The Sultan’s Procession in Istanbul, c. 1736. From a private collection. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Lecture 1 in a series of lectures given to a group of British and American journalists at the BBC Monitoring on 18 February 1999
First of all, I wish to say how pleased and flattered I am to be asked again to speak to a group of my friends and colleagues at the BBC and FBIS about the Middle East and Iran. As all of us are so immersed in daily news, it is possible that we may lose sight of the bigger picture and may not see the wood for the trees. As I have been involved in journalism for the past 20 years, whenever I go to conferences and academic gatherings, I appreciate the opportunity of listening to some broader and more theoretical analysis of the situations that I am dealing with. Therefore, I do not apologise for indulging in a bit of navel-gazing and engaging in a rather general, loose, historical and theoretical discussion of the issues relating to the Middle East and the West. I hope that you will also find it a welcome relief from the continuous involvement with the latest reports and news flashes. It is absolutely essential to be aware of the bigger picture and put our daily reports into context.
Although political issues are very important, one should remember that political developments do not take place in a vacuum but follow more civilizational, religious, ideological, scientific, economic and cultural developments. When one looks at history, one is amazed by the power of ideas, which far exceeds the power of guns and missiles. The rise and fall of civilisations seems to be less due to sheer military might or economic power, and more to do with the rise of greater ideas and concepts that prove the inadequacy of former world views and ideas. The fall of the Soviet Union in our own time was not due to a military defeat or even to economic collapse, although with hindsight we have seen that neither the Soviet military nor the Soviet economy was as powerful and as dangerous as we assumed. The Soviet system collapsed because Western democracy proved that it was much more powerful than the communist ideology.
There have been many historians who have looked at the full course of human history and have tried to discover the reason for the rise and fall of different civilisations. Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental 12-volume book, A Study of History, dealt with various civilisations and concluded that when we look at ancient history from the dawn of recorded time to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, we are dealing with religious civilisations.[1] Instead of talking about Indian or Chinese or Hebrew or Persian civilisations, we should be talking about the Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim civilisations. There is no doubt that each of these religions made a huge impact on the countries and civilisations that came under their influence. They gave rise to distinctive literatures, philosophies, art forms, customs and ways of life.
Edward Gibbon dealt with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the miraculous replacement of the mighty Roman Empire with originally a very insignificant and obscure “Sect of the Nazarene”.[2] The Gospels tell us that many people at the time of Christ questioned: “Does any good come out of Nazareth?” The ideas of an almost illiterate Jewish carpenter from the remotest corner of the Roman Empire, who lived barely 30 years, whose mission lasted just over one year, who was crucified and nearly all his early disciples were also killed most cruelly, not only survived but triumphed over the might of the Roman Empire. Stalin asked how many divisions the Pope possessed. I am sure that if the Roman emperor at the time of Christ had ever heard of him, which is very unlikely, he could have asked with much greater justification how many divisions this carpenter from Nazareth possessed. Yet a few centuries later, as the result of incredible historical irony, the Capital of the Roman Empire, the Eternal City, became the centre of Christianity. As we are about to celebrate the second millennium of his birth, over a quarter of the whole human race is, at least in name, an adherent of that carpenter from Nazareth.
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), one of the greatest philosophers of history that the world has ever known, mainly looked at the rise of Islam and the decline of the Persian and Byzantine empires. Arnold Toynbee calls ‘al-Muqaddima’, the introduction to Ibn Khaldun’s history of the world, the greatest work of its kind, written in any country in any age.[3] Ibn Khaldun tried to grapple with the mystery of the rise of Islam. Almost an identical miracle with that of Christ took place in the case of Muhammad. During Muhammad’s time in the early 6th century, Arabia had nothing but endless sand dunes. It was so barren and poor that it was not even colonised by one of the two great powers of the time, the Persian and the Byzantine empires. When an illiterate camel driver known as Muhammad broke ranks from his family and tribe, who were idol worshippers and preached belief in one God, he was persecuted, ridiculed, beaten and eventually was forced to flee his native Mecca, because his enemies had formed a conspiracy to kill him.
Later, from Medina, Muhammad sent letters to the Persian and Byzantine emperors, calling on them either to follow his religion or to be prepared to fight against him. Muhammad’s emissaries were unceremoniously thrown out of the Persian court, and we have a record of the reaction of a court poet in the court of Khosrow Parviz, the great Sassanian emperor, to Muhammad’s demand. He wrote: “By drinking camel’s milk and eating lizards, the Bedouin Arab has now grown so insolent as to dream of the crown of the Khosrows. Woe and alas to you, o fickle world, woe and alas!”[4] Yet, a mere two or three years after the death of Muhammad, the Muslims poured out of Arabia. In 638 AD the Persian and Byzantine empires collapsed in the face of the advancing Muslim armies and were ruled by these illiterate Arabs, carrying with them their new Holy Book, the Koran.
The whole of the Persian Empire and huge chunks of the Byzantine Empire, including Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Eastern Europe, became provinces of the Islamic empires of the Umayyads and the Abbasids that extended from Spain to China. 1400 years later, there are over one billion Muslims scattered in all corners of the globe. At the moment, fifty-five countries have a majority Muslim population and are members of the Islamic Conference Organisation. In addition to these countries, there are some 30 million Muslims in China, about 20 million within the Russian Federation, and 130 million in India. For the first time since the 1492 Reconquest of Spain and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain, there is again a sizeable and growing Muslim presence in Europe. There are at least eight million Muslims in the EU and slightly smaller numbers in the United States. Recently, US Secretary of State Madelaine Albright remarked that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States.
