Transcriber: Susan Richards-Benson,
Edited and introduced by Drs.
Cornelis Hulsman
Introduction by Drs. Cornelis Hulsman:
On
November 17, I attended a most
important lecture by famous British journalist and author William Dalrymple
at the American University in Cairo.
Dalrymple traveled in 1994 to various Christian communities in
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and
Egypt, and discovered that Christianity is expected to
disappear from most of these countries. Dalrymple’s
conclusions are very different from, for example, the
British makers of the film ‘Between Fear and Faith,’ who
traveled in Egypt during the same time. The makers
of this film falsely concocted persecution stories, playing into
pre-existing Western stereotypes and fear
of Islām. In 1994, I spoke with the makers of this film, and they told
me that they wanted a film that
would attract attention, would thus sell and be financially attractive. Dalrymple,
however, wanted to
collect the facts for a travel book, one of the best ever written on contemporary Arab
Christianity.
One hundred years ago Christians still made up some 25% of the population of the
Levant.
Istanbul had a Christian population of nearly 60%. Today their numbers are very small. Dalrymple
searched for the
reasons; various forms of Western interference resulting in tensions in countries in the
Middle East making
Christians emigrate to the economically wealthier West. Dalrymple, however, thought in
1994, just as so many other
Europeans, that the picture was one of Islamic extremism against Christianity
but then saw this was far from
accurate:
Christians in Turkey became the victims of various
nationalisms; Christians in South-Eastern
Turkey were caught in the 1980’s and 1990’s in a civil war
between Kurds and the Turkish government. The civil war
in Lebanon resulted in mass Christian emigration.
In both countries it was not primarily an issue of Islām against
Christianity. Religion certainly has been
misused by some people but it certainly was not the main reason for the
problems Christians have
experienced.
Since the American led invasion in Iraq in 2003, approximately half of
Iraqi’s
Christians have fled the country, most of them to Syria which is tolerant toward its Christian minority,
but, says Dalrymple, if the U.S. were to topple the Syrian regime it would probably be the end of
Christianity in
this country.
Of all regions in the Middle East, the situation of Christians in the
Palestinian territories
is worst but that too has little to do with Islām, but with Christians escaping
extremely difficult circumstances.
Of course extremists misusing Islām, who also attack Christians, do
exist, but it would be wrong to blame all or
most difficulties on extremists alone and neglecting or
undervalueing other far more important factors.
The
status of Palestinian Christians in Israel is
currently stable. Christians in Egypt, says Dalrymple, have gone
through a difficult period with extremist
attacks in the 1980’s and 1990’s but whenever tensions happen Christians
tend to leave. Tensions have often
been the result of Western interferences or perceived interferences such as a
generally greater Western
attention for the rights of Christians then the general well-being of people regardless
of their religious
affiliation that in turn has been perceived by Muslims as injust with a possibility of
sentiments
backfiring on local Christians.
Muslims, generally, have been much more tolerant toward their
non-
Muslim minorities then Christians were to theirs in Europe which does not mean that that there has not been
inequality and problems. Islamophobia in Europe is on the rise, also resulting in wrong presentations about
the
position of Christians in the Islamic world, both historically as well as contemporary, portraying
their position
much darker than is justified if one would take the historical context into consideration.
That is why it is so
extremely important that William Dalrymple presents a different view. He did so in his
book entitled, ‘From the
Holy Mountain,’ and continues to do so in his lectures, such as those at the
American University in Cairo, St. John
the Baptist Church in Cairo and Alexandria. We are pleased that
William Dalrymple gave us his permission to place
the texts of his Cairo lectures in AWR.
Sometime
in the early 1140’s a scholar from North Italy made an
arduous crossing over the Alps and the Pyrenees and
eventually arrived in the newly re-conquered Spanish frontier
town of Toledo. There, Gerard of Cremona was
given the position of canon at the Cathedral, formerly the Jama Masjid
or Friday Mosque, which had recently
been seized from the town’s Muslims.
Before the rise of Islām, Toledo
had been the capital city of
Visigothic Spain, and its capture by Alfonso of Castile was an important moment in the
Christian
reconquista of the land known to Islām as al-Andalus. Many of the Muslims of the city had,
however,
chosen to stay on under Castilian rule, and among them was a scholar named Ghalib, the Mozarab. It is not
known how Gerard and Ghalib met and became friends, but soon after Gerard’s arrival the two began to
cooperate on a
series of translations from Toledo’s Arabic library which had survived the looting of the
conquering
Christians.
