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ISLAM
AND THE WEST: CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS?
Francis Robinson
In
1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published
an article entitled 'Clash of Civilizations'
by Samuel Huntington, Harvard Professor, former
Director of Security Planning for the National
Security Council, and President of the American
Political Science Association. By 1996 Huntington
had developed his article into a book, and
it was published under the title The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order. 1
The argument was that in a post-Cold War world,
the crucial distinctions between people were
not primarily ideological or economic, but
cultural. World politics was being reconfigured
along cultural lines, with new patterns of
conflict and cooperation replacing those of
the Cold War. The hot spots in world politics
were on the fault-lines between civilizations:
Bosnia, Chechnya, West Asia, Tibet, Sri Lanka
etc. The civilisation with a particularly
large number of hot spots was Islam. It had
bloody borders and represented the greatest
danger to world peace. The argument has influenced,
indeed, helped to frame the debate about the
future world order to an extent which even
distresses Huntington himself. It has not
been well-received amongst professional scholars
of Islam, who have objected to the way in
which it has assisted in demonising Muslims
and to the way in which, by generalising about
Muslims, it has brushed over the many differences
of economic and political status, outlook
and understanding which the Muslim world embraces.
Huntington’s argument has been assessed by
several scholars, so needs no further elaboration
here. 2
However, the events of September 11
and the widespread realisation of the existence
and purposes of Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda
organisation created a new dimension by which
to examine this thesis. First it is necessary
to summarise the historical, particularly
Islamic, background to the events of September
11 and the great change in power relationships
between Muslim peoples and the West over the
past two hundred years. For a thousand years,
for much of the period from the 8th to the
18th century, the leading civilisation on
the planet in terms of spread and creativity
was Islam. It was formed in the 7th century
when Arab tribesmen, bearing the prophecy
of Muhammad, or so the traditional story goes,
burst out of the Arabian Peninsula. Within
a decade they defeated the armies of two rival
empires to the north, those of Christian Byzantium
and Sassanian Iran. A great new cultural and
economic nexus came to be developed which
was able to draw on the knowledge and commodities
of lands from China and India in the East
to Spain and Africa in the West, as well as
those of the West Asian lands in which it
was based. 2
This new civilisation commanded a substantial
slice of the world's area of cities and settled
agriculture. In this region there was shared
language of religion and the law. Men could
travel and do business within a common framework
of assumptions. In its high cultures they
could express themselves in symbols to which
all could respond. Arguably it is the first
world system, the one which preceded that
of Immanuel Wallerstein. 3
The first notable centres were found
in the Arab worlds of Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba
and Cairo from the 8th to the 12th centuries,
the second in the Turco-Iranian worlds of
Istanbul, Isfahan, Bukhara, Samarqand and
Delhi from the 14th to the 17th centuries.
There were great achievements in scholarship
and science, in poetry and prose, and in the
arts of the book, building and spiritual insight,
which are precious legacies to all humankind.
For about half of what is termed the Christian
era Muslims could regard themselves as marching
at the forefront of human progress. Over the
same period, the odd crusade or loss of Spain
aside, they could regard the community of
believers created by God’s revelation to man
through the Prophet Muhammad as walking hand
in hand with power.
Over the past two hundred years the Islamic
world system has been overwhelmed by forces
from the West, forces driven by capitalism,
powered by the Industrial Revolution and civilised,
after a fashion, by the Enlightenment. The
symbolic moment, when the leader’s standard
overtly passed to the West, was Napoleon’s
invasion of Egypt in 1798. From this moment
Western armies and Western capital overran
the lands of the Muslims: the British took
India, the British and Dutch South East Asia,
the British, French, Germans and Italians,
North, East and West Africa, the Russians
swamped Central Asia, and the British and
French carved up West Asia between them. By
the 1920s Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Central
Arabia and the Yemen were the only Muslim
countries free from Western control, and even
some of these were subject to influence. The
caliphate, the symbolic leadership for the
community of believers, which reached back
to the Prophet, had been abolished. For a
moment it was feared that the holy places
of Islam, Mecca and Medina, might fall into
the hands of the infidel. The community of
believers, which for so many centuries had
walked hand in hand with power, had good reason
to believe that history if not God
had deserted it.
For the remainder of the 20th century matters
did not seem a great deal better. Certainly,
from the emergence of modern Turkey in the
early 1920s to that of the Muslim republics
of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, we
could talk of a steady decolonisation of the
Muslim world - at least in the formal sense.
But for many this has seemed a Pyrrhic victory.
