Did G. K. Chesterton predict the Islamisation of Britain?

The great novelist warned of cultural surrender long before it was fashionable.

The creed of multiculturalism has made it difficult to discuss the impact of unfettered immigration. The far right have always opposed it on the basis of racial prejudice and ethno-jingoism. Yet there are authentically liberal concerns to be raised about the problem of political Islam and how all discussions are stifled through accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. What happens when an essentially anti-democratic ideology is allowed to flourish within a society that otherwise depends upon democratic norms?

To help illuminate the troubles of our time, and in particular the perverted form of liberalism that ensures its own undoing, we might return to G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), a whimsical novel about a future Islamic England. With today’s proliferation of sharia courts and the government’s determination to criminalise blasphemy against Islam by legislative stealth, one might call Chesterton’s novel prescient.

The key figure is Lord Ivywood, a politician who becomes enamoured of Misysra Ammon, an Islamic cleric who styles himself as the ‘Prophet of the Moon’. Ivywood is an exemplar of the zealotry of the progressive reformer, a prototype of the virtue-signaller, one who ‘did not care for dogs’ but ‘cared for the Cause of Dogs’. He first introduces Ammon at a private event at the ‘Society of Simple Souls’, where he is able to preach his creed to the gullible bons vivants of the upper middle-class. The collective thrill of the crowd is pure orientalism, and they are easily mesmerised by Ivywood’s panegyrics.

Inevitably, Ivywood’s submission to Islam is framed in syncretic terms; not so much surrender as a beautiful fusion. ‘The East and the West are one,’ Ivywood says. ‘The East is no longer East nor the West West; for a small isthmus has been broken, and the Atlantic and Pacific are a single sea.’ Islam, he claims, is the ‘religion of progress’, a phrase that anticipates today’s oft-echoed slogan of Islam as the ‘religion of peace’.

This kind of doublespeak is ubiquitous among those activists who routinely strive to force the square peg of Islamic doctrine into the round hole of woke politics. This is exemplified by articles such as ‘Prophet Muhammed was an intersectional feminist’ in Muslim Girl magazine, a piece that includes the inane claim that the founder of the religion ‘wanted to generate as much inclusivity as possible’. In similarly convoluted terms, Ammon in The Flying Inn argues that there is nothing more feminist than a harem. ‘What is the common objection our worthy enemies make against our polygamy?’ he asks. ‘That it is disdainful of the womanhood. But how can this be so, my friends, when it allows the womanhood to be present in so large numbers?’

Today’s readers will recognise Chesterton’s depiction of the tendency of liberal politicians to kowtow to the demands of Islamic clerics in a bid to avoid causing offence. At one point, Ivywood explains that he has tabled the ‘Ballot Paper Amendment Act’ in parliament to allow citizens to vote with a mark resembling a crescent rather than the traditional cross.

‘If we are to give Moslem Britain representative government, we must not make the mistake we made about the Hindoos and military organization - which led to the Mutiny. We must not ask them to make a cross on their ballot papers; for though it seems a small thing, it may offend them. So I brought in a little bill to make it optional between the old-fashioned cross and an upward curved mark that might stand for a crescent - and as it’s rather easier to make, I believe it will be generally adopted.’

The main plot of The Flying Inn revolves around the innkeeper Humphrey Pump and the Irish sailor Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to sell alcohol in spite of the new Islamic prohibitions in England. They find a loophole in the law that permits them to conduct their business so long as they first erect an official inn sign. And so we follow the pair as they dash from location to location, with their barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese on a donkey’s back, planting their portable sign wherever refreshment is needed.

Like all farce, the implausibility is the point, and much of Chesterton’s satire retains its relevance today. There is the continual excuse-making for the most regressive aspects of political Islam, the word games and historical revisionism as a means of ideological manipulation, and the tendency among the most privileged to rally around causes that are antagonistic to their interests. Ivywood seems like every affluent western liberal who eagerly stokes the incineration of his own society out of some desperate psychological need for a purpose. The key moment comes when Ivywood is asked: ‘Do you think you made the world, that you should make it over again so easily?’ ‘The world was made badly,’ Ivywood replies, ‘and I will make it over again’. This could serve as a fitting epitaph for any of today’s woke activists.

The Flying Inn ends with a sequence that strikes a discordantly ominous note. The women who have followed Ivywood suddenly realise that they are being collected for a harem. One aristocrat, Joan Brett, now understands that the true nature of Islamic project was being introduced to England by stealth and deception. She explains to the other women that Ivywood believes in ‘doing things slowly’ and that he is probably ‘getting us accustomed to living like this, so that it may be the less shock when he goes further – steeping us in the atmosphere before he actually introduces . . . the institution’.

The final showdown comes when we discover that Ivywood has all along been concealing and preparing an Islamic army to conquer the country by force. As dusk approaches, Joan spies the torchlit warriors emerge in the grounds of Ivywood’s estate.

‘There flew the green standard of that great faith and strong civilization which has so often almost entered the great cities of the West; which long encircled Vienna, which was barely barred from Paris; but which had never before been seen in arms on the soil of England. At one end of the line stood Phillip Ivywood, in a uniform of his own special creation, a compromise between the Sepoy and Turkish uniform. The compromise worked more and more wildly in Joan’s mind. If any impression remained it was merely that England had conquered India: and Turkey had conquered England.’

This seems to be the realisation of what Dalroy had previously described as the ‘four acts’ of ‘the great destiny of Empire’: ‘Victory over barbarians. Employment of barbarians. Alliance with barbarians. Conquest by barbarians’. Those who maintain that the west is committing suicide through its tolerance of the intolerant will find much to support their view in Chesterton’s story.

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This is an excerpt from “The End of Woke” by Andrew Doyle. You can buy your copy here.

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