DRAFT: 12.25.97

ISLAM AND THE WEST:

HOSTAGE TO HISTORY?1

By Majid Tehranian

Algeria is the open port of entry to a barbaric continent with two hundred million inhabitants... In His providence God now allows France the opportunity to make of Algeria the cradle of a great and Christian nation.

Archbishop Lavigerie,
Archbishop of Algeria (1887) & Primate of Africa (1887)

Today backward and deprived, we face an economic and military giant with the moral and spiritual scruples of a flea. It is not a pleasant encounter.

Sadeq al-Mahdi,
Prime Minister of the Sudan, 1966-67

Relations between Islam and the West have never been a model of harmony. The two quotations at the beginning of this essay are not isolated expressions of idiosyncratic opinion. They represent only one of the chapters in a long and arduous history of mutual suspicion and recrimination. This history began when the Christian West became aware of Islams potent presence on its doorstep in Europe at the time of Charlemagne, King of the Franks (768-814) and Emperor of Europe (800-814). Although Charlemagne put a stop to the advance of Islam at the heart of Europe, the borders between Christianity and Islam have remained remarkably the same ever since. With the exception of the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain after seven centuries of domination (711-1492), neither the Christian Crusades in the 11-13th centuries, nor the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, could substantially alter the existing borders between the two great Semitic religions that have rival universal claims and proven universal appeals.

I became disturbingly aware of this long history of mutual recrimination when I was asked by a sweet old British lady in Chipping Norton, England, if Islam considers women to have souls. At the time, I was giving a series of lectures on Islam while a Visiting Fellow at St. Antonys College, Oxford. I was puzzled by the question, but I answered it the best way I could. Islam considers men and women to be equal in the sight of God, both endowed with souls and moral responsibility. When I subsequently inquired about the origin of the question from my good friend and colleague at St. Antonys, the late Albert Hourani, he laughed and informed me that this idea was part of the medieval Christian propaganda against the Muslims that has survived to this day.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and proximity brings about love and hate. The history of relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (unlike those between Hinduism or Buddhism and Christianity) are thus replete with prejudices bordering on a will to misunderstand. The latest chapter in this history begins with the modern European encroachment on Muslim territories and thus gives rise to an even more unprecedented complex of feelings ranging in variety and intensity from unadulterated fear to grudging admiration and consuming hatred. Although in many respects, the Islamic responses to Western imperialism are fundamentally no different from Hindu, Buddhist or for that matter Latin American Catholic responses, there are some uniquely Islamic reactions that flow from an Islamic weltanschauung. In no other world religion (to use a Weberian category), the unity of temporal and spiritual realms is as central a tenet as it is in Islam. For this if no other reason, militant Islam has proved to be a far more formidable force that militant Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity.

In its encounter with the West, militant Islam faces a twofold challenge: external domination and internal decay. Muslims have had to admit that Western domination of the Islamic world became a reality only when Islamic societies had degenerated into corrupt and fragmented entities ruled by the Shahs or the Sultans far removed from the Islamic ideals of piety and justice. The responses of modern Islam to this dual challenge has been correspondingly twofold: external defense and internal reform. Beyond this general consensus of the nature of the problem and the challenges it presents, there is considerable disagreement among the Muslims today as to the strategy and tactics of the struggle. Although the Islamic Revolution in Iran initially captured the imagination of many Muslims throughout the world, its mixed success with the dual aspects of the challenge has had a sobering effect on the Muslim world. There are no easy solutions in this world, no panaceas. Theocracies are as vulnerable to arrogance and corruption of power as any other regimes.

In the West, by contrast, an understanding of the Islamic responses to the challenges of independence, democracy and development 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 media are not, however, the only culprits given naturally to their penchant for hyperbole and bad news. The academic pundits and specialists have also faltered. This should not be all that surprising. The two modern ideologies of progress, liberalism and Marxism, are strongly secular in bias and predisposed therefore to view any religious manifestation with disdain. If the religion at issue happens to be also as mystifying and threatening as Islam is perceived to be in the West, common stereotypes can easily take the place of serious analysis while policies pursue the course of short-sighted interests. We become hostage to historical prejudices without gaining historical perspective. For instance, it is often forgotten in the West that 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.

The Torch of Civilization

Relations between Islam and the West have to be understood therefore in the light of historical perspectives broader than the current short-sighted interests or their ideological rationalizations. These 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.

