against the fez-wearing Turkish police force, and their teetotaler ways. Hating "the fact of being crushed by the weapons of men brown and yellow ... had made the English what they had not been for centuries." Their heroic insurgency leaves Oman Pasha dead "with his face toward Mecca" and pubs reopening.
 Fez-wearing soldiers in The Attack by Fausto Zonaro (1854-1929), a depiction of the Battle of Domekos in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. |
Although a challenge to read, this overdrawn narrative uncannily anticipates the Left-Islamist alliance of our times, a phenomenon otherwise nearly invisible until the 1980s. Anticipating George Galloway and Carlos the Jackal, the lefty Ivywood called Islam a "great religion" and a "religion of progress." He even appealed for full unity between Christianity and Islam, to be called Chrislam (a term actually in use in 2014), while a trendy parson wanted St. Paul's Cathedral to sport "some sort of double emblem ... combining cross and crescent."
We learn, amusingly, that Ivywood wrote a biography of the tyrannical Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II for the Progressive Potentates series, anticipating (among other books) Patrick Seale's puff biography of Hafez al-Assad. Today's Left finds excuses for female genital mutilation and Ivywood abandoned Western girls abducted to Turkish harems on the grounds that "there should be no new disturbance of whatever amicable or domestic ties have been formed." Echoing today's progressives, he argued that Turkish women enjoy "the highest freedom" while belittling the lot of their British counterparts.
Likewise, Chesterton anticipated other themes then non-existent and now in full bloom. Ivywood speculated about our own day: in "a century or two to come," he said, "we may see the cause of peace, of science and of reform everywhere supported by Islam." In this spirit, he advocated "Asia in Europe," something that Muslim immigration has achieved.
The Turkish mystic Ammon promulgated "some fad about English civilisation having been founded by the Turks [and] seemed to think that Englishmen would soon return to this way of thinking." Indeed, it's banal in 2014 to hear Islamists declaim how Muslims reached the Americas in the tenth century A.D. and that Islam had a leading role in the writing of the U.S. Constitution.
The Flying Inn memorably sketches out a preliminary, wild, and weird picture of Islam in Great Britain, one far more real these days than when long ago published in a very different era.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
 The Washington Times illustration of this article. |
May 28, 2014 addenda: (1) George Bernard Shaw had a character say in his 1908 play, Getting Married: "I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century." In the Jan. 16, 1933 issue of the Ahmadiyya publication, The Light, an interviewer writes, "Mr. Shaw forecast that within a century Islam would be the religion of Europe."
(2) Hilaire Belloc had a similar premonition about Islam's return as a rival to Christianity. Chapter 2, "Islam – Scourge of the West" of The Essential Belloc: A Prophet for Our Times (2010) collects pages of quotes of Belloc musing on this topic. Here are two.
From Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church (1929):
our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our own culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble. That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. ... There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely.
From The Great Heresies (1938):
the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain complicated machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world?
(3) For a snippet of how life in Britain actually was in 1914, note my weblog entry, "Living Freely in England a Century Ago."
