John Lloyd’s basic idea, in his article entitled “Wanted—the next big idea” in the Financial Times of Jan 12/13, 2002, is that the September 11 event produced another big idea which portends the end of the world. In its wake the catastrophe has steered everyone’s imagination toward drawing scenarios as to how the end will come about. As a result, risk has “irredeemably” become “deeply engineered” in “all processes that sustain life in advanced countries.” According to him, the situation is worse now as compared with the time when socialism, despite its terrible world view, was the sole challenge to liberal democratic hegemony. Because the new challengers are the malevolent Muslims whose faith “does not care to have a world view”. The earth is, therefore, condemned and another challenger with a big idea is wanted to challenge the liberal democratic hegemony and to provide an escape from a condemned earth. For liberalism is confined by its own shackles. “The need to find votes” puts it at the mercy of the electorates, who do not allow it “to address the pain, misery and suffering of millions in the world.” But when it does provide aid and loans to developing states, it does so in return for a commitment by their elites to mechanisms which would guarantee to make their societies more like the west. This forced assimilation effectively wipes out the base on which an alternative to liberalism can be constructed. The above “conundrum”, also explains the moral bankruptcy of liberalism--despite its success in winning the ideological battle against its worthy challenger, which socialism was, it has failed on the moral ground by not addressing the worldwide misery.
John Lloyd has gone the farthest in laying bare the nature of “western liberalism” and “hegemony". But the discussion is too general, and its wide scope does not allow for gauging the impact of the U.S. hegemony on various countries--although the existence of the unprecedented consensus in the western camp has made it an all-permeating western hegemony. For example, the west, particularly the U.S., deals differently with three alien cultures which are of almost equal-size populations: its hegemonic treatments of China, India, and the Islamic world are totally different in content and substance. While hegemony is nakedly visible in the treatment of the Islamic states, it is well neigh absent in the treatment of the other two. The fragmented nature of the Islamic world, comprised of 51 countries, the existence of oil, and the Palestine problem, are the main mitigating factors paving the way for receiving the largest share of hegemony: Iran, for example, still struggles with the repercussions when its nationalistic tendencies were quashed in the 50s. It acquired sovereignty over its oil resources at the cost of social stability and disrupted development due to continuous boycotts.
Also, Mr. Lloyd has elaborated on the “global risk society,” which the west has turned into. The risk, however, is far greater for the Arab world living under the nuclear monopoly of Israel, acquired from the west when it looked the other way. In addition, the Arab world carries the biggest risk in that its developmental achievements can be wiped out by Israel, whose military superiority over the whole region has become one of the basic sacrosanct political tenets of the west.
The hegemony allotted, according to western policies and objectives, is having a pervasive and choking effect undermining all developmental efforts, initiatives, and visions throughout the Islamic states.
But does Islam itself have a world vision? Here, history’s verdict is different from the one offered by Mr. Lloyd. The western hegemony and hubris, is not confined to the maltreatment of other nations, or to reducing religion to a “residual”, as Mr. Lloyd has pointed out, but it also impacts upon the writing of history, tearing up the unwanted pages, of which the following is one:
“From the fifth to the tenth century Europe lay sunk in a night of barbarism which grew darker and darker. It was a barbarism far more awful and horrible than that of the primitive savage, for it was the decomposing body of what had been a great civilization.”
“The Christian-Germanic virtues did not result in progress, but in steady and growing barbarization. It is not true that a New World began at once to sprout on the ruins of the old. On the contrary, for close on five hundred years Europe sank lower and lower; things went steadily and continuously from bad to worse. In the ninth century the conditions were immeasurably more desolately dark and more utterly hopeless than they had been in the sixth or seventh. If we picture that Dark Continent of the ninth century isolated from the rest of the world and left to its own resources, there is no ground for surmising that it could ever, by virtue of any element of life existing within it, become civilized at all. Whatever, possibilities might exist in that dark welter of degradation, whatever factor might under propitious conditions be turned to advantage, it contained no endogenous seeds of life and progress that had power to germinate by virtue of their intrinsic force. The fate of Europe might conceivably have been to become fossilized into a kind of barbaric Abyssinia.
“The light from which civilization was once more rekindled did not arise from any embers of Greek-Roman culture smoldering amid the ruins of Europe, or from the living death on the Bosporus. It did not come from the Northern, but from the Southern invaders of the Empire, from the Saracens.”
It was not the Greek-Roman heritage nor was it Judaism or Christianity that saved the seeds of modern west; it was Islam that saved it with full awareness of its content. If Islam did not have a world vision it would not attend to the tendering care of a “decomposing” culture. Robert Briffault who devoted his entire book, entitled “The Making of Humanity”, to the subject in 1919, did so out of total frustration with recurrent grandiose distortions in western history. His book is totally ignored, however. It is not palatable to western taste, or in consonance with its hubris. Should he have caught the attention of his contemporary, Bertrand Russell, the chapter devoted to “Mohammadan Culture and Philosophy”, in the latter’s book entitled “A History of Western Philosophy”, would have undergone a drastic revision. History testifies, and Mr. Russell admits it, that the Jews, throughout the history, were saved by the Muslims; that their most outstanding philosopher Moses Maimonides (Ibn-Maimoun in Arabic) was a product of Islamic culture. Would the Zionists including Mr. Sharon care to take note?
We look with ambivalence at big ideas created at the spur-of-the-moment. The clash of civilization or that the earth is condemned because Islam lacks a world view do not withstand the test of deeper scrutiny. Distortion is a recurrent theme, however. If conceit ever oozed through a pen, then it surely found an expression in the so called clash of civilization, a thesis put forward by Professor Huntington, who turned Nietzsche’s idea, that stronger cultures devour the weaker ones, upside down. Whereas Nietzsche’s idea describes the hegemony of the west, its distorted version the “clash of civilization” rationalizes it. Only Bin Laden came to uphold the theme, and the Pentagon may find in it the political justification for attacks on Iran, Iraq, etc.
Nietzsche’s thesis, however, has an explanatory power with which Mr. Lloyd’s article is imbued. The western hegemony, in its demand of total assimilation from the rest, is nothing but a confirmation of the thesis. The fact that Christianity has been reduced to a “residual,” is a further confirmation showing the tectonic tension within the incompatible parts of western culture--the secular and the ethical. By the same token, the west is intent upon reducing Islam also to a residual. This aspect of the western hegemony, however, worries the Islamic world more than the material damage inflicted upon it--the material damage is due to the weaknesses in the Islamic world itself, for which it bears the prime responsibility. For example, the migration of 1.8 million educated Muslims to the west each year, burdens the Islamic world with enormous educational costs without return; the fault, however, lies in the Islamic world that cannot accommodate them. Or the fact that oil provides more revenue to western governments than to the Islamic states shows weaker economic bargaining power, for which the west cannot be faulted.
It is a reflection of the sorry state of our intellectualism and technological and scientific backwardness that the troglodytes who masterminded the September 11 disaster, showed far greater ingenuity than can be found in scientific institutions all over the Muslim world. The abominable act was of such sophistication and precision that set it apart from its environment; many still do not believe that it was the Muslims who conceived it. Perhaps the reason it did not arouse deep sympathies, for the victims, in the Islamic world, was because of the extreme savagery shown to a child called Mohammed A-Durrah—a savagery which stands out in the general pogrom against the Palestinians--and whose desperate cries, received nothing but bullets in response; his armless father, sitting next to him, could do nothing.
But the September 11 disaster should be discussed in a larger context. It was a disaster inflicted by the Islamic radicals. It has already been revenged by more than ten fold—the number of deaths in Afghanistan, subsequent to the American entry, is estimated at 40,000. Radicalism in the west, however, has inflicted upon the Islamic world far more devastating disasters: Hitler’s radicalism gave rise to Palestinian problem. The socialist-communist radicalism, engulfing Orthodox Christianity, played havoc with the Islamic world, deprived Muslims of the opportunity to practice their religion for about a century; the conquered people almost lost their Islamic identity. All of these disasters were preceded by the radical crusaders in the past, and have continuous backing from a crusading spirit which has become part of the electoral process in present day U.S.A., pushing for an engulfment of the whole region in flames as it targets Iraq, Iran, etc.
Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, who are the sworn enemies of the West, have inflicted heavier disasters upon the Islamic world. The use of napalm in Halabcha, the invasion of Kuwait and the suffering of the Iraqi people are not simple matters that can exonerate Saddam in a court of law. Bin Laden’s callous disregard for the poverty and misery in Afghanistan, where he could have invested his millions, his total preoccupation of its government with his diabolical schemes, when it should have been left to attend to the welfare of its people, as Islam would demand it, and his putting the Islamic world at jeopardy and adding to the miseries and threats, etc., are not within the fold of Islamic behavior. In fact, they are all in contravention to Quranic injunctions.
But had the Islamic world put its house in order, had it achieved something technologically at par with India and China, it would not have been subject to the present push and shove by the west; the Palestine problem would have found a solution and would not have been the thriving ground for radicals. Yes there are myriads of things that can be done to improve the situation, in all dimensions. But the blame for not doing anything is upon the Islamic world itself--when the governments are inactive, and as they are made sterile by the choking impact of the west, it is natural for the radicals to fill the vacuum. The choking impact of western hegemony also does not help the situation when realizing that political maturation does not come about overnight; it is a process of trial and error. In Iran, it took two decades for a Taliban-like regime to transform and is still transforming. Its political isolation is a blessing in disguise; it has allowed the trial and error to take place, as a result of which Iran has come a long way from Khomeini to Khatami. Others are not so lucky; in Algeria the process was curtailed; in Afghanistan lack of recognition of Taliban, blocked the process; the government was not allowed to be taken to task by the governed; as a result, Bin Laden was given a free ride.
Given the two examples, one about the far-west and one about the far-east of the Islamic world, it does not take too much imagination to fathom the impact of western hegemonic practices upon the countries that lie in between. The ladder has been pulled from under the feet in the Islamic world recurrently by the west. What we need from the West, in order to correct our situation, is decency and not big ideas. It is unfolding before our very eyes that under the banner of democracy in Afghanistan, warlords are reinstated, absolved of any remorse about their indecent acts in the past. While the Taliban have gone underground, the war lords have the freedom to roam around in return for accepting a foreign endorsed candidate for President with the people forlorn to pay for the ensuing consequences. Decency would have demanded that Afghanistan should not have been left forlorn to poverty and hunger when it sacrificed one million of its people to frustrate the diabolical communist designs, as a result of which the Russian bear was transformed to a lamb rejoining the western flock. Radicalism would have been nipped in the bud had Afghanistan been treated decently.
The unprecedented consensus in the west has resulted in the imposition of sanctions, mostly against the Muslim states, halting economic progress and afflicting the public suffering and malnutrition. Is the objective the punishment of certain leaders, or a forced reduction in Muslim population? Does it not radicalize the Muslim population? Can the U.N., a vehicle for these sanctions, remain a decent world organization in the eyes of the Muslims? What is cementing the consensus? When the west sends help to the sufferers, is it adequate, or only enough to get good publicity? Decency is not a product that can be fabricated; when it exists we will all know it. Decency would also demand that the concern for the poor becomes a global objective for all those whose religious beliefs remind them of the hereafter—let the struggle for the abolition of poverty be the ground where faith, Islamic Christian or Judaic, proves its existence.