From another perspective, Islamic-Western history may viewed in terms of changing power relations. These relations have gone through four distinctly different historical periods. The first period may be considered as a period of Islamic ascendancy, lasting from 622 AD (the year of Prophet Mohammeds exodus from Mecca to Medina and the beginning of the Islamic Era) to 1492, marking the fall of Grenada and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain. This period witnessed the remarkably rapid expansion of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula into the entire expanse of North Africa and Asia.

The second period represents a Western counter-movement against the Muslim occupation of the Holy Lands by means of a series of Christian Crusades dragged on from the 11th century into the Ottoman period until 1683 when the expansion of that last Muslim empire into Europe was stopped at Vienna.

The end of the Crusades could also be conceived as the beginning of a third period that finally led to Western ascendancy and subsequent domination of the Islamic world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Industrial Revolution and the technological and economic lead it gave to the West has ensured Western political domination to this day.

The latest chapter in relations between Islam and the West is, however, characterized by an increasing Muslim resistance against Western domination that began in the 19th century. I will focus on the complex of factors at work during this particular period of history to show the patterns of Western domination and Islamic resistance as they have unfolded in their dialogue. In recent years, revolutionary Islam has been one particular manifestation of this dialogue that has haunted the West. The implications of this phenomenon for the West as well as the Islamic world are a focal point of the following analysis. A realistic understanding of its import is vital for authentic communication and peace between the two worlds.

Militant Islam: Causes and Consequences

By militant Islam I mean a complex variety of movements that are often referred to by the Western media as fundamentalist. The term Islamic Fundamentalist, however, represents a profound cultural misunderstanding. In the Christian tradition, fundamentalist applies to those groups that consider the Bible as the literal Word of God.

In Islam, the Koran is considered the Word of God (kalam ul-allah) by all Muslims, but its interpretation is left to the Ulema (the Learned) who have developed the science of kalam (equivalent to theology) and Divine Law (the Sharia) based on the Koran, the Tradition of the Prophet and Rightly-Guided Caliphs (Sunna), the principles of analogy (qiyas) and reason (ray), as well as the consensus of the community (ijma). By this definition, all Muslims are fundamentalist but not in the Christian sense. Islam like orthodox Judaism is a religion of law covering all aspects of life. And since law is subject to constant interpretation, the Muslim Ulema go through a rigorous education to reach the status of a mujtahid who can exercise ijtihad (struggle) to interpret the Sharia. Issuing a fatwa (religious decrees) is thus the prerogative of only a handful of leading Islamic jurists.

Militant Islam is unified in its general notion that Islam is the key to the salvation of Islamic societies in their present plight. But that is where ideological and political unity stops and differences begin. Militant Islam is currently represented by such diversity of views as those of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who follow reactionary medieval practices, to the Refah (Welfare) Party in Turkey that briefly came to power through parliamentary elections and carried out many progressive reforms. To cover both groups as fundamentalist would only cover up our own ignorance. Similarly, to consider the Saudi regime in the same category as the Iranian regime, both as fundamentalist, simply suggests that we have lost our sense of history. These two regimes belong to two different historical eras, one to a pre-mobilized society and the other to a post-mobilized state. In Saudi Arabia, women have no right to vote or drive a car. In Iran, women vote, serve in the Majlis and the cabinet, sit on the bench as judges, act as film producers and directors, and generally make life difficult for a regime that still wishes to keep them in chadur, the veil.

An even more ignorant epitaph is to speak of Muslim fundamentalist terrorists. The 1997 Organization of Islamic Conference held in Tehran condemned terrorism as contrary to Islamic principles and practice. Fifty-five Muslim states representing a population of over 1 billion people, encompassing about 20 percent of the world, were unanimous in this condemnation. Nevertheless, contrary to their own religious precepts, individual Muslims like individual Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus continue to act as terrorists. What is worse, states that claim loyalty to one or a combination of these creeds also engage in state terrorism. No one can forget the United States governments use of napalm bombs and Agent Orange in the War in Vietnam, indiscriminately killing millions of innocent civilians and poisoning their sources of livelihood. Nor can we forget Saddam Husseins use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds in the l980s. The massacre of hundreds of women and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shattila in Lebanon by the Maronite militia forces, under the supervision of Israeli troops, is a reminder that even Jewish high standards of moral conduct fall apart in times of war. All states have thus bloody hands and none can claim moral superiority. But that does not stop any of them from making such claims producing comical effects. As demonstrated in Egypt and Algeria, state and oppositional terrorism continues to be the weapon of the morally and politically weak and bankrupt parties.

