http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4632_132/ai_100202993
The
forgotten inheritance: why the mutual hatred between Islam and the
west? Is it because neither can acknowledge that Islam gave Europe
what it values most: liberal humanism? by Andrew Wheatcroft -
Books - The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from
Muhammad to the Reformation by Richard Fletcher; Infidels: the
conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002 - book review
New Statesman,
April 7, 2003 by Ziauddin Sardar
The
Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to
the Reformation
Richard Fletcher
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 183pp, [pounds sterling]14.99
Infidels: the conflict between Christendom and Islam (638-2002)
Andrew Wheatcroft
Viking, 443pp, [pounds sterling]20
I
listened to an interview with Pat Robertson, the American
televangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition. The Prophet
Muhammad, he said, "was an absolute wide-eyed fanatic. He was a
robber and a brigand. And to say that these terrorists distort
Islam... they're carrying out Islam."
Like most Muslims, I have become immune to such abuse. But I
expected the interviewer, Sean Hannity, to challenge the good
Reverend. Instead, he inquired: "Do you think it's the majority of
Muslims?" Robertson replied by calling Islam "a monumental scam".
This prompted Hannity to conclude: "It's inevitable then that the
world is going to be in conflict with Islam for many decades to
come."
The
world, that is the western world, has been at war with Islam since
its inception. The views of Robertson and Hannity have had common
currency for more than 1,400 years. Western hatred of Islam, as
both Richard Fletcher and Andrew Wheatcroft show in their new
books, dates to the beginning of Islam. As early as 638,
Wheatcroft notes, the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem publicly
called the Muslim Caliph's presence in the city "abomination".
In
the early eighth century, John of Damascus, an Arab monk,
characterised Muslims as fanatical infidels. This image remains
with us today. The protracted era, over 250 years, of the Crusades
constructed the image of the violent "Saracen", whose very
existence was a threat to Christendom. With the emergence of the
Ottoman empire, the Ottomans became, to use Wheatcroft's words,
"the fons et origo of all evil". Colonialism sealed these images
in concrete.
The
cold war provided a brief respite, when the "evil empire" of the
Soviet Union took over the role of conventional demon in western
consciousness. Things returned to historic form with the fall of
the Berlin Wall, when the "clash of civilisations" thesis first
emerged and became the orthodoxy in Washington. After the events
of 11 September 2001, the idea that Muslims were wild-eyed
fanatics, determined on destroying civilisation as we know it,
acquired the status of a self-evident truth.
Yet
there is nothing inevitable in this pathological hatred of Islam.
It was deliberately constructed and learnt over many centuries.
Both Fletcher and Wheatcroft chart the centuries of scholarship,
literature, art and popular culture during which the west nursed
and nourished representations of Muslims as the embodiment of all
that is evil and depraved, licentious and barbaric, ignorant and
stupid, unclean and inferior, monstrous and ugly.
In
other words, western societies have been programmed to despise and
hate Muslims. This is why, Wheatcroft suggests, these images are
unquestioningly recycled in the western press and television,
Hollywood films and the works of so-called experts on the Middle
East. One only needs a trigger--such as a riot, or the Rushdie
affair, or an act of terrorism--for this programme to reload and
recycle the historic images of hatred.
There is a different way of looking at Muslims. Islam and the
west, as Fletcher argues convincingly, have a distinguished
history of collaboration and mutual respect. We traded with each
other, shared the benefits of such technologies as papermaking,
navigation, mining and surveying, and had enthralling debates on
theology and philosophy. Both Fletcher and Wheatcroft hold up
Islamic Spain, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in
peaceful harmony for almost 800 years, as a model example. Much of
this history, he asserts, has been overlooked in favour of the
history of mutual rivalry and hatred.
So
why do Muslims hate the west? How do we explain, for example,
Pakistani textbooks employed in religious seminaries stating that
western "infidels are cowards by nature"? Are the Crusades,
colonialism and orientalism by themselves enough to explain such
jingoism and hostility?
