Islam and
the West – Internal Cracks and External
Conflicts
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The worldwide protests against
the cartoons of the Prophet show up not so much
a conflict of civilizations but the growing cracks
within the Western and Islamic civilizations
Western civilization is all-mind with no heart.
Islamic civilization, which at one time had both
a mind and a heart, has lost its mind and is rapidly
losing its heart.
As technology shrinks the world and compresses
civilizations into shared space, each civilization
is forced to confront the contradictions within
itself. Unable to do so, the protagonists of each
project these contradictions upon the others,
blaming their neighbors for their own flaws, and
creating chaos that the world cannot afford.
Western civilization is sometimes projected as
Judeo-Christian. This is historically incorrect.
Religion in the West, more so in Europe than in
America, is a façade on a secular core.
Christianity appeared in a crumbling Roman world
as a monastic order, challenging the excessive
materialism of the day. It shunned involvement
with the decrepit politics of the times and focused
instead on spiritual upliftment. As the Western
Roman empire was overrun by the Visigoths, the
mantle of temporal power shifted to the Byzantine
(Eastern Roman) empire based in Constantinople.
In the fourth century, Emperor Constantine made
an attempt to integrate church and state. His
attempts were unsuccessful and Christianity remained
largely a religious super-layer on the temporal
power of medieval monarchs.
In the eleventh century, at the onset of the Crusades,
parts of Muslim Spain fell to the Christians.
With it, the vast libraries of Toledo became available
to the Latin West. The Christian monarchs set
up schools of translation and Greek rational thought,
which had been cultivated and polished by Arab
scholars, became accessible to Europe.
The Latins felt compelled to reconcile their religious
dogma with rational thought but they fell short
in this effort. St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the
greatest of the medieval Christian scholars, concluded:
what belongs to Caesar belongs to Caesar and what
belongs to the Church belongs to the Church.
The advent of humanism in the fifteenth century
marked a third major intellectual revolution in
Europe. It was partly a rebellion against the
excessive arbitrariness of the Popes and partly
an awakening nourished by the migration of Greek
scholars further west after Constantinople fell
to the Ottomans (1453).
Humanism placed man squarely in the driver’s
seat in his ongoing struggle to create history.
It cast aside any inhibitions imposed by Church
dogma and asserted man’s autonomy in charting
out his own destiny. Reason, not dogma, was to
be radar for guiding European destiny.
Humanism was a factor in the Protestant revolution.
Unshackled from religious inhibitions, Europe
spread its mercantile net around the world, focusing
more on profit than proselytizing. In the eighteenth
century it launched the industrial revolution.
Europe used the accrued technological and economic
advantages to master the oceans and colonize much
of the world. The technological explosion continues
to this day, hammering with its shock waves the
entire globe, transforming in its wake cultures,
languages and nations alike.
The Europe of today is a creation of humanism,
of scientific positivism. It is a child of Descartes,
Newton, Nietzsche and Sartre. It is not a product
of Christianity or Judaism. The sacred is confined
to the four walls of the church while the world
outside is abandoned to the profane. Nature, sociology,
history, politics and ethics are all subject to
the unbridled dance of the ego on the world stage.
The European civilization is all-mind and no heart.
How can the European mind grasp the deep hurt
felt by the Muslim psyche by racist cartoons of
the Prophet Muhammad?
The Muslim civilization is itself at odds with
its own soul. Islam burst upon the world in the
seventh century offering mankind an integrated
worldview wherein all creation was sacred. This
all-embracing worldview included in its fold politics,
sociology, history and nature. Nothing was left
outside of it. As the Prophet said: All of (the
vast) earth is a mosque.
The first challenge to this integrated worldview
came from Greek rationalism. In the eighth and
the ninth centuries, the Mu’tazalites tackled
many of the issues of Islamic beliefs in the light
of rational analysis. They fell flat on their
face because of their limited understanding of
the mystery of time, on the issues of before and
after, and their proposition that the Qur’an
was “created in time”. Reaction set
in, the Mu’tazalites were banished from
the Islamic intellectual landscape and history
threw up in its wake the strict Hanbali interpretation
of the Shariah.
The second historical challenge was the destruction
wrought by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.
The curtain fell on the classical Islamic civilization
when Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258 and the
Mongol Rasa displaced the Shariah as the law of
the land. In its darkest hour, the resilience
of Islam asserted itself. It renewed itself through
tasawwuf. The Sufi shaikhs converted the Mongols
and the succeeding centuries saw the magnificence
of the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Great Moguls.
For more than three hundred years, circa 1260
to 1600, it was the heart that ruled Islamic civilization.
This age gave birth to monarchs like Sulaiman
the Magnificent, Shah Abbas and the Great Mogul
Akbar. It produced the sublime poetry of Rumi
and Hafiz, monuments to love like the Taj Mahal
and architectural masterpieces like the Blue Mosque
of Istanbul.
Circa 1600, largely as a result of political and
religious movements in the Indian subcontinent,
the Sufic age went into decline and was replaced
by an increasing emphasis on jurisprudence. The
emperor Aurangzeb of India, Shaikh Abdel Wahab
of Arabia and Osman Don Fudio of Nigeria personified
this tilt towards jurisprudence.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as
Europe pressed its technological advantage, asserting
its political dominance and cornering global economic
activity, intellectual activity in Muslim lands
went into a decline. Science and culture decayed,
spirituality declined, old institutions frayed,
and the Muslims increasingly withdrew behind a
wall of legal rigidity and fatalistic mumbo-jumbo.
In the twentieth century, spiritual Islam came
under an incessant frontal assault from Western
positivism and internal sabotage from Wahhabi
absolutism. The resultant Islam was a caricature
of its own self, rituals without spirit, a passive
spectator in the onward march of history.
Modern Muslims are a product of this decline.
Lacking the political resources to withstand the
pressures of an overbearing West, or the intellectual
stamina to confront their own past, they react
to the needling of the West with the ferocity
of an injured tiger. There is a rage in the Islamic
world, fostered by wounds inflicted from without
and from within, which manifests itself in occasional
outbursts of extremism.
Europe, which abandoned its religious heritage
long ago, continues to snipe at Muslims for not
following its path. In response, Muslims ask:
Does an egocentric Europe, which gave birth to
destructive nationalism, fascism, Nazism, the
holocaust, and produced two World Wars, have anything
spiritual to offer mankind?
Make no mistake about it. The cartoons were caricatures.
They were racist, offensive and sacrilegious.
They were unnecessary in a day and age when the
confluence of civilizations calls for mutual respect
and understanding, not insult and insinuations.
But that is the Muslim perspective.
In the European perspective, born and bred in
a secular, anti-religious historical paradigm,
no activity is sacrilegious. It is the economic
value of an act that determines its utility. The
European mind respects money and power, which
modern Muslims do not have. The same publishers,
who hide behind a mantra of free speech, dare
not publish similar cartoons about other religious
traditions which possess far greater economic
and political clout.
Let the cartoon episode act as a catalyst for
Europe and the Islamic world alike to look inward
at the spiritual dislocations that are a legacy
of their own historical experiences. A United
Nations protocol for respect across religious
and cultural lines would help. However, it is
only when civilizations learn to confront their
own past will they be able to confront their future
and engage in a meaningful dialogue based on a
shared spiritual vision for all mankind and become
co-architects of a shared spiritual destiny.
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