On this issue a well as others, the Muslim world is divided. It clearly stretches from Gibraltar in the western-most tip of North Africa to the Philippine Islands in the Pacific; it compromises over 1 billion people of all races, languages, nationalities and cultures; it includes all manner of socioeconomic and political systems from monarchical absolutism to republican and socialist regimes with varying degrees of claims to religious vs. secular adherence; it shows an extraordinary level of diversity and complexity of social situations and movements in at least five different continents, i.e. Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania. Given this diversity and versatility, there is no single answer to the question of the direction of the Muslim world.

However, there are elements of unity that make it possible to discern some possible uniformity in responses. These include a common faith in the Oneness of God and His Message (tawhid and nabbuwat) as well as some common hopes and fears. Under the impact of Western domination, the common hopes and fears of the last two centuries or so have sometimes favored a revolutionary and militant interpretation of the faith. But to assume that this is a peculiarity of an Islamic response is to confuse the symptoms for the cause.

Other Third World societies with a variety of different historical and religious traditions have also shown some of the same symptoms. Love and hate relations with the West, periods of infatuation and emulation followed by periods of spite and defiance, have characterized the struggle of the colonized to liberate themselves both politically and psychologically from the colonizers in all ages of human history. The Mau Mau movement in Black Africa, the anti-American sentiments in the Latin Catholic theology of liberation, the Mahdist revolt in Sudan and the current Islamic resurgence against Western domination all stem from fundamentally the same set of social, economic, political and cultural imbalances and inequities.

What is uniquely Islamic, of course, is that the anti-imperialist sentiments are being expressed in a powerful ontological symbolism understandable to millions of the faithful. The deeper the level of the social and political struggle, the greater the Islamic ideological casting it has had to assume. This is demonstrated in part by the fact that after a long period of elitist disdain of religion in general and Islam in particular, the secularists such as Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Hafez Assad have begun to appear more Muslim than the Ayatollahs. Witness the Mujahedin Khalq, currently acting against the Islamic regime from its Iraqi military bases, that represents itself as Islamic Marxist. Nevertheless, the truth of Islam (like the truth of all other great religions) rests not so much on its current social and political doctrines as on its ability to give solace to humanitys perennial ontological insecurities. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, and the hope of disenfranchised. On that score, Islam seems to have proved itself of sufficient depth and adaptability to suit different historical and social circumstances ranging from the most primitive to the most advanced.

A militant interpretation of the faith is therefore just another phase in the evolution of Islam that has to be understood not so much in terms of abstract notions of what a utopian Islamic Society is (as the proponents and opponents of Islamic ideology would have us believe) as in terms of the historically specific circumstances out of which these interpretations have emerged.

Islamic Responses to Western Domination

Clearly, not all of the Islamic responses to the challenges of Western domination and modernization have been of a revolutionary turn of mind. On the contrary, despite its revolutionary origins (and which world religion cannot claim some revolutionary origin?), Islam until the 19th century could be considered on the whole as a conservative social and cultural force in the life of most Muslim societies. Subsequent to its rapid and spectacular expansion in the first century of the Islamic era (622-722 AD), the energies of Islamic rulers were spent more on consolidation than on colonial or revolutionary expansion. In India, the Far East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, as well as North and South America, Islamic expansion took place peacefully largely through conversions prompted by trade and cultural contact (as in Southeast Asia), Muslim rule over largely non-Muslim populations (as in Mongol India or Ottoman Europe), and the appeal of Islam as a multicultural faith against the predominantly white Christianity (as in Africa and North America).

Given a history of spectacular early success in world conquest followed by a long period of territorial stability and relatively peaceful expansion of the faith, the shock of defeat and colonization in the hands of the new industrial West was excruciatingly painful. Insult was also added to injury when Muslims realized that their civilization was, materially if not spiritually, inferior to that of the West.