Both Fletcher and Wheatcroft look to Muslim theology for a more
satisfying explanation. Fletcher claims that Islam has a single
text, the Koran, in "its fixed and final form", which provides
little opportunity for divergence of opinion. He locates Muslim
hatred of Christianity in the monolithic nature of the Koran. But
not even the most literalist and narrow-minded interpretation of
the Koran can justify such hatred. Any sacred text, fixed or
otherwise, is open to a variety of interpretations; and the Koran
has been interpreted in numerous ways--not just literally but also
metaphorically and mystically, legally, and even in modernist and
postmodern terms. Moreover, the Koran specifically sanctions
respect for Christianity and Judaism as sister religions to Islam.
The
explanation for the current anti-western paranoia in relation to
Muslim societies is to be found not so much in Islamic theology as
in a siege mentality. Muslims throughout the world feel that their
dignity and survival are under attack from the west. Muslim
populations react not only to double standards, but are also
concerned at how the west maintains unrepresentative and
repressive regimes in power and then blames Muslims for not
sharing the basic values of democracy.
In
the 19th century, just as parliamentary reform acts were inching
Britain towards democracy, Egypt attempted to introduce comparable
representative institutions, only to have them abolished by
British colonial power. The despots today in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
and Egypt are there largely because of the US.
There is another way of looking at the relationship between Islam
and the west. Since both Fletcher and Wheatcroft are silent on
this alternative history, let me spell it out.
The west's hatred of Islam stems from, more than
anything else, the denial of its true lineage. The western world
as we understand it is a child of Islam. Without Islam, the
west--however we conceive it today--would not exist. And, without
the west, Islam is incomplete and cannot survive the future.
Fletcher tells us that Muslims spent the early centuries of Islam
translating the Greek heritage. Europeans spent the 11th and 12th
centuries translating the Arabic translations into Latin. But
Muslims did more than simply preserve the Greek heritage and pass
it on to its rightful owners, the west. They added and expanded it
in numerous ways.
Few
of the great names of the European Middle Ages could read Greek;
what they read was not Plato, but Latin commentaries on Plato by
al-Farabi; not Aristotle, but the Latin translations of the
commentaries of ibn Sina (Avicenna) on Aristotle; not the
Neoplatonists, but the works of the Brethren of Purity, the tenth-
and 11th-century philosophers of Basra and other Neoplatonist
philosophers of the Muslim world.
It
is hardly surprising the Renaissance started in the independent
city states of Italy, cities whose long history of trading contact
with Muslim lands provided familiarity with its sophistication and
ready access to Arabic texts.
From the perspective of Islam, there is a double irony here. Not
only did Islam introduce classical Greek civilisation to Europe,
but also, without Islam, Europe would have been unable to
manufacture its Greek roots. We Muslims have a right to be upset:
not just that our intellectual endeavours were appropriated by
Europe, but that the source was wrongly attributed.
For
western civilisation is happy to trace its origins to Greece, a
slave society owned and operated by and for narrow elites with a
highly developed sense of their own exclusivity. The founding
fathers of American democracy were obsessed with making references
to ancient Greece in their debates. Their articulation of modern
individual rights for a narrow white elite is riddled with appeals
not only to a mythic Greece, but to Greek writers few of them had
read.
There is more. Islam trained Europe in scholastic and philosophic
method, and donated the model of its institutional forum of
learning: the university. Europe acquired wholesale the
organisation, structure and the very terminology of the Muslim
education system. Islam showed Europe the distinction between
medicine and magic, drilled it in making surgical instruments and
told it how to establish and run hospitals. It gave Europe what it
values most: liberal humanism. European liberal humanism has its
origins in the adab--literally, the etiquette of being a
human--movement of classical Islam. It is the suppression of this
history that generates the most distrust of the west among
Muslims.
To
transcend our mutual hatred, we need to be true to our histories.
We need to see Islam and the west as partner projects; one cannot
be conceived without the other. The west must jettison the
fabricated history of its origins, embrace its Islamic roots, and
acknowledge that Islam has played a key role in shaping its most
cherished humanistic values. Muslims, on the other hand, need to
appreciate that some of the best achievements of the west are
founded on the humanistic values of Islam. Our mutual salvation
lies in our shared, enlightened history and common humanity.
COPYRIGHT 2003 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
This site is still under
construction. Please visit again for more updates.