Although at the moment, the supremacy of Western civilisation seems to be assured, one has to realise that history does not stand still, and events move and change in quite mysterious ways. In the past decade, we have already witnessed the incredible changes that have come about in the fortunes of the former Soviet bloc. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama advanced the thesis of the “End of History.” He argued that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of a relatively harmonious world. In a very famous article under the same title, he wrote: “We may be witnessing … the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” To be sure, he said, some conflicts may happen in places in the Third World, but the global conflict was over, and not just in Europe. “It is precisely in the non-European world” that the big changes have occurred, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. “The war of ideas was at an end. Believers in Marxist-Leninism may still exist in places like Managua, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,” but overall, liberal democracy has triumphed. [5]
Even ten years ago, when I first read those remarks, I was struck by how premature they were and how similar they sounded to some of the remarks of the great 10th-century Iranian historian and scholar al-Biruni (973-1051 AD). In his introduction to the History of the World, Biruni made similar remarks about the all-inclusive Islamic culture that had united warring factions from Europe to China.
History ends at least once and occasionally more often in the history of every civilisation. As the civilisation’s universal state emerges, its people become blinded by what Toynbee called “the mirage of immortality” and convinced that theirs is the final form of human society. This was the case with the Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mughal Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.
The citizens of such universal states “in defiance of apparently plain facts … are prone to regard it, not as a night’s shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human endeavours.” The same was true at the peak of the Pax Britannica. For the English middle class in 1897, “as they saw it, history, for them, was over… and they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them.”[6]
Societies that assume that their history has ended, however, are usually societies whose history is about to decline. This does not mean that American power is going to decline or disappear in the foreseeable future. It merely means that the only constant fact in human history is change itself. Henry Kissinger has noted that: “The International system of the twenty-first century… will contain at least six major powers – the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and probably India – as well as a multiplicity of medium-sized and smaller countries.”[7]
In this lecture, I am going to talk about the Middle East and the West, and mainly about Western perceptions of the Middle East. Except for the Jewish population in Israel and smaller Jewish communities in most Middle Eastern countries, and relatively small Christian communities in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and elsewhere, the Middle Eastern population is predominantly Muslim. I am not a Muslim. In fact, my life was completely changed as a result of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I lost my job, my career, my house, my pension, some of my relatives that I had to leave behind, and many of my former friends.
But perhaps the most difficult of all was the fact that the Islamic revolution destroyed my optimism, my idealism and my belief in a gradual modernisation and liberalisation of society. I had to leave my career as an academic, something which I had been trained for and loved, and had to find a job as a BBC monitor, because all of a sudden I saw myself in mid-life out of work, with no income and a family to support. In the middle of the year, there was no academic position in my limited area of speciality to apply for, and I was glad that the BBC recruited me, without any former expertise in journalism, and even though I told them that I would continue to work at the BBC if I were recruited until I found an academic position. I was told later on that they had decided to recruit me for my honesty.
Therefore, I am not a supporter of or an apologist for Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. However, I believe that the present climate of mutual hostility and suspicion between Islam and the West is not healthy. It does a great deal of harm and injustice to both cultures. Apart from the fact that this feeling of mutual hostility is wrong and unrealistic from a philosophical, ideological and cultural point of view, it is also very unfortunate and dangerous from a political point of view. At the moment, the United States is the only unchallenged superpower in the world. Not only have the Americans come from all the nations under the sun, and naturally they should be more open and receptive to all cultures, but America’s international commitments and responsibilities as a superpower also mean that the United States should be able to deal with all countries, regardless of their racial, cultural or religious proclivities.
America is not and cannot be a parochial and insular country. It cannot retreat to fortress America, and it cannot turn its back on the world. Whether American people and politicians like it or not, they are at the moment carrying the mantle of leadership responsibility for the whole world. The term “the leader of the free world” is sometimes used with cynicism and even derision, especially by some in Europe and elsewhere who are envious of American supremacy. However, from the Far East and South-East Asia to the Persian Gulf and to Europe, we have seen that without American leadership and involvement, even Europe is not able to achieve very much.
To discharge these responsibilities, the United States must have a much greater understanding of and empathy for other cultures and civilisations. I wrote a PhD thesis on “Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”[8] The attitude that was developed by Emerson and the rest of the members of the Transcendental Movement at the beginning and the middle of the last century was amazingly cosmopolitan, universal, broad-minded and all-inclusive. They borrowed a great deal from Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Sufi ideas and saw themselves as much the inheritors of the Asian as of the European civilisations. Addressing America, Emerson himself, as a 21-year-old student at Harvard, wrote: “Strong man! Youth and glory are with thee. As thou wouldst prosper, forget not the hope of mankind. Trample not upon thy competitors, although unworthy. Europe is thy father, bear him on thy Atlantean shoulders. Asia, thy grandsire, regenerate him.”[9]
Unfortunately, as America has got more involved with foreign conflicts and with various contending domestic pressure groups, that broader and more universalist outlook has somehow faded. There is, rightly or wrongly, a perception among most Middle Eastern nations that America’s views towards Islam are hostile, and its attitude towards Middle Eastern affairs is partisan. As the foremost military, political, economic, technological, scientific, and even cultural power in the world, especially as a country that has had so many dealings with the Middle East and involvement with the Middle East oil, it is simply not right that America has no diplomatic relations with several leading Middle Eastern countries.
