The 19 young hijackers on Sept. 11 last year changed the world and its relations with their faith Islam. Their terrible act also created one of the greatest paradoxes of the 21st century: Islam, which sees itself as a religion of peace, is now associated with murder and mayhem.
Never before in history, it appears, has there been a conjunction of factors as in our time that has allowed people to kill and be killed on such a scale, with such extraordinary frequency and in so many gruesome ways.
So what is going on? What psychological, political or cultural factors are driving people into the global confrontation? What is the role of Islam in this?
As a direct result of Sept. 11 there has been an explosion of interest in books on Islam which attempt to answer these questions. The range varies — some like the three books under consideration based in scholarship and others, alas too many, reflecting prejudice and ignorance.
These three authoritative books attempt to answer the questions from different perspectives: The former Marxist — or is it Trotskyite? — Tariq Ali in “The Clash of Fundamentalisms,” the “Orientalist” historian Bernard Lewis in “What Went Wrong?” and the non-Muslim yet sympathetic scholar of Islam, John Esposito in “Unholy War.”
Consider Pakistan, the homeland of one of the authors, Tariq Ali. Christians worshipping in church were attacked and killed last month; the church was situated in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad, the capital of the nation. Shortly before this Muslims were killed in a mosque in Rawalpindi. Danny Pearl was brutally murdered in Karachi. Earlier, gunmen burst into a church in south Punjab and shot dead a large number of worshippers. In the time between the attacks on the churches dozens of Pakistanis have been killed. Doctors in particular were targeted especially those belonging to the Shia community.
In Pakistan no logical explanation appears to work. Jews, Christians and Muslims were all victims. No one could say that any one religion was more of a target than another one.
In the Middle East Jews and Muslims kill each other in a sickening spiral of violence and in South Asia Muslims and Hindus clash violently. A thousand people have died in India so far this year. Most of them were Muslim. Many were burned to death and women were raped.
Responses to Islam in the West have come in several forms. There have been attempts to reach out and begin the process of understanding. US President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington. Both he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair took every opportunity to state that the war was against terrorism and not Islam. In a darker and more troubling response, there has been an outpouring of vitriol against Islam. Muslims have been harassed and humiliated and in some cases killed.
It is this kind of reaction that Tariq Ali calls “fundamentalism”. Tariq’s autobiographical, polemical, angry, historical and ironic book explains Islam’s predicament and its relations with the West from a neo-Marxist perspective. The United States as the sole superpower has created global political, social and economic conditions which create anger and hatred for it. Tariq is equally critical of both American and Islamic extremism or “fundamentalism”.
Tariq sees fundamentalism in both the America of George Bush and the Islam of Osama Bin Laden. The illustration on the front jacket, Bush in a turban and Taleban style beard, and on the back jacket, Osama in a Western suit striking a presidential pose behind a podium displaying the seal of the President of the USA, carries the main content of Tariq’s argument. The “neo-colonial” and “imperialist” America is hated not only in the Muslim world. He describes the joy in Central America, Brazil and China on hearing the news of the events of the Sept. 11 in New York and Washington. “The subjects of the Empire had struck back.”
Samuel Huntington’s essay and later book called “The Clash of Civilizations” have generated a global debate about a supposedly inherent conflict between Islam and the West. What is not well known is that both the term and the idea came from Bernard Lewis’ essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” written several years before Huntington’s. In this essay Lewis also rehearses the arguments in his book, “What Went Wrong?”
In “What Went Wrong?” Lewis argues that the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement — the foremost military and economic power of its kind. It was also the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe was seen as barbaric and remote. Then all changed “suddenly” (I am extremely uncomfortable with the word when describing the rise and fall of civilizations as history tells us these movements are rarely sudden). It was downhill all the way and that is where the Muslim world finds itself.
As an explanation for the decline Lewis argues that the Muslim world failed to produce respect for time, music and literature which thwarted the development of modernity and democracy. There was no Mozart or Goethe and this was symptomatic of the failure. This linear trajectory of Muslim history can be challenged.
If Muslim history was coming to an end at the outset of the modern era in one part of the world, in other parts it was just beginning. Take South Asia. When the British Crown took over India after the failed uprisings of 1857 the processes of modernity were set in motion.
As a response Muslim society produced literary and intellectual giants such as the great poets Mirza Ghalib and Muhammad Iqbal. It produced educational institutions like Aligarh which created a synthesis between Western education and Islamic tradition. In turn Aligarh through its alumni contributed to history by producing several presidents and prime ministers.
South Asia produced world-class statesmen like Muhammad Ali Jinnah who had a vision of a modern, tolerant democracy for the nation he created, Pakistan. Abdus Salaam has won the Nobel Prize and the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has moved millions in the West.
And what about the role of Western imperialism in explaining what went wrong for Muslims and the stunting of democratic institutions? Too many Muslims are stuck in non-Muslim lands and subject to killing and harassment — ask the Palestinians, Kashmiris, Bosnians and Chechens. Anger and hatred inevitably poison society; tragically, this leads to violence.
Lewis would not want a clash of civilizations although many see his and Huntington’s ideas as forming a self-fulfilling conjecture. On the contrary Lewis raises other questions that may point to hope in the future: “But for growing numbers of Middle Easterners it is giving way to a more self-critical approach. The question ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question — ‘What did we do wrong?’ — had led naturally to a second question: ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question, and in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the future... If they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, then they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is their own.”
If Bernard Lewis is, as “The New York Times Book Review” called him, “the doyen of Middle Eastern studies” in the United States, John Esposito is considered by many as the young challenger. Writing “Unholy War” in his usual accessible manner Esposito sets out to chronicle the rise of extremists groups and explain the emergence of anti-American feeling in Muslim society. It is not driven by religious zeal alone but by the frustration and disappointment at US foreign policy. Many Muslims are also repelled by aspects of Western culture and the impact it has on their own societies. Esposito takes care to underline the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are appalled by the acts of violence committed in the name of Islam. He hammers home the point that we need to distinguish between the religion of Islam and the actions of people like Osama Bin Laden.
“Where Do We Go From Here?” Esposito’s final chapter, argues strongly against falling into the trap of seeing the clash of civilizations as inevitable. While urging the international community to continue the fight against terrorism it must not wage a war against Islam. Furthermore, the war against terror must not be used to erode central values in the US or seem to support authoritarian regimes that suppress opposition in their lands.
In the 21st century relations between Islam and the West will be determined by one of two opposing ideas — the clash or the dialogue of civilizations. In the midst of the global war against terrorism it is easy to believe that the former is triumphant. The daily news is depressingly full of examples of conflict. But those who believe in dialogue are also out and about. They may be thin on the ground but they are strong in commitment and many have a high profile.
The first and most important step forward in dialogue is to begin to understand Islam. There could be no better guide than these three books. We may not always agree with what they say but we need to take in their different perspectives to help us make sense of the atavistic yet contemporary, predictable yet uncertain and always dangerously changing relationship between Islam and the West.
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(Professor Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, Washington, D.C., and author of “Rethinking Islam: Living Dangerously in the 21st Century.”)
