By: Hamid Fahmy Zarkasyi PhD
Introduction
One
may infer that relations between Islam and the West have never been a model of
harmony. However, such an inference is subject to further consideration, since historical
facts suggested that Islam-West relationship was filled not only with clashes
and confrontation, competition and challenge but also with admiration,
acceptance, collaboration and cooperation in diverse areas of interaction resulted
in harmonious and peaceful relationship. Therefore, the future relationship
should be constructed from historical perspective by learning the positive
aspect of mutual respect and understanding and not historical prejudice.
Defining the “West” and “Islam”
There are number of definitions of what Islam and the
West are all about, but comprehensive definition is still required. There are
still many who offer inadequate definition and possibly could lead to
misunderstanding. The annual report of World Economic Forum, defines the
“West” as Europe and lands of significant European settlement, primarily North
America, but also Australia and New Zealand. The definition is geographical-historical
rather than cultural. While the term “Islam”, refers to a religion that finds
diverse cultural expression around the world. In addition, the report defines
the “Muslim world” as both Muslim majority countries and a transnational Muslim
community that includes growing minorities within Western and other countries.[1]
The foregoing definition about the West is somewhat
misleading, since geographical definition tells nothing about the essence of
Western civilization. In fact, Christianity, Judaism, liberal democracy, liberalism,
secularism, free markets, individualism and consumer culture, are all
constituted the so-called Western civilization. Moreover, the definition of
Islam and Muslim also denigrated the fundamental meaning of Islam as religion
and civilization, for it only depict Islam in the sense of cultural expression
and community. After all, diverse tones of definition about Islam and the West
only reflect that one is not fully conversant if not ignorant of the other. The
following research finding shows that the Muslims understanding of the West and
vice versa is considerably poor.
Muslim-West Perception
There are interesting facts about Muslims and the Western
people regarding the important of relationship and interaction, their mutual
respect. Gallup Research finding suggest that both Muslim majority and
non-Muslim majority nations or majorities of residents in nations around the world
say that better interaction between the Muslim and Western worlds is important
to them. However, they do not see that the reality is not supportive to this
positive idea. Three-in-four US residents say the Muslim world is not committed
to improving relations with the West; an identical percentage of Palestinians
attribute the same apathy to the West. At least half of respondents in Italy
(58%), Denmark (52%), and Spain (50%) agree that the Muslim world is not
committed to improving relations. Israelis represent a notable exception;
almost two-thirds (64%) believe the Muslim world is committed to improving
relations. The same pattern is among the majority-Muslim nations surveyed. Majorities
in every Middle Eastern country studied believe the West is not committed to
better relations with the Muslim World, while respondents in majority-Muslim
Asian countries are about evenly split.
Be that as it may, majorities in most nations surveyed
in both the Muslim and Western worlds say that the quality of interactions
between the two is important to them. In some Western countries, including
Denmark, the United States, Belgium, Italy, Israel, Canada and Spain, the
percentage who say the issue is important to them is even higher than the
percentage who give the Western world credit for commitment to improved
relations. In the Middle East, Iranians are most likely to say the interaction
between the West and the Muslim world is important, at 70%, followed by Turks
at 64%.
In 2005, the Gallup Organization asked residents of
several Muslim majority countries to explain in their own words what the West
could do to improve relations with the Muslim world. The most frequent
response, from countries as different as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can be summed
up with this statement : “Show greater respect for Islam and stop regarding
Muslims as inferior.”
What is interesting point from the Gallup survey is
the perception of Muslim on the West and vice versa. Many Muslim populations
believe that the Western world lacks respect for the Muslim world. The vast
majority of Palestinians (84%) and Egyptians (80%) say this is the case, while
the numbers from Turkey (68%), Saudi Arabia (67%) and Iran (62%) are only
somewhat lower. The same case is with the perception of Western nation on
Islam. Fewer than half of those in Denmark (30 %), the United States (42%),
Sweden (32%) and Canada (41%) believe the West respects the Muslim world. In
Israel and the Netherlands, the numbers are somewhat higher (45% and 46%,
respectively), though still below half. This implies that Western people concede
the fact that Western world lacks respect for the Muslim world.
In contrast, most residents in all but one
majority-Muslim nation believe that the Muslim world respects the Western
world. Two-thirds of respondents in Indonesia (65 %), the country with the
world’s largest Muslim population, believe that the Muslim world respects the
West; similar numbers are seen in Saudi Arabia (72%), the Palestinian
territories (69%) and Egypt (62%). On this question, as on others within the
Index, non-Arab nations of the Middle East diverge from their Arab neighbours.
In Iran, the percentage who say the Muslim world respects the West is somewhat
lower at 52%, while Turkey is the only country in which this figure represents
less than a majority, at 45%.
However, while most respondents in almost all Muslim majority
countries say the Muslim world respects the Western world, majorities of those
in Western countries – and Israel – disagree. Eighty-two percent of Americans
and 73% of Israelis believe that the Muslim world does not respect the West.
Similarly high figures are seen in Spain (63%), site of the Madrid terrorist
bombing of 2004, Denmark (69%), where the international firestorm over the
Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad originated in 2005, and the
Netherlands (55%), where the 2004 killing of a Dutch filmmaker by a young
Muslim has sparked controversy. However,
the Index reveals that even in the nations studied with no obvious conflicts or
significant dysfunction with local Muslim minority communities – such as Italy
(70%), Canada (67%) and Sweden (54%) – high percentages of respondents feel the
West is disrespected.
These findings illustrate that mutual understanding
between Islam and the West is practically poor. The survey is not quite
different from the perception of both Western and Muslim intellectual.
Intellectual
Perception
The intellectual perceptions on Islam in the West are
not quite different from the finding of the survey above. Their analysis mostly
refer to religious and political interaction between Muslim and the Western
people in the past, two sensitive area that inevitably have a symptom of a
conflict. The depiction of Islam-West relation in terms of conflict is manifest
in Bernard Lewis’ work What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and
Modernity in the Middle East. From
religious perspective Lewis boldly argues that the conflict between
Islam and West is between Islamic and Christian civilizations.[2]
Lewis assumes Muslim civilization first rejected modernity due to its Christian
nature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which came to produce
and embody modernity in the last three hundred years. Lewis also implies that
Muslims again turned against the West and modernity in recent decades due to
their perennial failures in the emulation of the Christian West. Lewis’s book
thus gives scholarly weight to the argument that the cause of Muslim discontent
with the international order and the Western world stems from Muslims’
inability to harmonize Islam and modernity.
Lewis consistently focuses his
depiction of Islam and the West in term of religious conflict between Islam and
Christianity. Beginning with Muslim rule in Spain, then passing through the
Crusades, the Ottoman conquests of Europe, European imperialism, decolonization,
and, finally, recent anti-American ideologies. In his version of a zero-sum game,
either the Muslims would be victorious and hegemonic or the Christians. Thus,
Lewis asserts that since Christians were the winners in the last three hundred
years, Muslims could not come to terms with their defeat and so turned against
the West, as well as the modernity and international order identified with it. The
book concludes that Muslims, instead of blaming themselves for “what went
wrong” in their societies, blamed the West
and America.
The conclusion is considerably untenable,
since some of the same critiques of and debates on the “West” that we see among
Muslims existed, in similar forms, among intellectuals in non-Muslim societies
such as Russia, Japan and other socialist countries also existed. There also anti-Western
language of such humanist thinkers and nationalists as Mahatma Gandhi,
Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghose, Okakura Tenshin, Namik Kemal, Jamal
ad-Din al-Afghani,W.E.B.DuBois, Ali Shariati, Frantz Fanon, and many others.[3]
Most of these intellectuals formulated their commitment to the equality and
dignity of humanity in the reverse-Orientalist language of a materialist West
versus a moral East.[4]
Moreover, another fact suggest that
the sources for non-Western critiques of the West, were fertilized by the West
itself—in the form of Counter-Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The anti-modern and anti-Western attitude of Muslims,
show affinities and direct borrowings among European Romantics, Hindu
Revivalists, Russian Slavophiles, or pre–World War II–era Japanese
philosophers. Their visions of the West are gathered under the rubric of
“Occidentalism.”[5]
Occidentalist thought could be deemed as common idea about Counter-Enlightenment
thought in Europe, such as criticism of the human costs and excesses of
science, technology, rationality, individualism, city life, capitalism,
globalization, women’s liberation, mass culture, and so on. It can also include
criticism on Western doctrine of dichotomy like profound native spirituality
versus shallow and mechanistic Western rationalism; authentic moral tradition
versus technological and inhuman modernity; cultural uniqueness versus the
