Glib threats of cultural war simply echo the abhorrent omens of the dead and buried Osama bin Laden. Jews and Christians lived together in Arabia well before the Prophet’s arrival, and a gradual accumulation of monotheistic beliefs eventually made its way into the Koran. Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted with mutual respect until the Crusades. Their religions differ in many ways. But they are not necessarily any more in opposition today than they were in the distant Arabian past.
Faith and Power is the title of the latest book by one of the most prominent of the foreign policy hawks, Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis. Professor Lewis analyzes the failure of Muslims to adapt their religious traditions to modern requirements. He concludes that Islam and the West are firmly incompatible.
Back in 1993, eight years before 9/11, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations that the next great world conflict would no longer be caused by ideological or economic factors. Instead, the divisions among peoples and nations would be cultural – language, history, tradition, and especially religion. A book written by Jóhann Páll Árnason and published in 2003 in the Netherlands, Civilizations In Dispute, presented the first systematical and critical survey of classical and contemporary approaches to comparative analysis of different civilizations.
Social Differences Separating Islam from the West
If you ignore Turkey and the functioning democracies and industrial economies of Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, it is generally true that Muslim traditions have failed to adapt to modernity’s requirements. Sharia law is without legal makeup or disposition. Tribe, family, or sect subverts the authority of public institutions, overwhelming civil society and placing power under the vested interests of military structures that are not committed to social need, public demand, or political ideals.
Unlike Christianity in the West, Islam is not just a faith, creed, or conviction in the Middle East. In the words of Middle East specialist Bernard Lewis, it is “a complete system of identity, loyalty and authority” that provides Muslims with the answers to every question and the solution to every problem. Without public institutions and legal structures, ancient oppressive systems have endured. Professor Lewis first used the term “clash of civilizations” in 1990 in his Atlantic Monthly article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage.”
Iron-fisted dictators and their networks of spies have been able to use religious traditions to support and maintain their control over resources and the high levels of unemployment, rising prices, and the wide gap between rich and poor that have made their corrupt regimes possible. Entrenched, ancient regimes have used the Koran to co-opt opposition parties and trade unions. The United States, Britain, France, and others have supported these dictatorships and monarchies, even occasionally overthrowing democracies in the name of protecting national interests against Communism and to maintain access to natural resources such as oil.
Can today’s leaderless uprisings guarantee a radical departure from the brutal, oppressive past while continuing to serve Islam? Will new opposition parties carry an Islamic tag like the Jamaat-e Islami in Pakistan? If so, the world will simply have to deal with new dictators and the citizens of their countries will continue to suffer.
How the Believers in a Coming Clash of Civilizations See Islam
The hawks point out that Muhammed established a state that he would forever rule as both prophet and sovereign, unlike Jesus who distinguished between obligations owed to God and Caesar. Most Middle Eastern states have never separated state from religion. But this view does not consider differences in origin, ethnicity, education, or the impact made by geography and climate. Those concerns have been left to scientists such as Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, whose book Guns, Germs and Steel examined how and why human societies and continents followed such widely divergent pathways of development over the past 13,000 years.
Rather than make anthropological observations of human behavior, those who warn us about a clash of civilizations base their scholarship on the study of written religious texts, which grew out of oral traditions (known as Hadiths) that were passed down by all the generations since Muhammed’s death in 632.
One is reminded of the children’s game played around the world, broken telephone or Chinese whispers, in which one person whispers a message to another. The words are passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Naturally, errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from the one uttered by the first. Some players also deliberately alter what is being said in order to guarantee a changed message by the end of it.
Judgments based on this kind of scholarship, which disdain the social sciences, have produced the broad, distorted generalizations that have been used to send our troops and money into Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Holy Qur'an
Western scholars tend to accept the basic premise that Muhammed the Prophet lived from 570 until 632 CE in Arabia and that he spoke the words that compose the 114 “suras” of the Qur’an, or Koran. The holy text took on its present form under the Caliph Uthman, the Prophet’s son-in-law and the third successor to lead the Islamic community, who reigned from 644 to 656.
The earliest written biography of the Prophet was composed by Ibn Hisham, who died in 833, about 200 years after Muhammed’s death.
The earliest of the three synoptic gospels of the New Testament, Mark’s, was written just 40 years after the death of Jesus, when spoken memories would have been fresher. Yet, biblical scholars admit to knowing almost nothing about the life of Jesus or his personality. Despite the acknowledged unreliability of oral tradition and the fact that those traditions were not recorded until two centuries had passed since the Prophet’s passing, most scholars believe that Muhammed was the Arabian Moses, dispensing God’s laws from the peak of a holy mountain.
Raising the Battle Cry for a Clash of Civilizations
Although Muslims ruled Jerusalem since 638, Christians were permitted to visit the city until the 11th century. Just as the number and frequency of pilgrimages to Jerusalem reached new peaks, the Seljuk Turks took over control of Jerusalem and announced an end to Christian pilgrimages. On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II called on Christian princes in Europe to go on a crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks. His speech to the Council of Clermont in France combined cries for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and a great holy war against “the infidels.”
Seven disastrous crusades followed and continued until 1291, when Rome lost its final post in Palestine. The Crusades were as much a failure as the invasion of Iraq more than 700 years later. Rather than halt the spread of Islam, they merely installed a cruel intolerance between Muslims and Christians, replacing the mutual respect that came before. And they revived anti-Semitism throughout the West and the Middle East. The only winners were the despots who initially raised the battle cry. The Popes increased their power and wealth, and the European kings used the Crusades to rid themselves of troublesome barons.
The battle cry was raised again just eight days after 9/11, when Richard Perle, head of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and close pal, Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, argued that the way to prevent future terrorist attacks was to invade and take over Iraq. They showed how democracy is rooted in institutional structures with clear lines of accountability, pointing out that both are absent from many Middle Eastern and Muslim societies, including Iraq’s. But those very facts combined with a little knowledge of history should have told the West that it would be impossible to impose a successful, effective democracy on Iraq or any of its Muslim neighbors through foreign military force. Nevertheless, the region’s most disastrous Western intervention since the Suez Crisis of 1956 went forward.
Today, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt (and perhaps Syria in the near future) demonstrate that only internal forces enabled by information technology beyond the control and power of the military-intelligence state can establish regime change with a democratic agenda. So far, the cry “Islam is the Only Solution” has not been heard, despite dire warnings of more terrorism to come by dictators trying to blackmail continued Western support. There has been no clash of civilizations.
Conditions were once not so different in the West when the Christian god, via the divine right of kings, was used to support power politics. Finally, at Runnymede in 1215, the English barons used a sword and the Magna Carta to force King John to formally relinquish tyrannical power. He had to promise to no longer seize people or their property in violation of “the law of the land.” Until then, kings exercised the same kind of tyrannical power over their subjects that the Middle Eastern dictators have been wielding over their citizenry — arresting opponents without formal charges, imprisoning, torturing, and executing them.
Can the people of the Middle East develop with their own Magna Carta to create the rule of law and to overcome the imperative of religion?
Resources:
Lewis, Bernard, Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, N.Y., 2010
Huntington, Samuel, P., The Clash of Civilizations?: The Debate, The Council on Foreign Affairs, New York, N.Y., 2010
JÁrnason, Jóhann Páll, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Koninklijke Brill, N.V., Leiden, The Netherlands, 2003
Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, N.Y., 1997
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
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