The US has imposed sanctions on Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya, countries that it calls “terrorist” or “rogue” states. Its relations with several other Middle Eastern countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, are tense. American nationals have been attacked and killed in Saudi Arabia. America’s embassies in most other so-called friendly countries, including nearly all the Persian Gulf littoral states, have been turned into fortresses. There may be good and justifiable reasons for all this, but this is not a situation that can continue indefinitely. Political necessity requires that the root causes of these problems and misunderstandings be identified and remedied.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Islamic fundamentalism” became the great bogey. Many Western scholars have viewed the 1990s as the era of Islamic fundamentalism and the end of this century as the era of “Islamic threat”. The irruption of Islam into the political landscape in Iran and in many Islamic countries is viewed as an anachronism. The Islamic revolution in Iran exactly 20 years ago this month caught everybody by surprise. Since then, “Islamic terrorism” has almost become synonymous with “Islamic fundamentalism”, and “Islamic fundamentalism” has become synonymous with Islam. The terrorist acts committed by a small number of militant Muslims, who often have grudges against their own rulers, are attributed to an inherently violent Islamic doctrine.
Olivier Roy in his The Failure of Political Islam writes: “A strange Islamic threat indeed, which waged war only against other Muslims (Iran/Iraq) or against the Soviets (Afghanistan) and caused less terrorist damage than the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the Red Brigade, the Irish Republican Army, and the Basque separatist ETA, whose small-group actions have been features of the European political landscape longer than Hizbullah and other jihad movements.”[10] No one criticises Christianity for the activities of those terrorist gangs, but any terrorist action by crazy Muslim groups is often attributed to Islam.
This is not to say that terrorist acts committed by various Muslim groups against local rulers or against Western targets are not serious. They are very serious and have to be dealt with. However, an overemphasis on the Islamic nature of these grievances can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and create a situation that is much more difficult to deal with. We have had the terrorist activities in the United States by Omar Abd al-Rahman and his associates, who were originally involved in the assassination of President Sadat, and also the dreadful bombings at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where again Muslim groups seem to have been implicated.
However, many unrelated terrorist activities in America and Europe have also been attributed to Muslims. Shortly after the Oklahoma bomb attack, writing in ‘The Times”, Bernard Levin pondered: “Do you realise that in perhaps half a century, not more, and perhaps a good deal less, there will be wars in which fanatical Muslims will be winning? As for Oklahoma, it will be called Khartoum-on-the-Mississippi, and woe betide anyone who calls it anything else.” One British tabloid newspaper on the same day published a photograph of the bombed building and a dead child with the caption: “In the name of Islam.”
There were similar hysterical outbursts after the crash of the TWA flight. I remember the day after the crash, the studio announcer interviewing an American official asked if the bomb explosion in the aircraft was connected with the attack on an American air base in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. After years of campaigning and Labour promises when in opposition that it would allow direct grant Muslim schools, last year the Labour government announced that it would allow two Muslim direct-grant schools. The day after the news was announced, one of the tabloids devoted its entire front page to the picture of a Muslim school with the caption “Government surrender to segregation.” Although there are many Church of England, Catholic and Jewish schools, in the case of an Islamic school, there is the use of the emotion-charged terms of “surrender” and “segregation.”
A report of the Runnymede Trust, a race-relations think-tank compiled by a committee including the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, Rabbi Julia Neuberger and Professor Akbar Ahmed, published on 28th December 1996, concluded that Britain had become a nation of Muslim haters, and Islamophobia was in danger of becoming institutionalised unless the law was changed to outlaw religious as well as racial discrimination. The report concluded: “In 20 years it has become more explicit, more extreme, more pernicious and more dangerous… [it] is part of the fabric of everyday life in modern Britain, in much the same way that anti-Semitic discourse was taken for granted earlier in this century.”[11]
These journalistic attitudes towards Islam have their counterparts in academic writing on the Middle East and Islam. A few years ago, Professor Bernard Lewis gave a series of lectures at Oxford entitled “Islam and the West” that were later published in the form of a book. In the first instance, that title does not strike many people as being odd. Yet it is strange that on the one hand, he talks about a religion and on the other about the West. The lecture could have been entitled ‘Islam and Christendom’, ‘The Middle East and the West’, ‘The East and the West’ or ‘Asia and the West.’ By juxtaposing Islam and the West, the speaker first intends to simplify Islam, which is as varied — in fact more varied — than Christianity with its adherents in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the West. There are almost as many Muslims in Indonesia and India as in the entire Arab world put together. On the other hand, he wishes to portray it as an enemy of the West by dropping any allusion to Christianity in a widely secular world.
In the wake of the Cold War, the increasing intensity of this historical antagonism has been widely recognised by members of both communities. In 1991, for instance, Barry Buzz saw many reasons why a societal cold war was emerging “between the West and Islam, in which Europe would be on the front line.”
This development is partly to do with secular versus religious values, partly to do with the historical rivalry between Christendom and Islam, partly to do with jealousy of Western power, partly to do with resentment over Western domination of the post-colonial political structuring of the Middle East, and partly to do with the bitterness and humiliation of the invidious comparison between the accomplishments of Islamic and Western civilisations in the last two centuries.[12]
In addition, he noted a “societal Cold War with Islam would serve to strengthen the European identity all around at a crucial time for the process of European union.” It is amazing that as soon as one hate figure in the form of communism has left the scene, another enemy should be found to act as a tool for the process of the European Union.
In 1990, Professor Bernard Lewis analysed “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and concluded:
“It should now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilisations — that perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.”
He then magnanimously pointed out: “It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.”[13]
One can argue that there has been a much longer and more meaningful “Judeo-Islamic civilisation” than the ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation. The Jews who had been, for the last time, expelled en masse from Palestine by the Romans in 70 A.D., were allowed to go back to Jerusalem when the city was conquered by the Muslims in 638. When the Crusaders poured out of Europe to fight the Muslim heathens, en route for good measure, they massacred all the Jews they could find. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, they indiscriminately massacred both the Muslims and the Jews. When the city was reconquered by Saladin, the Jews once again regained their freedom and were allowed to settle there.
Throughout the Middle Ages, when the Jews were severely persecuted in Europe and were subjected to pogroms and forced conversion, there was a great deal of cooperation and coexistence among the Jews and Muslims, both in Spain as well as in the Middle East. Great Jewish scholars and mystics lived and worked not in the Christian West but in the Muslim Middle East. Sa’adia Gaon, often referred to as the first Jewish Aristotelian philosopher, lived and worked in Egypt. The greatest Medieval Jewish Scholar, Maimonides (Moses ibn Maimon), who was forced to flee his native Spain, where he had lived under Muslim rule, took refuge and composed most of his philosophical work in Alexandria. The systematic and continuous persecution and expulsion of the Jews, and above all the dreadful Holocaust, perhaps the worst crime in human history, did not take place among the Muslims but among the Europeans. It is sad and ironic that now a leading Jewish scholar of Islam talks about the “Muslim Rage” against “our Judeo-Christian heritage”.
However, these remarks are quite indicative of what many people in the West think about the Middle East and Islam. According to Edward Said, at the basis of what Europe and America think about the ‘Orient’ lies the reality of power. It is this power which perpetuates the distinction between “them” and “us”, and by so doing, distorts even what may seem to be the most academic and detached work. As a discipline of mind, “Orientalism” has become a closed system, having an internal consistency, “self-perpetuating, with little essential relationship with the reality it purports to be describing, having less to do with the Orient than with ‘our’ world.”[14] Although some modern views about Islam and the Middle East have to do with the events of the past few decades, many of them have unconsciously much longer and deeper roots. They have to do with the historical encounter between Islam and the West over the past 1,400 years.
ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
From the time that Islam appeared in the Middle East, it has been a problem for the West. Those who believed in it were enemies on the frontier. Wherever the West turned before the discovery of the New World, it encountered an Islamic country, the Umayyad, the Abbasid or the Ottoman empires to the East, and North African Muslim countries to the South. This long history of contact with the Islamic Middle East has gone through various phases.
First encounter: In the seventh and eighth centuries, armies fighting in the name of the first Muslim empire, the Caliphate, expanded into the heart of the Christian world. They occupied provinces of the Byzantine Empire in Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt and spread westwards into North Africa, Spain and Sicily; the conquest was not only a military one, it was followed over time by conversions to Islam on a large scale. No other part of the world, the Far East, China, India, Africa or even Russia, has had such a long history of rivalry and confrontation with the West.
Second encounter: Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with the waging of the Crusades (incidentally, a holy war declared by a Pope against Islam), there was a Western counterattack. The Crusades became successful for a time in the Holy Land, where the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was created, and more permanently in Spain. The last Muslim kingdom in Spain was brought to an end in 1492, but by that time, there was a further Muslim expansion elsewhere, by dynasties drawn from the Turkish peoples. The Seljuqs advanced into Anatolia, and later the Ottomans extinguished what was left of the Byzantine Empire and in 1453, occupied its capital, Constantinople, and expanded into eastern and central Europe. As late as the seventeenth century, they were able to occupy the island of Crete and to threaten Vienna (the last siege of Vienna was in 1683).
Third encounter: The aftermath of the Ottoman conquests. Indeed, to see the change of fortunes between the East and the West, we have to go to the fifteenth century. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire marks the beginning of a new era both for the Muslims and for the Christian West. The shock of the defeat and the scattering of the scholars from the Byzantine Empire to Italy and other parts of the West provided an impetus for the Renaissance in the West. It was that defeat which forced the West to find another route to the Far East. One of the by-products of this search was the discovery of the New World and the eventual encirclement of the Middle East and the world of Islam. This, of course, greatly strengthened Europe and marked the beginning of the decline of the Middle East.
Fourth encounter: The era of Western colonialism. It is also just as well to remember that the history of Western colonialism in the Middle East only goes back a couple of centuries. The first time that a major Middle Eastern country had been conquered by a European country since the rise of Islam was in 1798 when Napoleon invaded Egypt. In historical terms, both events, the colonisation of the Americas and the Middle East, belong to a very recent period. The Declaration of Independence by the American colonies coincided with the European expansion into the Islamic lands. It is clear that the memories of these events, especially in the Middle East, where people have a much longer historical memory, are quite fresh in the minds of many people. The colonisation of Islamic countries lasted until about 50 years ago, in the case of Algeria and the Gulf region, even later.
Fifth encounter: 16th July 1998 marked the 50th anniversary of the handing over of the last British garrison in Egypt to the Egyptians and the beginning of Egyptian independence. That means that over half a century ago, Egypt, the most important Arab country, was part of the British Empire. The period of decolonisation, which started about fifty years ago, has continued till the present time.
During the past half-century, we have seen the process of more and more countries in the Middle East and North Africa achieving their independence. To begin with, many of these newly independent states experimented with some essentially Western concepts, such as nationalism in Turkey and Iran, Arab nationalism in Egypt and Syria, secular nationalism as in the Ba’thist Iraq and Syria, and Marxism as in Aden and Yemen. For the past twenty years, we have witnessed a new phenomenon. Having been disappointed with their earlier experimentations with those imported ideologies, starting with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, some Muslim countries have turned to a militant and revivalist form of Islam. The turmoil that we witness in most Middle Eastern countries today is due to the rise of Islamism as a reaction to modernisation and Westernisation, very much as the Puritan Revolution in England and Counter-Reformation in Europe were reactions against the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
Professor Owen Chadwick, in his acclaimed Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh, has convincingly argued that the rise of secular democracy and concepts of human rights and individualism have their roots in the religious wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.[15] When President Mohammad Khatami, in his CNN interview, linked the experience of the early Puritan fathers with the development of freedom and individual liberty in the United States, he was unwittingly referring to an important historical fact. It was the religious strife and the Puritan beliefs of the early settlers that eventually led to the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Therefore, the current fundamentalist movements in the Middle East may also paradoxically lead to the establishment of democracy in Islamic countries. The signs of this development and of a new interpretation of Islam in the light of new democratic ideas can already be witnessed in the lively and unprecedented debates that are taking place in Iran, the first country that ushered in an Islamist government.