Muslim responses to these series of defeats, which stretch for nearly two centuries, have been complex and manifold. Initially, of course, the Western threat was conceived primarily in military terms. The Ottoman and Persian Empires, the two states that still enjoyed some measure of autonomy in the early 19th century, turned therefore to a series of military reforms for resistance. It was soon discovered, however, that a modern military force is contingent on the acquisition of modern science, technology, training and methods of organization. Muslim reformers such as Abbas Mirza and Amir Kabir in Persia and Midhat Pasha in the Ottoman Empire turned therefore to the dispatch of students to European schools, and educational and administrative reforms. In the meantime, Western economic and political penetration of the Muslim world continued unabated. The struggle against Western domination was also commensurably deepening in those sectors of the population who were more directly threatened, i. e. the merchant class, the Ulema, and the liberal revolutionary intelligentsia.

In the second half of the 19th century, the anti-colonialist and reformist movements in the Islamic world gathered momentum, led by a charismatic leader, Seyyed Jamal ed-Din Asadabadi (known as Al-Afghani). Afghani traveled widely throughout the Islamic world and some parts of Europe; he gained therefore a first-hand knowledge of the conditions of European progress and Muslim subjugation. He even joined the Freemasons and engaged in a debate with Ernest Renan, in which he acknowledged the obscurantist role of religion in history. As a bona fide member of the Ulema, however, he could speak with authority on religious matters. His diagnosis of the situation consisted essentially of two parts dealing with the conditions of Western domination and a call for Pan-Islamic unity and reform. He addressed himself not only to the elite, the Ulema and the Muslim rulers, but also to the revolutionary enthusiasms of the late 19th century Muslim societies.

Wherever he went, he left his mark. Although he was credited by friend and foe to have fomented revolts in India, Iran, and Egypt against the British and local potentates, he was clearly a man whose time had come. For this reason, the themes of his oratory and active politics have become the dominant themes of modern Islam ever since: Islamic unity (Pan-Islam), modernist reform, through the opening of the gates of ijtihad, an impulse to return to the purity of pristine Islam, and finally an unparalleled revolutionary militancy against foreign domination and the un-Islamic rulers of Muslim lands.

However, this agenda for modern Muslims has not been without its problems and contradictions. In an age of nationalism, when Muslims among other peoples around the world have increasingly become conscious of their own separate languages, cultures, ethnic and national identities, the message of Pan-Islam has fallen largely on deaf ears. One might add that perhaps the Pan-Islamic diagnosis of the historical problem was faulty to begin with. Having awakened to the Western threat, the Pan-Islamists perceived the West in traditional, dualistic Dar-al-Islam (Domain of Islam) vs. Dar-al-Harb (Domain of War) terms. It therefore called for Muslim unity against the Christian West. In the meantime, however, medieval Christendom had already broken up into separate and often competing nation-states in Europe and North America. Pan-Islam as a political program could not answer the challenges and opportunities of a new nationalist world.

Although Pan-Islamism was for a while a rallying cry of the beleaguered Muslims to be sometimes exploited by their cynical rulers (such as Sultan Abdul-Hamid of the Ottomans) to justify their own claims for universal loyalty, its ideology soon merged into separate nationalist and constitutionalist movements that most clerics joined. Without the clerics, these movements could not have received mass support. But as soon as the secular nationalists won the day, the clerics were pushed aside and, in some circumstances such as Iran, Turkey and Central Asia, they were branded as reactionary and unworthy of leadership.

By contrast, Islamic modernism found a fertile soil in some of the more advanced Muslim countries such as Egypt and developed therefore some roots and branches. The two eminent Muslim scholars who continued the work of Afghani in this respect were Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Reda of the Al-Azhar University, who took up the painstaking challenge of reform of the Sharia through a judicious exercise of Ijihad. Their work is a continuing challenge to other Muslim Modernists.

Can the Islamic Revolution Be Exported?

The five world religions, which as Weber defined them include Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, plus the two modern secular ideologies of progress (liberalism and Marxism) may be considered not only as modes of explication of the world and codes of conduct but also as competing strategies for world integration. These seven belief-systems have all claims to universal validity and application; all seven (but particularly the last two) have also attempted at one time or another to spread their faith and message universally. All seven have also initially underestimated and have had subsequently to come to terms with the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of the world that divides humanity into tribes, nations, castes, and classes. Under the impact of modernization, the processes of global mobilization and fragmentation have been at least as strong as the processes of assimilation and integration with the consequence that messages of world unity (whatever their origins and claims to validity) have often fallen on deaf ears.

