April 18, 2006, 7:14 a.m.
The Fallaci Force
Oriana’s cultural reasoning.

By Lee Harris

The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, 307 pages, $19.95)

Oriana Fallaci's latest book is called The Force of Reason, yet, in reading it, one is bound to come away with a troubling sense of the fragility, if not the immense vulnerability of reason.

The Italian author begins her book with an historical anecdote. In 1327 an enlightened Florentine scholar, Mastro Cecco, runs afoul of the local authorities and is turned over to the Inquisition. He is tortured, and asked to recant his ideas, but because he cannot declare false what he believes to be true, he is condemned to be burnt alive in the public square, along with all his books and writings.

So The Force of Reason opens with a paradox. What use is reason in a world run by Inquisitors? No doubt, Mastro Cecco tried to reason with his tormentors, attempted to use logic, to provide them with evidence. So where in this incident, one may well ask, does the force of reason appear?

The same paradox haunts Fallaci's new book. As in her earlier post 9/11 work, The Rage and the Pride, Fallaci has one searing message to bring us, and she delivers it with breath-taking disregard for political correctness.

Islam, she tells us, presents a threat to the very existence of Western civilization, of conscience, of toleration, of liberalism — a message which is summed up in an epigram she quotes from the 18th century philosophe Diderot: "Islam is the enemy of Reason." Yet Islam today is not the Islam of Diderot's time — an Islam that is content to be the enemy of Reason in Dar el-Islam. It is rather an enemy on the march — but not the forced march of armed ranks of soldiers, against which the West could wage conventional war, but a different kind of march, against which the West appears to have no defenses.

It is not just terrorism that Fallaci is talking about — not even the catastrophic terror of 9/11 or the Madrid bombing; what alarms her most is "the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens...the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism...." What enrages her most, on the other hand, is the refusal of European leaders to recognize what is at stake in this war, and their complicity in exempting Muslim immigrants from the first duty any immigrant has to his new homeland, namely, the duty to fit into his new culture, and to play by its rules. Instead, as Fallaci luminously illustrates, a situation has developed in Europe where "native" Europeans are being increasingly forced to play by Muslim rules, and to accept Muslim culture.

In denouncing those who are enabling this cultural suicide, Fallaci does not beat around the bush: She calls them traitors — a harsh word, and yet, in Fallaci's eyes, the only one that can apply to those who are willing to sell out the West either for oil or for political correctness or in the name of misguided multicultural tolerance. She also uses harsh words to describe the tactics used by her many critics, accusing them of "intellectual terrorism," and comparing them with the Inquisitors who persecuted Mastro Cecco.

These modern inquisitors no longer use the rack to attack the body. Instead, Fallaci explains, they have devised subtle and insidious ways to go after the soul. With the help of newspapers, TV, public schools, colleges, and universities, they have developed a diabolical technique in which it is no longer necessary to engage in debate with those who disagree with their own party-line; it is enough simply to destroy the public character of their opponents, either by outright slander, or by insinuations of insanity. Or, worse, to intimidate them into obsequious silence with the threat of criminal charges, and even with the threat of death itself.

Again, the paradox: What force can reason possess in a world dominated by intellectual terrorists for whom dialogue and debate mean nothing?

Fallaci herself seems to recognize the immense vulnerability of reason at the very end of the book, where she writes "thus let me conclude with the hardest question I ever asked myself....Have we already lost, in the West, or not?"

The answer she gives is tentative, but hopeful: "Perhaps not." Yet if the West can survive it will take more than the force of reason: It will take enormous courage and passionate conviction as well. In short, it will take a lot of guts and gumption — the very virtues that Oriana Fallaci has embodied so poignantly both in her own life and in her writings.

Ultimately, if reason has any force, it is due to the examples of men and women, like Mastro Cecco and Oriana Fallaci, who have given force to reason through their own uncompromising commitment to it.

— Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies.