Byzantine Empire 555AD
Roots of Muslim Rage part 2
by Bernard Lewis
See The Roots of Muslim Rage Part 1
THIS revulsion against America, more generally against the West, is by no means limited to the Muslim world; nor have Muslims, with the exception of the Iranian mullahs and their disciples elsewhere, experienced and exhibited the more virulent forms of this feeling.
The mood of disillusionment and hostility has affected many other parts of the world, and has even reached some elements in the United
States. It is from these last, speaking for themselves and claiming to speak for the oppressed peoples of the Third World, that the most widely publicized explanations -- and justifications -- of this rejection of Western civilization and its values have of late been heard.
The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and
imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and
exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but
to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human
beings, as members of the human race.
In none of these sins are we the only
sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather
better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the
almost universal lot of womankind on this planet.
Is racism, then, the main grievance? Certainly the word figures prominently in
publicity addressed to Western, Eastern European, and some Third World
audiences. It figures less prominently in what is written and published for
home consumption, and has become a generalized and meaningless term of
abuse -- rather like "fascism," which is nowadays imputed to opponents even by
spokesmen for one-party, nationalist dictatorships of various complexions and shirt colors.
Slavery is today universally denounced as an offense against humanity, but within living memory it has been practiced and even
defended as a necessary institution, established and regulated by divine law.
The peculiarity of the peculiar institution, as Americans once called it, lay
not in its existence but in its abolition.
Westerners were the first to break
the consensus of acceptance and to outlaw slavery, first at home, then in the
other territories they controlled, and finally wherever in the world they were
able to exercise power or influence -- in a word, by means of imperialism.
Is imperialism, then, the grievance? Some Western powers, and in a sense
Western civilization as a whole, have certainly been guilty of imperialism, but
are we really to believe that in the expansion of Western Europe there was a
quality of moral delinquency lacking in such earlier, relatively innocent expansions as those of the Arabs or the Mongols or
the Ottomans, or in more recent expansions such as that which brought the
rulers of Muscovy to the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Hindu Kush,
and the Pacific Ocean?
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the
West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia
of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in
having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy
these historic diseases.
And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not
condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr.
Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they
diagnosed and to which they gave their names.
Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism -- sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in
the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry
quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics.
In many of these
writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance,
being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary,"
and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern
colonial empires.
One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of
imperialism is not -- as for Western critics -- the domination by one people over
another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship.
What is truly
evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For
true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of
the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive
to embrace the true faith.
But for misbelievers to rule over true believers
is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and
morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law.
This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as
Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in
all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim
governments.
It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in
Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those
countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor,
of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim
spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own.
In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith,
based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or
incomplete, have no right to any such protection.
THERE are other difficulties in the way of accepting imperialism as an
explanation of Muslim hostility, even if we define imperialism narrowly and
specifically, as the invasion and domination of Muslim countries by non-Muslims.
If the hostility is directed against imperialism in that sense, why has it been
so much stronger against Western Europe, which has relinquished all its Muslim
possessions and dependencies, than against Russia, which still rules, with no
light hand, over many millions of reluctant Muslim subjects and over ancient
Muslim cities and countries?
And why should it include the United States,
which, apart from a brief interlude in the Muslim-minority
area of the Philippines, has never ruled any Muslim population? The last
surviving European empire with Muslim subjects, that of the Soviet Union, far
from being the target of criticism and attack, has been almost exempt.
Even the most recent repressions of Muslim
revolts in the southern and central Asian republics of the USSR incurred no
more than relatively mild words of expostulation, coupled with a disclaimer of
any desire to interfere in what are quaintly called the "internal affairs" of
the USSR and a request for the preservation of order and tranquillity on the
frontier.
One reason for this somewhat surprising restraint is to be found in the nature
of events in Soviet Azerbaijan. Islam is obviously an important and potentially
a growing element in the Azerbaijani sense of identity, but it is not at
present a dominant element, and the Azerbaijani movement has more in common
with the liberal patriotism of Europe than with Islamic fundamentalism.
