A century ago G.K. Chesterton had an accidentally accurate vision of an Islamic Britain

May 23, 2024 by Jill

by Steven Tucker, Mercator:

29 May sees 150 years since the birth of G.K. Chesterton, the once-famed English writer and Catholic apologist – now a deeply unfashionable figure.

Perhaps the single book which sums up best why Chesterton is not much read on university syllabuses today is his 1914 novel The Flying Inn, also celebrating 110 years in print in 2024. I say “in print”, but no major presses, like Penguin Classics, currently have it in their catalogue. I had to get my copy from a low-budget “print on demand” service. Why? Probably because the novel successfully managed to predict, in several key details, a topic of pressing but often suppressed importance over a century later – the growing Islamisation of the West.

The Flying Inn is a semi-sci-fi novel, set at some indeterminate point in the (then-)near future, in which, thanks to the influence of a degenerate elite, led by the treacherous politician Lord Ivywood, Britain is facing imminent Islamic takeover by stealth. A bizarre new variant of the faith, dubbed “Progressive Islam” is on the verge of replacing Anglicanism as the official state religion. The priggish authoritarian, Lord Ivywood, has pushed a Prohibition Bill through parliament, outlawing the drinking of alcohol: the titular Flying Inn is an illegal pub on wheels set up to defy Ivywood’s new sharia laws.

The book being written in 1914, a time when there were about as many Muslims living in Britain as there are Rastafarians living in Mecca today, Chesterton did not mean his prediction of an Islamised England to be taken literally as a warning of actual things to come. Instead, the imminent Progressive Islamic Caliphate is a generic satirical illustration of the kind of unwelcome dystopias which invariably appear whenever members of a jaded ruling class try conjuring up new political or social utopias of any kind.

Nonetheless, in choosing Islam as his specific agent of civilisational suicide, Chesterton did manage to accidentally predict, with uncanny (if unintended!) accuracy, what life on Britain’s shores would actually end up looking like some 110 years later, thanks to decades of uncontrolled mass immigration from former Ottoman lands. So, let us look more closely at The Flying Inn and see: in what precise ways did Chesterton get things right, or wrong?

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