The West needs to be aware of this fact and not allow the harsh rhetoric of some Islamic polemicists or the terrorist activities of some deranged individuals or groups to create panic or hostility. Even a Muslim like the Aga Khan, who scrupulously avoids political controversy and is known to be sympathetic to the West, is concerned about the relationship between Islam and the West. He feels that Islam, as a threat to order, as darkness, is never far from the Western mind:
“With Islam encompassing such a large area of the world with significant populations, Western society can no longer survive in its own interest by being ill-informed or misinformed about the Islamic world. They have to get away from the concept that every time there is a bushfire or worse than that, it is representative of the Islamic world. So long as they make it representative of the Islamic world, they damage both themselves and their relations with the Islamic world itself because they are sending erroneous messages back. There is what I would call a ‘knowledge vacuum’. It is hurting everyone.”[16]
In Europe, we have already seen how former enemies who in this century have been involved in two deadly world wars can now work together in a European Union and try to build a better future for all. Shortly after the Second World War, anti-German feeling was still quite palpable in most parts of Europe. Yet, now when one travels to Europe, one cannot but be impressed by an amazing transformation which has taken place when former enemies are now truly regarding themselves as citizens of one united, peaceful continent. The recent remarks of the new German culture minister about the need for British people to, at last, bury the memories of the last war are another example of the desire to look forward to the future rather than dwell in the past.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is another amazing example of how two hostile blocs whose conflict had the potential to unleash Armageddon and probably bring about the end of human civilisation as we know it are now working together. Two decades ago, the Cold War was at its height and the Eastern and Western blocs regarded each other with intense fear, suspicion and hostility. President Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, and the communist propagandists never tired of castigating the “imperialist West.” Yet all of us have witnessed how Russia peacefully dismantled its empire — one of the largest and most powerful the world had ever known — and abandoned its tyrannical political system. Only last year, Russia and NATO signed an agreement for the enlargement of NATO and future cooperation between the two former superpowers. It was due to the basically benign nature of the democratic West that Russia felt secure not only to dismantle its empire but even to count on Western support for rebuilding its shattered economy.
The Arab-Israeli conflict which had gone on for half a century and seemed to be one of the most intractable problems, was on the way to a solution through a peace process which has been, unfortunately, suspended due to the election of a hard-line government in Israel, and the present paralysis before the next Israeli election. However, hope of a peaceful settlement has not completely faded, and sooner or later, the two sides must learn to live together in peace and harmony. All peace-loving people have to prevent another disastrous war in the Middle East, which has had its fair share of conflict and calamity.
The century which is about to come to an end has been an amazing one in many respects and a dreadful one in other respects. This century has changed human life for the better and has brought about technological advances that were unimaginable even a century ago. However, this century has also been the century of wars and conflicts on a global scale. In the wars and conflicts of the 20th century, it is estimated that over 130 million human beings have perished. As we approach the next millennium, the greatest challenge facing the human family is the realisation of world peace, not only among individual countries but among the entire human race.
Yet, at the end of this century and millennium, many prophets of doom and gloom come with dreadful prophesies and warnings about future conflicts; this time, not among nations or blocs of nations, but among civilisations. It seems that some people can only function if they can define themselves in terms of a real or imaginary enemy, their identity being closely tied to the other, their nemesis. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left a vacuum in their psyche, which has to be filled by another bogey. One such work that has achieved enormous fame and aroused a great deal of controversy is the book published a couple of years ago by a Harvard professor of political science, Samuel P. Huntington. Huntington wrote an article in the 1993 summer issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential American foreign policy magazine, entitled “The Clash of Civilisations.” In that article, he predicted that future conflicts would not be between countries or blocs but between civilisations. He wrote:
“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural… The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.”[17]
Huntington has further elaborated on those ideas in a much-discussed book entitled The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, which was published in 1996.[18] In this book, Professor Huntington has analysed major civilisations and concludes that the conflicts among them will determine global politics in the next few decades. His theory has sparked off a furious debate in which perceptions of Islam have figured prominently.
Huntington’s theory has encouraged some politicians and military men to exaggerate the strategic threat to Western interests posed by Islam. The then Secretary General of NATO, Willie Claus, declared shortly after the publication of Huntington’s article on “The Clash of Civilisations” that Islam was as great a threat to the West as communism had ever been. The danger comes when an intellectual exercise of a professor of political science, like Huntington, is believed by someone who is running the most powerful military machine in the world.
What Huntington says is not entirely new. I have already referred to Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. In that book, Toynbee also discussed encounters between civilisations, particularly civilisations based on religion. To his credit, at the height of the Cold War and the threat of communism, Toynbee said that communism was not a genuine, long-lasting ideology but more of an economic system. He divided the present world among the five great religious civilisations — Hindu India, Buddhist China and the Far East, the Greek Orthodox Eastern Europe and Russia, the Christian West and the world of Islam. Toynbee, who had a firm grasp of history, could put the present situation in its historical context. He praised each of those civilisations for having contributed a great deal to human civilisation. Although he believed in the inherent superiority of the Western Christian civilisation, which he thought would eventually predominate over other existing civilisations, he nonetheless believed that all other great civilisations had a considerable contribution to make to the future global civilisation. His view of the future was not of a clash of civilisations but of a mixing of civilisations.
