The Decline and Fall of a Theory

An anti-Islam reader in a comments thread at Jihad Watch recently reflexively blurted out one of many Givens of our Age:

"In the last days of the Roman Empire, she bestowed the highest honor of the office of arms and of the administration of the palaces to barbarians, who maintained secrete correspondence with their country, who acquired the knowledge and advantages that supported its decline."

Actually, this historiographical axiom, like so many others which so many in the West glibly assume to be true, suffers from that peculiar (if not unique) civilizational syndrome which afflicts the modern West: its amnesia about Islam.  More and more, I've come to realize how many historical events and processes of the long arc of Western history from the 7th century forward that we heretofore were taught in schools (or read in books whether popular or higher-brow) to believe as historical fact were at bottom profoundly influenced by the tenaciously vicious -- and protracted (if not perennial) -- expansionism of Islam.

And so for the theory we've all come to know and love about the fall of the Roman Empire.  As formidably charming as Gibbon was, we must set aside our schoolboy's fondness for him and rethink, outside the box.  The conventional theory has been persuasively counter-argued by the Pirenne thesis (early 20th century) -- which, by the 1970s fell out of favor by revisionists (or rather revanchists) in academe but which, more recently, has been given new life and vigor by a new study:

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited:
The History of a Controversy
by Emmet Scott
New English Review Press · 2012 · 270 pages
$19.95 · Kindle version $9.95

A truly stellar essay about it and its implications (using copious quotes from the book) was written a couple of months ago by Baron Bodissey over at the Gates of Vienna blog:

Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?

The answer to that question my reader will find by reading the essay, but I can offer a "spoiler" I'm sure he saw coming a mile away: The Muslims.

One interesting corollary to that answer mentioned by Bodissey in his essay is that the Germanic (and often ultimately central Asiatic) barbarians who slowly percolated into the vast and sprawling Empire, far from being a threat and "ending" the Empire, actually assimilated into its culture and values and virtues because they (with of course exceptions, initial burps along the way in the form of Vandals or Visigoths) saw Rome as superior to their own culture in many ways, and really wanted to be "Roman" -- and they did become Roman, and then not long after that, became Roman Christians, at least a good 300 years before Mohammed was even in diapers (I mean around his loins, not the diapers around his head). 

 I.e., unlike Muslims, the barbarians became civilized -- which is always perforce a voluntary process -- and eventually became productive members of a culture they came to respect as superior to theirs: They had no supremacist script from on high, as did the Muslims, who with an eternal and deranged vengeance maintained a fanatical enmity against all Others -- an enmity that not only remains as virulent today, but is getting worse by the day, aided and abeted by PC MC throughout the West, as well as by the darker consanguinity of radical Leftism which, though only reflecting a small minority in the West, has happened, by a cruel serendipity, to come to be occupying the White House.  Let's hope not for long.

Further Reading:

Western History in the light of Islam