Such a movement would not arouse the sympathy of the rulers of the Islamic Republic.
It might even alarm them, since a genuinely democratic national state run by
the people of Soviet Azerbaijan would exercise a powerful attraction on their
kinsmen immediately to the south, in Iranian Azerbaijan.
Another reason for this relative lack of concern for the 50 million or more
Muslims under Soviet rule may be a calculation of risk and advantage. The
Soviet Union is near, along the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran, and
Afghanistan; America and even Western Europe are far away.
More to the point,
it has not hitherto been the practice of the Soviets to quell disturbances with
water cannon and rubber bullets, with TV cameras in attendance, or to release
arrested persons on bail and allow them access to domestic and foreign media.
The Soviets do not interview their harshest critics on prime time, or tempt
them with teaching, lecturing, and writing engagements. On the contrary, their
ways of indicating displeasure with criticism can often be quite
disagreeable.
But fear of reprisals, though no doubt important, is not the only or perhaps
even the principal reason for the relatively minor place assigned to the Soviet
Union, as compared with the West, in the demonology of fundamentalism. After
all, the great social and intellectual and economic changes that have
transformed most of the Islamic world, and given rise to such commonly
denounced Western evils as consumerism and secularism, emerged from the West,
not from the Soviet Union.
No one could accuse the Soviets of consumerism;
their materialism is philosophic -- to be precise, dialectical -- and has little or
nothing to do in practice with providing the good things of life. Such
provision represents another kind of materialism, often designated by its
opponents as crass.
It is associated with the capitalist West and not with the
communist East, which has practiced, or at least imposed on its subjects, a
degree of austerity that would impress a Sufi saint.
Nor were the Soviets, until very recently, vulnerable to charges of secularism,
the other great fundamentalist accusation against the West. Though atheist,
they were not godless, and had in fact created an elaborate state apparatus to impose the worship of their gods -- an apparatus with its own
orthodoxy, a hierarchy to define and enforce it, and an armed inquisition to
detect and extirpate heresy.
The separation of religion from the state does not
mean the establishment of irreligion by the state, still less the forcible
imposition of an anti-religious philosophy.
Soviet secularism, like Soviet consumerism, holds no temptation for
the Muslim masses, and is losing what appeal it had for Muslim intellectuals.
More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an
authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life.
Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the
greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for
their people.
A Clash of Civilizations
THE origins of secularism in the west may be found in two circumstances -- in early Christian teachings and, still more, experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart.Muslims, too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the separation of religion from the state.
Only by depriving religious institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.
Muslims experienced no such need and evolved no such doctrine. There was no need for secularism in Islam, and even its pluralism was very different from that of the pagan Roman Empire, so vividly described by Edward Gibbon when he remarked that
"the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true. By the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."
Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship.
It did, however, accord to the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as
theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until the West
adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
At first the Muslim response to Western civilization was one of admiration and
emulation -- an immense respect for the achievements of the West, and a desire to
imitate and adopt them.
This desire arose from a keen and growing awareness of
the weakness, poverty, and backwardness of the Islamic world as compared with the advancing West. The
disparity first became apparent on the battlefield but soon spread to other
areas of human activity.
Muslim writers observed and described the wealth and
power of the West, its science and technology, its manufactures, and its forms
of government.
For a time the secret of Western success was seen to lie in two
achievements: economic advancement and especially industry; political
institutions and especially freedom.
Several generations of reformers and
modernizers tried to adapt these and introduce them to their own countries, in
the hope that they would thereby be able to achieve equality with the West and
perhaps restore their lost superiority.
In our own time this mood of admiration and emulation has, among many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In
part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation -- a growing awareness,
among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having
been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their
inferiors. In part this mood is due to events in the Western world itself.
One factor of major importance was certainly the impact of two great suicidal wars,
in which Western civilization tore itself apart, bringing untold destruction to
its own and other peoples, and in which the belligerents conducted an immense
propaganda effort, in the Islamic world and elsewhere, to discredit and
undermine each other.
