Islam and the West Pre September 11
To study the history of the world is to examine the history of civilisations interacting with one another. History also allows us to view the way in which certain cultures spend a period in dominance over other civilisations, disseminating ideas and institutions in the process. As Howe (2002:1) ascertains, history is therefore a study of empire.
A great deal of the world’s history is the history of empires. Indeed, it could be said that all history is imperial or colonial history, if one takes a broad enough definition and goes back far enough.
It is an important point. The long, rich history of political and cultural engagement between the Christian West and the Muslim East has its roots in imperialism and is a pertinent factor in the portrayal of Islam today. After the fall of the dominant Roman Empire (in the fourth century in the West, two centuries later at least in the East) the world began to fragment into a multitude of divergent creeds and civilisations with the Chinese and Indian Empires enjoying particularly fruitful periods of achievement until the tenth century. But, for the traditional powers of Europe, the greatest single challenge to religious and geo political domination was the inexorable rise of Islam, not only because of the sheer numbers of followers of the new faith but because of what Muslims represented.
Islam was seen as a vocation, a complete way of life, rather than merely a faith. Muslims were required to make daily prayers to Allah; their custom and society, which were based upon ritual and community emerged stronger and more robust than did Christianity in the West, as Ahmad underscores (1992:1).
Islam is a complete way of life. It integrates man with God, awakens in him a new moral consciousness and invites him to deal with all the problems of life individual and social, economic and political, national and international in accordance with his commitment to God.
That the Muslims posed a powerful, dangerous threat to the prevailing Western, Christian way of life is in no doubt. Indeed, with the exception of Marxism in the mid nineteenth century, Islam represents the only serious ideological in history to the dominance of the Western way of life within the past millennia; the onset of the First Crusade beginning in the late 1070’s serving as a manifestation of the rising barrier between Western and Muslim ideals.
Throughout the middle ages the Ottoman Empire represented the sole Muslim alternative to Christian monarchic expansion. And although the relationship between the two cultures was often fraught with tension, an attitude of religious and political tolerance prevailed even though the attitudes of both civilisations towards one another can at best be described as policies of ‘containment’, a point with Curtin (2000:178) expands upon.
In spite of frequent warfare, cultural exchange between Ottomans and the West ranged from watchful tolerance to benign contempt. The Christians had a long standing horror of Islamic contamination, going back to the rise of Islam and intensifying with the Crusades. The Ottomans were more tolerant of religious difference but the millet system combined permissiveness with an effort to seal off Christian minorities into segregated communities.
Although the states of Islam led the way during the middle ages in the pursuit of science and technology, passing inventions and techniques onto the European and Asian powers in the process, it was the western European powers that rose inexorably through the modern period of history to dominate global cultural exports. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the United States has become as militarily aggressive and politically secure as its western European allies and American economic supremacy has further added to the sense of isolation felt by many Muslim nations, a point underscored by Abdelwahab Meddeb (2003:11).
The Islamic world has been unceasingly inconsolable in its destitution. It knew one very high point of civilisation, accompanied by the boldness of hegemony. If we go back to the notion of world capital, it is reasonable to suggest that before its displacement toward Europe, this concept was concretised in the Abbasid Baghdad of the ninth and tenth centuries, in the Fatimad Cairo of the eleventh and the Mameluke Cairo of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After that the world capital crossed over to the north shore of the Mediterranean with the Genoa Venice duo, before it exiled itself, departing ever further from the Islamic world, by setting up first in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, then in London in the nineteenth and in New York City in the twentieth century since the fifteenth century, the world capital has thus moved geographically ever further away from the Islamic space.
There has therefore been a fundamental parting of the ways concerning Islam and the West since the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the Age of European and American expansionism. The traditional view of the dynamics within this relationship in the modern period has been an assumption that the economically superior capitalist West would assist its politically retarded neighbours in the Middle East in the transition to modernity. The reality, however, has been the emergence in the epicentre of the Islamic world, of a more aggressive form of cultural and ideological leadership based upon religious doctrine rather than socio political hegemony in addition to a growing distrust between the world’s two greatest faiths.
1979 marked a watershed in the relationship between Muslims and the West, particularly within the western media, who, like the establishment that they represent, were markedly concerned by the occurrences taking place during Iran in that year, as highlighted by Falk (2003:182).
The emergence on the world stage of the Ayatollah Khomeini suggested the potency of another way of envisioning governance and human destiny that rested on traditional values and the primacy of religious leaders and institutions in shaping the life of society.
The stereotypical image of the Muslim businessman, getting rich of western style capitalism while dressed in traditional Islamic clothing, became a stereotypical view that was heavily re enforced by the western media during the 1980’s. Indeed, it even appeared that popular music was guilty of perpetuating existing typecasts of Muslims, with The Clash’s Rock the Casbah (1983) serving as the most blatant example of the discernibly mainstream nature of state sponsored media discrimination during the period of the Ayatollah and the Afghanistan war against the Soviet Union.
The situation, by the 1990’s, had become noticeably more militant and the discourse surrounding the differences between the West and Islam centred on ideological as well as religious issues. 1992 was an important year in the formation of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The end of the jihad against the USSR as well as the emergence of a new conflict based upon religious partition in Serbia meant a movement of displaced hard line Muslims with an inexorably growing grievance against perceived evils emanating from the West. Eventually, Afghanistan would become a haven for these disillusioned Muslims, under the umbrella of Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
Tags: Al Qaeda, America, Bin Laden, civilisations, God, Muslims