In Professor Huntington’s view, however, different existing civilisations are not merely in a state of healthy competition but are in the process of a deadly conflict. Toynbee defined civilisations mainly based on their predominant religious affiliation. Huntington’s definition of civilisation is not as clear. While one can praise Huntington for bringing the concept of culture and civilisation into the debate of international relations — for they are a very important part of the political map of the world — his definition of various civilisations is not very convincing. His distinction between the democratic West and the rest of the world, including the hostile Islamic world, is simplistic and imprecise. There are many other difficulties with the concept of a clash of civilisations:
1- One is bound to ask: What is the West? Where does it start, and where does it end? Are we including the Russian Federation, which, apart from its European part, also extends to Siberia and the Far East as part of the West? Do we include Latin America, with its rather distinct culture, as part of the West? What about Japan and the rest of the so-called ‘tiger economies’ in the Far East, which are competing with the West in the field of industrial and technological development? If they are included in a single civilisation, as Huntington tends to do, then surely the term “Western civilisation” is used very loosely.
2- What is Islam? Does it refer to all the 55 member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference? Are we talking about Indonesia, which has the largest number of Muslims of any country, bigger than the entire Arab world put together, followed by India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, none of which are either Arab or Middle Eastern? Is he seriously proposing a united challenge posed against “the West” by the combined forces of Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where by far the largest number of Muslims live? Or is he talking merely about the Middle East?
If it is the Middle East that he is talking about, the Middle East itself is very diverse in nature, with Arab, Persian and Turkish civilisations having challenged each other for the past few thousand years. Moreover, the Middle East has not been historically very hostile to the West and has not been very unstable either. The present perception of Middle Eastern instability belongs to the past two centuries, which have witnessed Western domination over most of the Middle East, followed by anti-colonialist struggles, as well as to the more recent history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These recent events have provided the West with an impression of endemic instability and conflict in that part of the world.
The Middle East has been the cradle of human civilisation, and the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian civilisations created some of the oldest empires, which lasted for thousands of years and laid the foundations of recorded history and world religions, including Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Some 5,500 years ago, a Nilotic civilisation, which would in time become one of the world’s greatest cultures, was spawned in Egypt. The Egyptian civilisation continued for thousands of years until it was eventually conquered first by the Persians, then by Alexander the Great, before being absorbed into the Roman Empire in 30 BC.
At the beginning of the fourth millennium BC, the Sumerians first started a great civilisation in the southern parts of Iran and Mesopotamia. Shortly afterwards, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians and later the Chaldaeans occupied the Tigro-Eurphrates valley. About 2,500 BC, the Amorites and Canaanites (including the Phoenicians) populated Syria, and about 1,500 BC, the Aramaeans settled in Syria and the Hebrews in Palestine.
The Medes, the Achaemenians, the Parthians and the Sassanian empires, which lasted from the 7th century BC to the 7th century AD, provided long periods of stability and prosperity, as a result of which many different races and ethnic groups worked together in perfecting the art of civilisation. During the Islamic period, the Abbasid Caliphate, which lasted from 750-1258 AD, or the Ottoman Empire, which lasted from 1292-1922 AD, have been among the most stable and enduring civilisations the world over. Therefore, the prevalent notion that the Middle East is an inherently unstable part of the world is not borne out by facts.
Even in the post-Second World War period, the Middle East has not been the most violent part of the world. The war in Korea (1950-54) cost between 3 and 4 million lives, and those in Vietnam (1945-75), upward of 4 million. The most costly Middle Eastern wars were those of Algerian independence (1954-62), in which an estimated one million people died as a result of the violent French opposition to the Algerian demands for independence, and the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), in which around three-quarters of a million people are believed to have died. The human toll of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole, from 1948 onwards, including Israeli attacks on Lebanon, is believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000, most of the casualties being on the Arab side.
In recent years, other parts of the world have also produced many examples of appalling bloodshed and barbarism. Only a few years ago, the world witnessed the massacre of some two hundred thousand Bosnians in the heart of Europe, and the conflict still continues in Kosovo. About 50,000 Muslim women were gang-raped by Serb soldiers. In Rwanda, about one million people were hacked to death in less than a month by feuding tribes who are pagan or Catholic. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and forced more than five million Afghans to flee to Iran and Pakistan. The Russian suppression of Chechen independence and Russia’s military involvement in Tajikistan’s civil war have also produced massive devastation and human misery.
The problem with some modern authors, and probably with our fast-moving, media-dominated, soundbite civilisation, is that we have lost sight of the long sweep of history and have forgotten the long record of inter-relationships and mutual influences which have shaped human history during the past few thousand years. We seem to have forgotten the long history of contact between the Greeks and Persians, the Romans and the Persians, the Byzantines and the Arabs and the Islamic-Christian contacts during the Middle Ages and the long history of inter-relationship in Spain and Eastern Europe.
3- What is a civilisation? Is it peculiar to a country or to blocs of countries and cultures? Is a civilisation to be defined mainly as the result of the existing religious beliefs of the majority of the people in a given country at a given time, or are there other equally important factors which seem to remain the same regardless of the changes in the predominant religion of the time? Did Iran’s civilisation fundamentally change as a result of the conversion from Zoroastrianism to Islam, or were there some constant factors which remained the same despite the change of faith? Did the civilisation of many Byzantine territories, which were converted to Islam and became part of the Islamic empire, suddenly change? Conversely, did the Spanish civilisation fundamentally change after the expulsion of Muslims from Granada in 1492? Was the British civilisation totally transformed as a result of the Reformation or the recent triumph of secularism?