homogenizing forces of industrial capitalism; heroic, idealized common folk
versus cowardly and calculating bourgeoisie; and, finally, religious purity
versus idolatrous materialism. So, the major source of anti-Western “Occidentalist”
ideas is precisely Eurocentric world order and the claims of an inherent
superiority of Western civilization. Therefore, the Western program of globalization
to spread secularism, liberalism and other Western ideologies since the first
half of the nineteenth century plays a pivotal role in making a qualitative
rupture in the relationship between the Muslim world and the West.[6]
Alastair Crooke clearly
stated that :
“…what Muslims hate is the West’s
monopoly on the socio-economic implementation of values such as justice,
freedom, good governance, which all Muslims share. Muslims don’t believe simply
that the West is the only model of the implementation of these values, and the
only way you can have good governance is to have Western good governance. In
fact, they are not sure the West has
good governance in many respects.” [7]
So, the biased supposition of the
West on Islam represented by Lewis’ viewpoint is indicative in his ambiguous
analysis that in the Islamic world things are “went wrong” in contrast to the
West where thing went right. Perhaps, it was due to Lewis’ position as the intellectual mentor of the current
U.S. policy toward the Middle East, closely connected to figures like Richard
Perle, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove.[8]
It is perhaps the reason why their understanding of the Islamic responses to Western
ideologies has been marred not only by past historical distortions and
prejudices, but also by the contemporary political and ideological
mystifications of the realities at the hand. The West has always seen the world
into two imaginary sections: the Orient and the Occident. This misconception
has existed as a kind of daydream that could often justify western colonial
adventure of military conquest. This is based on western fear, desire, and
dream of power, and has led to “more detailed ignorance and more ambitions than
any other perception of difference”[9] Western misunderstanding of Islam is conceded
by Mr. Squires as he says:
Any open-minded person embarking on
a study of Islam, especially if using books written in European languages,
should be aware of the seemingly inherent distortions that permeate almost all
non-Muslim writings on Islam. At least since the Middle Ages, Islam has been
much maligned and severely misunderstood in the West. In the last years of the
Twentieth Century, it does not seem that much has changed even though most
Muslims would agree that progress is being made.[10]
This
misunderstanding also admitted by Swiss journalist and author, Roger Du
Pasquier, in his work The West's ignorance of Islam and the motives of
Orientalism as quoted by Mr. Squires
The
West whether Christian or dechristianised, has never really known Islam. Ever
since they watched it appeared on the world stage, Christians never ceased to
insult and slander it in order to find justification for waging war on it. It
has been subjected to grotesque distortions the traces of which still endure in
the European mind. Even today there are many Westerners for whom Islam can be reduced
to three ideas: fanaticism, fatalism and polygamy.[11]
Nevertheless,
it is to admit that the Islamic world also has many misconceptions about the West
in general and Christianity in particular. The Western world also observe and
accuse that many Muslim websites contain intentional misrepresentations of
Christian beliefs, most of which the Muslims borrowed from atheists and
Jehovah's Witnesses! Despite, experiencing harmonious life for several
centuries in Baghdad, Spain and other places Muslim-Christian relation, there
were also a moment when each group has a distorted view of the other.
Completely blaming the West for the misunderstandings between these two
civilizations is intellectually dishonest and will never bring about mutual
understanding and respect.
The
two modern ideologies of progress, liberalism and Marxism, are strongly secular
and predisposed therefore to view any religious manifestation with disdain. The
work like When Religion Become Evil,
by Charles Kimball[12]
or Is Religion Killing Us, by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer[13]
and the likes shows only negative side of religion in secular society,
including Islam. If the relation between Islam and the West is seen from such a
secular viewpoint, Islam and the West would see each other as threat. The West
seems to forget modernity began with theocratic regimes in Britain with Henry
VIII, who declared himself the Head of the Church of England, and in Geneva
with Calvin. British and Japanese monarchies are to this day theocracies of
sorts with the head of the state serving also as head of the dominant religion,
Anglican Protestantism and Shintoism respectively. If we blame religion or
denigrate its role in this postmodern era we become hostage to historical
prejudices without gaining historical perspective.