More often than not they have found Western
rule replaced by that of Muslims with secular
Western values, while Western capital and
Western culture have come to be even more
corrosive of their customs and their standards
than before. This challenge has elicited from
many Muslims the assertion of an Islamic,
and for some a totalitarian Islamic, future
for their people. Such views have not been
shared by all Muslims but have come to be
shared by enough of them to represent a significant
threat to the secular leaders of their societies,
and on occasion, as in the revolution in Iran,
to drive their upholders to power. These Muslims,
who are popularly known as ‘fundamentalist’
in the West, are more appropriately known
as ‘Islamists’. I shall elaborate on these
‘Islamists’ when I address the significance
of the Islamic revival. For the moment it
is enough to note that they represent the
major opposition to the leadership of Muslim
states, many of which have relations of greater
or less strength with the USA, among them
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Tunisia,
Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and also of
course, the Palestinian Authority. In this
situation, lack of fairness or evenhandedness
on the part of non-Muslim states is an irritant
which helps to radicalise Muslim populations
not just in the states concerned butalso across
the Muslim world. There are the problems of
Muslim minorities in the Balkans and the resistance
of the people of Chechnya to Russian military
might. Indian Muslims experienced a sense
of threat as they were first demonised by
Hindu revivalism and then, in 1992, saw the
Emperor Babur's Mosque torn down by Hindu
revivalists. The Muslim majority in Kashmir
feel oppressed as they are held down by India’s
martial rule, while the peoples of Iraq suffer
on account of their rogue regime. The Muslim
and Christian peoples of Palestine have experienced
the greatest injustice during these past fifty
years and more. These are all complicated
issues, but from the point of view of many
Muslims in the streets and bazaars of Muslim
towns and cities across the world they represent
symbols of injustice and oppression. They
represent a world order in which Muslims are
victims. They constitute a world order in
which Muslims must organise to resist. There
are three significant developments which accompanied
the transformation of the Muslim position
in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
They form strands in the long-term background
to the events of 11 September. Firstly, Muslim
peoples have long suffered a range of feelings
from a tremendous sense of loss through to
a deep bitterness and rage at their powerlessness
in the face of the West. This was particularly
strong in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent,
now the home of over 350 million Muslims,
originally because of the speed with which
the Mughal Empire lost power in the 18th century.
Then it grew because of the new competition
for power this brought with rival peoples,
and finally because this was the area of the
Muslim world most heavily exposed to rule
from the West. This was expressed in the most
powerful artistic form of culture - poetry.
The 18th and 19th century poetic genre of
Shahr Ashob mourned the passing of great cities,
of great centres of Muslim civilisation. One
of the greatest works of the 19th century,
the Musaddas or Elegy of Altaf Husain Hali
entitled The Flow and Ebb of Islam.4
This was a great set-piece poem
on the rise and decline of Islam and its causes.
It was highly popular and came to be used
almost as a national anthem for the Pakistan
movement. It would be recited at the opening
of political meetings and have everyone in
tears as they contemplated the fate of Islamic
civilisation:
When autumn has set in over the garden,
Why speak of the springtime of flowers?
When shadows of adversity hang over the present,
Why harp on the pomp and glory of the past?
Yes, these are things to forget; but how can
you with
The dawn forget the scene of the night before?
The assembly has just dispersed;
The smoke is still rising from the burnt candle;
The footprints on the sands of India still
say
A graceful caravan has passed this way.
5
Of course there was admiration for
the achievement of Europe, even if of a despairing
kind. The secretary of the Moroccan envoy
to France in 1846, after watching a review
of French troops, wrote: "So it went
on until all had passed leaving our hearts
consumed with fire for what we had seen of
their overwhelming power and mastery ... In
comparison with the weakness of Islam ...
how confident they are, how impressive their
state of readiness, how competent they are
in matters of state, how firm their laws,
how capable in war". 6
But as Western power enveloped the Muslim
world, there was growing protest against the
West. From 1926 to 1957 Husain Ahmad Madani
was principal of the great reformist school
of Deoband, whose organisation and influence
in Pakistan was to create the network of madrassas
in which the Taliban were bred. "The
British and the European nations do not consider
Asians and Africans as human beings, and thus
deny them human rights", he asserted
in his autobiography written after his internment
in Malta during World War One. "The British
are the worst enemies of Islam and the Muslims
on the earth". 7
Muhammad Iqbal, a man who intellectually
owed much to the West, accepted a knighthood
from the British, and was the poet philosopher
behind the concept of Pakistan
- a Muslim modernist, in no way radical. In
his Persian Psalms, published in 1927, he
declared:
Against Europe I protest,
And the attraction of the West.
Woe for Europe and her charm,
Swift to capture and disarm!
Europe's hordes with flame and fire
Desolate the world entire. 8
The rejection of Europe, or by now the
West in general, both as a destructive force
and a false model of progress was a theme
of many of the leading ideologues who prepared
the way for the Iranian revolution.
"Come friends", said Ali Shariati
in the 1960s, "let us abandon Europe;
let us cease this nauseating apish imitation
of Europe. Let us leave behind this Europe
that always speaks of humanity, but destroys
human beings wherever it finds them".
9
By this time, as the USA replaced Europe
in the demonology of the Islamic world, it
became the focus of bitterness and resentment,
which was all the greater because it affected
the lives of supposedly free peoples. Ayatollah
Khomeini's howl of rage, when in 1964 the
Iranian Parliament granted US citizens extraterritorial
rights in Iran in exchange for a $200m loan,
spoke for all Muslims who had felt powerless
in the face of a bullying West from the bombardment
of Alexandria in 1882 to the plight of the
Palestinians in the present crisis: "They
have reduced the Iranian people to a level
lower than that of an American dog".
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