4- Furthermore, what do we mean by religion? There are many varieties of sects and denominations within the same religion, some of which are completely at variance with others. What we need to bear in mind in looking at religious traditions such as Christianity or Islam is that although we use the singular label “Christianity” or “Islam”, in fact, there are many varieties of Christianity and Islam. Looking at Christianity, there are some movements about which we may have doubts as to whether they count as Christian. To list some of the denominations of Christianity is to show something of its diverse practice — Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Coptic, Nestorian, Armenian, Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Mennonite, Congregationalist, Quakers, Disciples of Christ — and we have not reached some of the newer, more problematic forms: Latter-Day Saints, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Unificationists, Zulu Zionists, and so forth. Moreover, each faith is found in many countries and takes colour from each region. German Lutheranism differs from American, Ukrainian Catholicism from Irish, and Greek Orthodoxy from Russian.
The same is true about Islam. In addition to the major divide between the Sunnis and the Shi’is, there are the four main orthodox Sunni sects and no less than 400 other minor sects and Sufi orders. Islam has given rise to perhaps the world’s greatest mystical literature in the works of Sufi writers and poets. It has also produced militant fundamentalist movements. Which of them represents true Islam? Religions or sects are merely one factor and one contributor to the complex notion of culture. An Iranian Muslim is different from an Arab Muslim and very different from an Indonesian or Malaysian Muslim in the same way that a British or American Christian is very different from a Chinese or African Christian.
5- Another problem with a blanket definition of civilisation is that even the non-religious aspects of different civilisations are not always representative of a single concept and a single philosophy. Western civilisation has produced liberal democracy. It has also given rise to fascism and Nazism. Western civilisation has created capitalism as well as communism. The Soviet Union’s dogmatic Marxism, its faith in material progress and the cult of technology, and indeed its nationalism and patriotism, all had precedents only in European history. Western civilisation has produced philosophies of individualism as well as collectivism. It has produced the Industrial Revolution, as well as otherworldly, nihilistic and Utopian ideologies, right to modern positivism or post-modernism. Which of these are truly representative of Western culture?
In the Islamic civilisation, we have the highly rational philosophy of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose scientific and non-religious ideas scandalised Medieval Europe when the Church condemned “Averroism” as a dangerous heresy. On the other hand, there have been many idealistic and mystical philosophers in Islam, such as Avicenna, Ibn Arabi and Suhrwardi, who provided the inspiration for many idealist European philosophers of the 19th century, including Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Iranian Islam has produced one of the greatest agnostics in the ever-fresh Omar Khayyam. It has also produced one of the greatest theological thinkers, Abu Hamid Ghazzali, who was a contemporary of Khayyam and was engaged in a famous debate with him. It is clear that at different periods, both the Western and the Islamic civilisations have gone through different phases of development, and different world-views and philosophies have prevailed at different times.
6- It is also not at all evident that civilizational differences have been the basis of international conflicts in this century or ever in the past. The trade problems between America and Japan; the competition for supremacy between America and China, and for that matter between Japan and China; the intense hostility which existed between the West and the Soviet bloc, were all of these based on civilizational differences or were they quite divorced from any concept of civilisation and were primarily clashes of interests, to do with the economics, with territory and with rivalry? The former Eastern European countries in the Eastern bloc, which have now become friendly with the West and are queuing to join the EU and even NATO, have they completely changed their civilisation, or were the former hostilities not based on civilisation?
7- When we talk of a pluralistic world, do we mean that pluralism is acceptable only if the rest of the world adopts Western culture, or are we looking forward to a world in which all different cultures can live side by side in peace and harmony? Clearly, related to this is the much-debated issue of the need to listen to the voices of those formerly excluded from consideration, not least the voices of Third World peoples. Too often, monopolies of power have created monopolies of knowledge and even monopolies of culture. This is manifest in the role of the powerful West in creating the international system. When President George Bush proclaimed the dawn of a New World Order, he was clearly referring to a world order modelled on the American way of life and dominated by her. In these cases, a critique of existing power structures and monopolies of knowledge is long overdue.
Throughout history, there have been periods when one or more powers have dominated the world or a large part of the world. As was pointed out earlier, we have witnessed the supremacy of the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Ottoman empires. During the past two centuries, the European empires, particularly the British Empire, ruled the world, followed by America, which is dominating the current world scene as the only remaining superpower. The world would have been a much poorer place if any of those ruling powers had been able to completely dominate and assimilate other cultures and civilisations. Yet, we seem to be demanding the total assimilation of all other cultures into what we regard to be Western civilisation. We seem to have chosen one “particular” culture and civilisation and would want to turn it into a “universal” civilisation.
None of the former monopolies of power lasted forever, and certainly, the present superiority of one political and military bloc over the rest will also not be exempt from this rule. However, what makes the present situation different from the past is both the reach and the globalisation of political power, the tremendous advances in science and technology, including the science of war, and also the universal nature of information technology and means of intellectual and cultural, as well as political and economic domination. The speed of communication and the material advancement and superiority of the West have led some to the conclusion that all the different cultures have no option but to submit to the dominant secular culture of the West and be submerged in it.
Jean-Jacques Servant Schreiber, over 30 years ago, published The American Challenge, which analysed Europe’s economic decline because of American goods and ideas. “The confrontation of civilisation will now take place in the battlefield of technology, science and management,” he concluded. He predicted, “The war we face will be an industrial one.” H. G. Wells described civilisation as “a race between education and catastrophe.”