Not
only has Muslim civilization fundamental difference from the Western
civilization regarding the concept of religion, but also other related concept
constituting at whole as worldview. David D Newsome has clearly delineated
those differences as the following:
There
is no doubt that the Muslim worldview is fundamentally different from that of the average American and therefore
require an effort to comprehend. In its original form, Islam combined
government and religion – strong contrast to the US secularist tradition of
separating church and state. Another area of cultural discrepancy is the notion
of the political legitimacy of nation state – a concept of foreign to
traditional Islam. Instead, in Islam, the worldwide religious community (ummah) take precedence. Attitudes
towards one’s fellow man and non-Muslim
states or societies are determined by their perceived relationship to this
global religious community. The United States by contrast, is a multiethnic,
multireligious, secular society – albeit with strong Judo-Christian overtones.[14]
It was
because of different worldview that Islam and the West have been thus caught up
in a fourfold vicious circle of misunderstanding: Western misunderstandings of
Islam, Islamic misunderstandings of the West, Western misunderstandings of the
West, and Islamic misunderstanding of Islam. The roots of these
misunderstandings are historical as well as contemporary. The historical sides relate
to religious conflict in the past, while the contemporary aspects refer to the
present political interaction, but still with strong religious overtones as
David remarked above. In the United State, for example, their negative view of
Islam spring primarily from two perceptions. “One is that Islam, particularly
fundamentalist Islam, represent a threat to the interest of the United States.
The other is that Islam is basically an inhumane religion”. This assumption
refers to many cases, like in Libya and the Philippines where Islam is
identified with direct attack on strategic US interest. Another source of
Americans’ negative image of Islam is a distorted view of Islamic social
customs. Islam as described by popular media lends itself to sensationalism
especially on the practice of Islamic law penalties.
It was also from the Western worldview, where cultural
background, belief, ideology and other factor plays fundamental role, that Western
media attitude towards Islam is considerably biased. Cultural background of
Western journalists reflects the societies in which they are born. The question
of terminology and of defining specific discourses is of fundamental
importance. Recurring metaphors such as: fifth column, bridgehead, enclave,
Trojan Horse and enemy within, can be used in reference to Muslims by some
tabloids. The use of terms such as “cruel”, “fanatical”, and “barbaric” are not
unusual. Islamic “fundamentalism”, “extremism”, the Muslim “terrorist”, the
Muslim “threat”, the “Islamic Bomb”, have become key buzzwords used freely by
the main news agencies and followed by the rest. The words ‘Islam’, ‘Islamic’
and ‘Muslim’ are often used interchangeably even by some respectable and
serious news organizations.
So, the source of tension between Islam and the West
stems from misunderstanding. In the case of Western civilization, this
misunderstanding result in the enforcement of various concepts and values to
the Muslim worlds such as human liberties, rule of law, equal opportunity,
independent media, secularism and the likes. While the West claimed that those
concepts and values are universal, the Muslim resist with reference to their
basic teaching of religion. The two, in fact, have different worldview. The
Western people in general continue to demonstrate a widespread lack of basic
knowledge about Islam. That lack is compounded in the West by social
secularization and the accompanying death of religious value, which decreases
interest in and empathy with non–Western religions. Similarly, many Westerners
view Islam as a monolith, and indeed the demonstrations that took place in the
wake of the cartoons controversy were regarded as confirmation of this.
Conclusion
It is our
task to promote mutual understanding first among the Western and Muslim society
and it is not wise enough to enforce one understanding upon the other.
Therefore Muslim should understand Western civilization from the first hand
knowledge, and similarly the West should be conversant of Islamic civilization
from original source.
From
religious perspective Islam and the West, in this case Islam-Christianity,
should agree that religious identities should not be regarded as big hindrance
of future relationship. For in fact, there never was a solid and unified front
dividing Islam from Christianity. Longstanding historical process of
Muslim-Christian dialogue during the Umayyad Dynasty, scientific collaboration
in the Abbasid era and harmonious life of Muslim, Jew and Christian in Spain
are religious as well as cultural tolerance for diversity by which cultural
exchange become possible are all lesson that should be taken into consideration.[15]
Those harmonious relationship could be taken as good model for cultural
tolerance during which Muslims, Christians, Jews as well as Arabs, Persians,
Greeks, and Turks worked together. They produced an Islamic synthesis and
renaissance that served as a bridge between classical Greek, Roman, and Persian
cultures and the modern European Renaissance. This was principally accomplished
by the establishment of a Dar al-Hikmah by the Khalifa Mamun operating during
the third and fourth centuries of the Islamic era (8th to 9th centuries of the
Christian era). Subsequent development suggested that Ottoman leaders, as well
as the leaders of other Muslim societies, willingly aimed to join the
Eurocentric international society, despite the Christian identity of European
societies. This was also an indication that religious identity for Muslim was
not and is not hindrance for having interaction with others in peaceful life.