We may respond in the negative therefore to the question of whether or not the Islamic Revolution can be exported. The evidence of history seems to be against such a possibility. The 18th century European and American liberal revolutions, and the 20th century Marxist revolutions all attempted in their moments of enthusiasm to export their messages and organizations. Similar material conditions, of course, gave rise to similar ideological trends, but in no instance could a revolution in one country be automatically reproduced in another. Revolutions, like wars, are more lost than won. It is frequently the moral, political, economic and physical exhaustion of the ancien regime that brings about the triumph of a group of often disorganized, incoherent, inexperienced but energetic oppositions to fill the new power vacuum.

What has been brought about due to a unique set of historical circumstances in one country cannot be therefore wished into reality in a different set of unique historical circumstances. Old enmities and rivalries among neighbors also often militate against the universal revolutionary calls. Lenins attempt to export the Russian Revolution to the rest of Europe or at least to neighboring colonial Asia, Che Guevaras heroic endeavors to export the Cuban Revolution to the rest of Latin America, and Ayatollah Khomeinis call for an Islamic uprising in the Muslim world against their corrupt and tyrannical rulers are only the most recent historical examples of failures to export revolutionary ideologies and movements effectively.

Western worries about export of the Islamic revolution are therefore unwarranted, but concerns about indigenous conditions that give rise to political instability, terrorism, and revolt are well-justified. There is much in the revolutionary situation of a given country that corresponds to conditions elsewhere suffering under a similar set of historical circumstances. That is how revolutions keep spreading gradually and often autonomously. The Islamic Revolution in Iran owed its genesis to two over-riding factors which are present throughout most of the Muslim world.

First, there are the material and social conditions of foreign economic and political domination reinforced by indigenous Western-oriented elites that owe their power and prominence to the military and technological support systems coming mainly from the liberal West. These secular elites and their sponsors also exhibit sometimes an extraordinary degree of social ostentation, political insensitivity, and intellectual arrogance inflaming the moral and political sensibilities of their Muslim underlings. The regimes in Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey are currently the prime examples.

Secondly, Islam as a religious belief-system presents possibilities for revolutionary interpretations unparalleled in the other world religions. Islam presents the closest rival to Marxism in its revolutionary ideological potential. Like Marxism, Islam believes also in the unity of theory and practice. Unlike Marxism, however, it provides a belief in the afterlife that gives ontological security to the human conditions of death, suffering, and evil. Islam, like Marxism and unlike Buddhism, takes history seriously and believes in the possibility of salvation here and now. Unlike Christianity, Islam recognizes no demarcation between the spiritual and temporal realms. The unity of temporal and spiritual authorities in early Islam is the ideal state to which modern Islam would like to return, either with the imposition of the rule of the Ulema as practiced in the clerical domination in Iran or as suggested by Maulana Abdul al-Maududi in Pakistan, or alternatively, by the leadership of such lay Islamic organizations as the Mujahedin Khalq or Ikhvan al-Muslimin.

Furthermore, two of Islams first articles of faith are the unity of God (universalism) and brotherhood of humanity (egalitarianism). In some branches of Islam (particularly but no exclusively in Shiism), there is also the expectation of a second coming. Mahdism or the messianic expectation of a religious redeemer to come and save the world from corruption and injustice has provided the Muslim world, both Shia and Sunni, with a powerful ideology to galvanize mass movements on behalf of a variety of different social and political causes. If that ideology has served revolutionary causes in recent times (as in Sudan, Iran, or Algeria), it is due mainly to the propitious revolutionary circumstances in those countries.

A revolutionary Islamic ideology, like all other modern totalist ideologies, contains some seeds of its own self-destruction. By uniting the legislative, executive and judicial functions into a monolithic ideology and organization, totalist ideologies (if successful politically) run the risk of closing all possibilities for social and political response and self-correction. Quite apart from its aesthetic value, political and ideological tolerance opens the doors for co-optation and delivers the incalculable and practical rewards of political longevity for a regime. However, when a revolutionary ideology such as Islam is also based on claims of moral purity and eschatological hopes for salvation, the inevitable corruption of power and this-worldly gain on the part of those who wield them in the name of religion can be disastrously disillusioning to the believers. In this way, the ruling clerics in Iran have de-mythologized Islam as effectively as the Shah de-mythologized monarchy. As the presidential election of 1997 in Iran demonstrated, 70 percent of the electorate voted for Ayatollah Mohammad Khatami, a candidate who has called for full equality of women, more liberal media and cultural policies, and a dialogue of civilizations between Islam and the West. These are policies that run against the views of the dominant conservative clerics, led by the supreme Faqih Ayatollah Khamenei. More radical leaders such as Abol-Karim Soroush, Ayatollah Montazeri, and the Islamic Student Organization of Tehran University have been calling for the separation of religion and politics, a symbolic rather than a political role for the chief-of- state (Ayatollah Khamenei), and the election of that position by universal suffrage. These new revolutionary rumblings promise a bitter struggle in the years to come between the conservative and liberal clerics with each side seeking allies in the military and civil society.