The message they brought found many listeners, who were
all the more ready to respond in that their own experience of Western ways was not happy. The introduction of Western commercial, financial, and industrial methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to transplanted Westerners and members of
Westernized minorities, and to only a few among the mainstream Muslim
population.
In time these few became more numerous, but they remained isolated
from the masses, differing from them even in their dress and style of life.
Inevitably they were seen as agents of and collaborators with what was once
again regarded as a hostile world.
Even the political institutions that had
come from the West were discredited, being judged not by their Western
originals but by their local imitations, installed by enthusiastic Muslim
reformers.
These, operating in a situation beyond their control, using imported
and inappropriate methods that they did not fully understand, were unable to
cope with the rapidly developing crises and were one by one overthrown.
For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style
economic methods brought poverty, Western-style
political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style
warfare brought defeat.
It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to
listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were best and that
their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers
and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for his people.
ULTIMATELY, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies,
secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit,
and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan
force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United
States.
The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor
explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken
place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the
political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries.
Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and
formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have
devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis,
robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an
increasing extent even their livelihood.
There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even
the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equalled in other civilizations. And
yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are
stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive
mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and
civilized country -- even the spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical
religion -- to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the
life of their Prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.
The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate source of
these cataclysmic changes in the West and in attributing the disruption of
their old way of life to the impact of Western domination, Western influence,
or Western precept and example.
And since the United States is the legitimate
heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of the West, the United States has
inherited the resulting grievances and become the focus for the pent-up
hate and anger.
Two examples may suffice. In November of 1979 an angry mob
attacked and burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The stated cause
of the crowd's anger was the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a group of
Muslim dissidents - an event in which there was no American involvement
whatsoever.
Almost ten years later, in February of 1989, again in Islamabad,
the USIS center was attacked by angry crowds, this time to protest the
publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.
Rushdie is a British
citizen of Indian birth, and his book had been published five months previously
in England. But what provoked the mob's anger, and also the Ayatollah
Khomeini's subsequent pronouncement of a death sentence on the author, was the
publication of the book in the United States.
It should by 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 civilizations -- the perhaps irrational but
surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. 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.
Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or native
Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been accepted by even the most
radical Islamic fundamentalists, usually without acknowledgment of source, and
suffering a sea change into something rarely rich but often strange. One such
was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices of
representation, election, and constitutional government.
Even the Islamic
Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected assembly, as well as
a kind of episcopate, for none of which is there any prescription in Islamic
teaching or any precedent in the Islamic past. All these institutions are
clearly adapted from Western models.
Muslim states have also retained many of
the cultural and social customs of the West and the symbols that express them,
such as the form and style of male (and to a much lesser extent female)
clothing, notably in the military.
The use of Western-invented
guns and tanks and planes is a military necessity, but the continued use of
fitted tunics and peaked caps is a cultural choice.
From constitutions to Coca-Cola,
from tanks and television to T-shirts, the symbols and artifacts, and through
them the ideas, of the West have retained -- even strengthened -- their appeal.
THE movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition.
There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great
achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these
other traditions will in time prevail.
But before this issue is decided there
will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even
the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among
themselves.
And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid
the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of
differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements.
At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics.
To describe this perception I shall end as I began, with a quotation from an American President, this time not the justly celebrated Thomas Jefferson but the somewhat unjustly neglected John Tyler, who, in a letter dated July 10, 1843, gave eloquent and indeed prophetic expression to the principle of religious freedom:
The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment.
The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith.
The Mahommedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions....
The Hebrew persecuted and down trodden in other regions takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid.... and the Aegis of the Government is over him to defend and protect him. Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free government would be imperfect without it.
The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air.
Copyright © 1990 by Bernard Lewis. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 1990; The Roots of Muslim Rage; Volume 266, No. 3; pages 47 - 60.
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