The West should not worry about Islamic resurgence or Islamic
unity, for it is not directed against any country or any bloc. Islam is
religion of peace that preaches tolerance and universal brotherhood. The rapid
and spectacular expansion beyond Arabic peninsula in the first century of the
Islamic era (622-722 AD), took place peacefully not in the form of colonial or
revolutionary expansion. It was not through war but largely through conversions
prompted by trade and cultural contact.[16]
Islam does not permit its ideology to be imposed on other by force, just as it
does not want other ideologies to be imposed on Muslims. Islam believes in the
principle of peaceful coexistence. The late Zia ul Haq, former President of Pakistan once said: ”We do
not wish to impose our ideology on others and similarly we would not tolerate
others imposing their ideologies on us”[17]
In fact, there should not be any conflict or contradiction between Islam and
Western values and tradition as far as they are bond to their religious values.
Islam, as religion and civilization, rooted in certain basic values which are
not alien to the Christian tradition.
With
reference to the above historical cases the relations between Islam and the
West have to be understood therefore in the light of historical perspectives,
not historical prejudice, broader than the current short-sighted interests or
their ideological rationalizations. From historical perspective Islam-West relations
may be viewed as the passing of the torch of human civilization from hand to
hand. The torch was transferred from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and
Persian civilizations to the Greeks, Romans, and the Semites from whom the
Muslims learned their science, technology, and theology. Islamic civilization,
in turn, served as a bridge to the European Renaissance which recaptured the
classical philosophy and sciences from Muslim translations and commentaries.
Reflection
and dialogue between Western and Muslim intellectual communities is
necessary. The dialogue should be based on mutual understanding that each of
the parties has some cardinal belief and principles that cannot be changed and that
there are area that can agreed upon as a common platform. The dialogue between
Islam and the West should be separated conceptually from the dialogue between
Islam and Christianity, since former deal with inter-civilization, while the
latter concerns about inter-religious matters. In the case of Islam-West dialogue should
begin with intensive communication between the criticizers, the Muslim, and the
targets of the criticism, the West, by which constructive and positive outcome
could be produced.
Gontor, 1 May 2009
[1] World Economic Forum: Islam and the
West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue
[2] Bernard
Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam
and Modernity in the Middle East (New York : Oxford
University
[3] Stephen
N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and
his Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970); Ali Rahnema, An
Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati (New York: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2000); and Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan & China: Black
Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel
Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[4] It was a similar anti-white,
“colored” internationalism that prompted W.E.B. DuBois to visit Japan and Manchuria
during the late 1930s, praising “Japanese challenge” to the “white hegemony in
the world.” Scholars of international history and decolonization have already
clarified several key aspects of the anti-Western humanist critiques and the
way anti-Western ideas were utilized in the struggle for liberation from
Western hegemony. Prasenjit Duara’s research on alternative universalism in
China and Japan during the decolonization process, Michael Adas’s examination
of the “Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology” before and after
World War I, Mark Bradley’s exploration of Vietnamese perceptions of America,
and Erez Manela’s research on the non-Western world’s excitement and later
disillusionment with the Wilsonian moment demonstrate that anti-Westernism (and
its anti-American versions) contains within it an affirmation of universal
norms and values. See Cemil
Aydin, The Politics of Conceptualizing Islam
and the West, Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004).
P.93
[5] Ian Buruma and
Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West
in the Eyes of Its Enemies, The Penguin Press, 2004.
[6] Cemil Aydin,
“The Politics of Conceptualizing”, p.90
[7] http://www.conflictsforum.org/index.php?s=faliq
[8] Peter
Waldman, “A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers
U.S.
[9] Edward W Said, Orientalism,
Vintage Books, New York
[10] As quoted in http://www.answering-Islam.org, on 1
May 2009
[11] Ibid.
[12] Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, Harper
SanFransisco, 2203.
[13] Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us, The Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2005.
[14] David D Newsom, “Islam in Asia,
Ally of Adversary?” in John L Esposito,
(ed) Islam in Asia, Religion, Politic and Society, Oxford
University Press, 1987, p.4
[15] Sir Thomas
W. Arnold, Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim
Faith, Low Price Publications, India Binding, 2004, p729 Arnold
is in the opinion that non-Muslim inhabitant in the Muslim world enjoyed full
peace and tolerance which never happen in pre-Modern Europe ….
The violence was due mostly to the internal Christian conflict.
[16] The whole story of Islamic
preaching in almost all territory beyond Arabic peninsula was delineated very
well by Sir
Thomas W. Arnold. See Sir Thomas
W. Arnold, Preaching of Islam.
[17] Dawn, Karachi