None of the foregoing problems need be as impossible as they seem to the progress of Islam. The experience of Iran seems to have been taken to heart in other parts of the Muslim world. The intellectual and moral capacity of the Ulema will grow as their educational and practical attainments in the modern world increase. A more sophisticated if less militant approach to the problems of the modern world may also result from all of this. Islam has shown itself adaptable enough for the past fourteen centuries and will continue to adapt itself to the historical challenges of another fourteen centuries. After all, Islam should be considered still a young religion by comparison to other world religions. In longevity, Islam is now where Christianity was at the time of the Reformation. Some of the militancy, pain, and factionalism of modern Islam may be similarly considered as the rebirth pangs of a medieval religion coming into a cold, hostile, and challenging modern world.

Western Perceptions and Reactions

Islam and the West suffer from the perceptual problems of an adversary relationship going far back into history. Western perceptions of Islam, as indeed the Islamic perceptions of the West, have thus been distorted by prejudices and myths difficult if not impossible to overcome. Since the pendulum of power has swung back and forth at least twice in the past fourteen centuries, the dominant themes in this relationship have been mutual fear, imitation, rejection and ultimately grudging acceptance and sometimes respect. The swings of power and civilization from the Roman and Persian Empires to the Islamic Empires of the 7th to 13th centuries, and back again to modern industrial Europe after the Renaissance and Reformation, are reminders to both sides that history does not stand still.

Nor can historical situations, sui generis, be repeated. Nevertheless, the myths go on. The myths of the Crusades are powerful indeed in the minds of some modern Muslims and Christians. As late as the 1920s following the battle of Maissaloun, when the French general Gouraud entered Damascus, one of the first things he did was to visit the famous tomb just outside the Omayyad mosque where he knocked on its door and said to its inmate: Saladin, listen, we have returned. A recent volume by an expert political writer and commentator is entitled The Dagger of Islam invoking the memory of the Crusades to make its point:

The Crusaders returning to Europe from Syria in the 12th and 13th centuries brought with them the word assassin, the name which they gave to an Ismaili sect led by Hassan Sabbah (The Old Man of the Mountain) practicing religious terrorism under the influence of a hallucinatory hashish, derived front marijuana. The terrorists were called hashashin (hence assassin). Gradually, the word became synonymous with murderer, though assassin is the stronger term. Seven centuries after the Crusaders startled Europe with the first stories of the Assassins, the world is now viewing Muslim assassins at work again through global television networks such as the CNN. In the period since the end of World War II, they are supposed to have killed in every part of the Islamic world and as far away from it as London, Paris, Hamburg, and New York. Frequently, the assassins are alleged to be Arabs, Iranians, or Pakistanis, encouraged by their ayatollahs to be dedicated killers. Such a media image of Islam represents a universalist and humane world religion as parochial, monolithic, reactionary, and pathological with a crusading spirit. And to offer irrefutable evidence in defense of this sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit message, the media uncritically assumes that the Islamic religion is based on the pursuit of domination and power. As a tit for tat, the West is often portrayed in the militant Islamic media as greedy, corrupt, and imperialist.

If such unidimensional views, Islam and the West are dichotomized, dramatized, and demonized. A careful reading of Islamic as well as Western histories and ideologies would teach us that we cannot make grand generalizations about their inherent and unchanging qualities. Ideologies are inextricably tied to the historical conditions out of which they emerge; they evolve with the changes in the historical conditions to which they have to adapt. Islam began as a universal rather than parochial message of hope in the Judaic and Christian prophetic traditions. It soon established itself into a political as well as a religious community at Medina with Prophet Muhammad as its founding temporal as well as spiritual authority. Although Muhammad was and still is considered by Muslims as the last of the Prophets and the single most important source of authority after the Koran, he has never been regarded by himself or his followers as divinity. To call Islam by the name of Muhammadanism as some Orientalist scholars have done is misleading and, from a Muslim point of view, a sacrilege. The young Islamic community split into factionalism and civil war soon after the death of Muhammad and has not to this day recovered from the deep ideological divisions that pluralize Islam. Views of Islam as a monolithic ideological and political force, therefore, fly in the face of historical as well as contemporary realities.