If some Europeans are worried about this perceived American technological superiority, then the people in the Third World have much more reason to be alarmed. Modern technology is ruling the world, both in military fields, as could be seen during the Gulf War, as well as in economic fields. The countries which possess more sophisticated technology are jealously guarding their technical superiority, while preventing the third world countries from acquiring the most sophisticated technology is one of the main preoccupations of the developed world.
Another area where the West has an enormous superiority over the rest of the world is in the field of economic globalisation. It is the result of a long process of economic and technological development, by means of which large Western multinational corporations have controlled a major part of economic activity and global investment. Globalisation has led to an almost total internationalisation of markets, investment, management and finance. World finance, for example, is enormously important as it translates into the daily flow of billions of dollars, transferred instantly from one financial centre to another, mainly dominated by more advanced countries. The collapse of the communist bloc has further intensified this trend of financial globalisation in the interest of major Western financial institutions.
All this is not meant as an indictment of the West or to suggest that one should turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of the developing countries, whether Islamic or non-Islamic. It would be a mistake to go from an acceptance of established orthodoxies to the assertion that all alternatives are to be welcomed or have equal validity. One should clearly be able to criticise oppression, dictatorship, prejudice and injustice wherever they are found. However, one should be consistent in one’s condemnation; not as is the case at the moment, when the so-called friends of the West can literally get away with murder, while other countries which are not so friendly towards the West are condemned for the slightest offence.
One should also realise that some elements of the present climate of mistrust, suspicion and hostility towards the West that exist among some Middle Eastern countries are themselves a legacy of their past history and the alleged ills of colonialism and imperialism to which they were subjected. What we are witnessing today is not the result of a “clash of civilisations” or a war between Islam and the West. It has mainly to do with national or regional conflicts, economic problems, and ethnic and sectarian differences. At the moment, the ball is in the American court. By trying to devise a just and balanced system for the whole Middle East, as a result of which all the countries of the region can feel that they have a stake in the maintenance of peace, the West can create peace, prosperity and hope for the future in that turbulent area.
The study of peace and conflict reveals two notions of peace: positive and negative. Negative peace is the absence of violence and an end to the bloodshed, not an end to prejudice and hatred. Negative peace is an example of many treaties that were signed in Yugoslavia, in the Middle East, and in the Far East. Positive peace is more than the absence of war; it is the elimination of the deep-rooted structural divisions that lead to conflict and violence. It brings an end to hatred and prejudice, racism, religious bigotry, chauvinism, economic and political injustices and indifference to suffering.
To help achieve positive peace, we must study how enemies can achieve reconciliation through the development of mutual understanding and respect. If people are not to be derailed from that goal, they must start practising a collective form of forgiveness and reconciliation leading to permanent peace. If the “New World Order” is not to remain forever just a slogan, then we must start to apply principles of forgiveness and reconciliation in the conduct of international relations. More important than that is a positive effort by all of us not merely to tolerate other cultures and religions, but to actively try to learn from them and see all of them as manifestations either of the same God or at least of the same universal human culture.
We can start by studying different kinds of literature which appeal to the common poetic imagination of mankind. We must begin to speak in the language of science, which knows no boundary. We must speak in the language of art, which is universal. We must speak about the language of mysticism, which is common to all religions. And we should speak less about minor dogmatic and doctrinal ideas, which do not constitute the main element of any religion. The East can learn from the West’s science and technology, its rationalism, its concepts of democracy and individual freedom, the equality of rights of men and women and respect for minorities; while the West can learn from the East’s more integrated view of life, its union of science and religion, its respect for tradition, family values and a deeper affinity with nature.
In the 1950s, Lester Pearson warned that humans were moving into “an age when different civilisations will have to learn to live side by side in peaceful interchange, learning from each other, studying each other’s history and ideals and art and culture, mutually enriching each other’s lives. The alternative, in this overcrowded little world, is misunderstanding, tension, clash, and catastrophe.”[19]
Our apprehension about the possibility of a nuclear confrontation during the Cold War helped us to avoid war and to find a peaceful solution to the East-West conflict. Professor Huntington’s book and other similar works, by drawing our attention to the possibility of a clash between civilisations, can help us to avoid a real clash between civilisations and learn to resolve our differences in a spirit of mutual respect, tolerance, humility and reconciliation.
Footnotes:
[1] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 12 vols., 1934-1961). There is also an abridged version of this book in two volumes by D. C. Somervell (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).
[2] E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
[3] There are two good translations of this book, one by Dr Franz Rosenthal of Cambridge and one by Professor Mohsen Mahdi of Harvard University.
[4] Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi, Shah-Nameh (the Book of Kings, the great 10th-century Persian epic poem).
[5] Francis Fukuyama. “The End of History,” The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), 4, 18.
[6] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 12 vols., 1934-1961), VII, 7-17; Civilisation on Trial (Oxford University Press, 1948), 17-18; Study of History IX, 421-422.
[7] Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 23-24.
[8] I submitted it for an MA degree as I was accepted to teach and work for a PhD. Degree at Cambridge University.
[9] R. W. Emerson, Journals (Centenary Edition, Boston, 1902), I, 342.
[10] Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, (I.B. Tauris, 1994, Preface, p ix).
[11] See ‘The Observer’ magazine, 29th Dec. 1996.
[12] Barry Buzan, New Patterns, pp. 448-449.
[13] Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West and Why Their Bitterness Will Not Be Easily Mollified,” Atlantic Monthly, 266 (September 1990), 60.
[14] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), pp. 2f..
[15] Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
[16] Quoted in: Akbar S. Ahmed, Post Modernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (Routledge, 1992), p. 97.
[17] Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.
[18] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996).
[19] Lester Pearson, Democracy in World Politics (Princeton University Press, 1955), pp. 83-84.
F Jahanpour 