Similarly, the West is an imaginary of modern vintage that was invented and popularized by European opinion leaders and poets such as Kipling who wished to construct a collective historical self against the other (the East) whom they considered as their inferior. As late as the 18th century, much of the so-called East (China, India, Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia) was still considered as fountains of civilization to be emulated rather than subjugated. But Asian military defeats in successive battles changed the balance of power and perception. It fortified the collective consciousness of the industrial world as the Western world superior to the rest of the world in science, technology, culture, and civilization. However, the vanquished in history are often subjugated with their own cooperation. A psychological study of victims of hostage-taking, well-known as the Stockholm Syndrome, has shown how they come to admire their captors. Similarly, the so-called East gradually adopted a conception of the so-called West as politically, economically, culturally, and morally superior to itself to be emulated. But the syndrome gave rise to a love-hate relationship between the two imaginaries providing to this day a serious obstacle to authentic communication among the diverse peoples and traditions of these two giant and diverse cartographies of imagination.

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. While I have touched on the first set of misunderstandings, the limits of this essay have precluded the possibility of dealing with the other three sets. And yet, they are equally important to an understanding of the depth and intensity of the problems at hand.

Islamic militancy has been a blessing in disguise. It has shocked us all and brought into historical relief the interconnections of these four sets of misunderstandings. By failing to understand the depth and intensity of the Islamic peoples struggles for independence, democracy, and development, the West has sided with those social and political forces that have been subservient to its short-term interests. By their preoccupation with vengeance at a time when historical circumstances call for international reconciliation and national reconstruction, the Islamic militants have often alienated domestic and international opinion.

On the other hand, the Western powers singular inability to acknowledge their own part in bringing about such tragedies as the ones in Palestine-Israel, Iran, Iraq, or Algeria, presents another obstacle to reconciliation. Short-sighted economic and political policies in the Persian Gulf, for instance, have often created Frankenstein monsters such as Saddam Hussein whose greed and ambition violate their own people as well as their neighbors.

Narrow and anachronistic interpretations of Islam continue to strip this great religion of its ability to deal imaginatively and creatively with the problems of religious faith and practice in the modern world. By succumbing to the totalitarian temptation, some factions of militants also run the risk of alienating the most intelligent and patriotic sectors of the population away from Islam and towards rival ideologies or worse yet, cynicism and opportunism. As a religious faith and as a social and political worldview, Islam has a vital part to play in the modern world alongside those competing and complementary worldviews embedded in modern sciences and ideologies. If, however, Islam tries to usurp the functions of science and political ideologies, it will fail to fulfill the role for which as a great universal religion it is uniquely suited.

Conclusion

In March 1997, I had the privilege of acting as the a Rapporteur at a UNESCO-sponsored conference held in Paris focusing on a dialogue between European and Islamic civilizations. The participants included eminent political, economic, cultural, academic, media, and religious leaders from both sides. My own participation at the conference was in my capacity as the director of a peace institute, the Toda Insitute for Global Peace and Policy Research. For its motto, the institute has chosen Dialogue of Civilizations for World Citizenship. We were therefore most grateful to Emma Nicholson, the British Parliamentarian who led the conference for having invited us to cosponsor it. As a Muslim heading an institute that is sponsored by a lay and pacifist Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai International, I have been actively engaged in this kind of dialogue and have immensely learned from it. My report to the conference may therefore provide a fitting conclusion to this essay.

In a parliamentary style, the conference was given several different resolutions to debate. The one focusing on cultural diversity stated that this conference believes that the post-globalization era can only protect mankinds diverse cultures and vulnerable communities if specific mechanisms to achieve that essential goal are created and put in place now. We had four main speakers during on this topic, two European and two Islamic scholars. Although the main speakers were all men, the subsequent discussion was vigorously joined by ten participants, four of whom women. The opinions expressed in this extraordinary debate ranged from devout theism, secular skepticism, and strong atheism. But the common ground reached was equally extraordinary. It proved that women and men of good will, coming from different ideological perspectives but engaging in sincere dialogue, can in fact agree on some essential principles for human decency and cultural diversity.

I shall try to summarize the debate in the form of 15 main propositions expressed in one form or another during the debate. These propositions were sometimes contradictory, but more often they were complementary. In the interest of developing common grounds, I took the liberty of combining several different expressions of the same points into unified propositions. At the conclusion, I proposed a revised motion that seemed to me to capture the sense of our dialogue.

1. In Islam, God knows and commands but humans possess only partial knowledge and err. Divine Truth can be therefore absolute but human truths are only relative. The metaphor of the elephant and the blind men quarreling among themselves as to the shape of the elephant applies to all human affairs.

2. By contrast, some other participants expressed the view that it is empirically misleading to speak as if there is a single Islamic (or European) civilization, and that it is more useful to speak of Arab, Persian, Turkish, African, Malay, or other national cultural traditions in the Islamic world.

3. Despite differences in perspectives, dialogue between the European and Islamic peoples is possible provided it is not accompanied by cultural and political domination. A good example of this is the recent dialogue between Ayatollah Taskhiri and Archbishop of Canterbury.

4. Whereas a true global culture requires genuine dialogue and exchange, globalization has become a synonym for Westernization.

5. Without its own cultural identity, however, no people can enter into any kind of cultural exchange.

6. Cultural tolerance for diversity is another precondition for cultural exchange. The example of the Abbasid era in Islamic history was cited as a 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).

7. It is a mistake to think of cultures as static. Cultures change as humans change biologically, socially, and intellectually. It would be therefore both simplistic and unfortunate if we view ourselves and others in terms of fixed stereotypes.

8. The moral task is to see ourselves as others see us, and that takes a great deal of education and intercultural dialogue. But the dialogue must be rational, avoid domination, and refrain from the kind of stereotyping that attributes, for example, the strange behavior of the Taliban to the entire Islamic world.

9. Reflection and dialogue are necessary but not sufficient; they must be followed up by actions that take the following three central facts of the contemporary world into account. The world has become far too complex, too rapidly changing, and too big in scale of its problems to lend itself to any solutions devised by any single cultural or national group.

10. War is easy, peace is difficult. To build peace among cultures, we need massive public education requiring financial resources enabling us to produce a vast range of educational materials accessible to all.

11. Fundamentalism, defined as cultural intolerance and violence, comes in all forms and shapes, including secular as well as religious kinds. The bombing of the Russian Parliament in 1993 was, for instance, a form of liberal fundamentalism. The denial of freedoms of belief and speech in any country provides another example of so-called fundamentalism.

12. Fundamentalism as a term has become an insult. It covers a vast and complex range of sincere beliefs in the fundamentals of a religious tradition to all kinds of intolerant attitudes towards others. It has also become a psychological scapegoat, refusing to acknowledge and avoiding to take responsibility for the real international and intercultural problems. The term should be therefore avoided in serious discourse.

13. In some of the European countries, there is a general hostility towards Islam fed by the media stereotypes and anti-immigrant sentiments caused by the conditions of unemployment. To correct it, we need to address the prevailing economic as well as cultural conditions of disparity between rich and poor.

14. The word protect in the motion sounds patronizing and should be discarded. We must enhance and cross-pollinate cultures. In fact, some of this is already happening in Europe as exemplified by the impact of Arab on French popular music.

15. The media can be both a source of cultural stereotyping as well as cultural cross-pollination and enrichment. We must provide financial incentives for the latter kind of multimedia creativity.

In the light of the above, the motion on cultural diversity should be amended to read as follows:

That this conference believes that the post-globalization era can enhance humankinds diverse cultures as well as develop common grounds for global human rights and responsibilities. To achieve these goals, rules of civility in dialogue, tolerance in practice, and protection of vulnerable communities must be observed and specific mechanisms must be created and put in place now.

MAJID TEHRANIAN is professor of international communication at the University of Hawaii and director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research. His recent publications include Technologies of Power: Information Machines and Democratic Prospects (1990); Letters from Jerusalem (1990) Restructuring for Ethnic Peace (1991); Restructuring for World Peace: Challenges for the 21st Century, co-editor (1992), and Globalism and Its Discontents: International Communication and Modernization in a Fragmented World (1998)