Gerard and Ghalib’s mode of translation was not one that would be regarded as
ideal by modern
scholars. Ghalib rendered the classical Arabic of the texts into Castilian Spanish which
Gerard then translated on
into Latin. As many of the texts were Greek classics which had themselves arrived
in Arabic via Syriac, there was
much room for error. But the system seems to have worked. In the course of
the next half-century, Ghalib and Gerard
translated no less than 88 Arabic works of astronomy, mathematics,
medicine, philosophy and logic, exactly the
branches of learning which underpinned the great revival of
scholarship in Europe referred to as the Twelfth
Century Renaissance.
Gerard and Ghalib’s
translations were not alone. Other translations from the Arabic
texts during this period filled European
libraries with a richness of learning impossible even to imagine a century
before: editions of editions of
Aristotle, Euclid, Plato and Ptolemy, commentaries by Ibn Sina- known to the
Christian West as Avicenna and
astrological texts by al-Khwarizmi, encyclopedias of astronomy, illustrated accounts
of chess, and guides
to precious stones and their secret medicinal qualities.
It was a crucial but sometimes
forgotten
moment in the development of Western civilization: the revival of mediaeval European learning by a
wholesale transfusion of scholarship from the Islamic world. It was probably through Islamic Spain that
such basic
facets of western civilization as paper, ideas of courtly love, algebra and the abacus passed
into Europe, while
the pointed arch and Greco-Arab (or Unani from the Arabic word for Greek/Ionian)
medicine arrived via Salerno and
Sicily, where the Norman king Roger II (known as the “Baptised Sultan”)
was commissioning the Tunisian scholar al-
Idrisi to produce an encyclopedic work of geography.
Some
scholars go further: Professor George Makdisi, in
an important book published by the Edinburgh University
Press, has argued convincingly for a major Islamic
contribution toward the emergence of the first
universities in the mediaeval West, showing how terms such as having
‘fellows’ holding a ‘chair,’ or
students ‘reading’ a subject and obtaining ‘degrees,’ as well as practices such as
inaugural lectures and
academic robes, can all be traced back to Islamic concepts and practices. Indeed the idea of
a university
in the modern sense – a place of learning where students congregate to study a wide variety of
subjects
under a number of teachers – is generally regarded as an Arab innovation first developed at the al-Azhar
university in Cairo. As Makdisi has demonstrated, it was in cities bordering the Islamic world – Salerno,
Naples,
Bologna, Montpellier and Paris – that first developed universities in Christendom, the idea
spreading northwards
from there.
The tortuous and complex relationship of Western Christendom and
the world of Islām has provoked
a variety of responses from historians. Some such as the great Scottish
medievalist, Sir Steven Runciman, take the
view (as he wrote at the end of his magisterial three volume
‘History of
The Crusades’) that “Our
civilization has grown out of the long sequence of interaction
and fusion between Orient and Occident.”
Runciman believed that the Crusades should be understood
less as an attempt to re-conquer the Christian
heartlands lost to Islām so much as the last of the
Barbarian invasions. The real heirs of Roman civilization were
not the chain-mailed knights of the rural
West, but the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the
cultivated Arab caliphate of Damascus,
both of whom had preserved the Hellenized urban civilization of the Antique
Mediterranean long after it was
destroyed in Europe.
Others have seen relations between Islām and
Christianity as being basically
adversarial, a long drawn-out conflict between the two rival civilizations of East
and West: as Gibbon
famously observed of the Frankish victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD which halted the
Arab advance
into Europe:
“A victorious line of march had been prolonged from the Rock of Gibraltar to the
banks
of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and
the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian
fleet
might have sailed into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Qur’ān would now be
taught in the
schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and
truth of the
Revelation of Mahomet.”
Since 9/11, there has been no shortage of takers for this
school of thought, which
sees Islamo-Christian relations in terms of brute confrontation. The cheerleader
of this tendency in America has
been Bernard Lewis and his follower Samuel Huntington, who between them
have come up with the dangerous notion of
the Clash of Civilizations
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington].
Underlying much of Lewis’s
writing is the
assumption that there are two fixed and opposing forces at work in the history of the Mediterranean
world:
on the one hand is European civilization which he envisages as a Judeo-Christian block; and on the other
hand, and quite distinct, is a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on the conquest and conversion of the West.
As he
writes in one influential essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage: “The struggle between these rival
systems has now
lasted some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islām in the seventh century,
and has continued
virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and
counterattacks, jihads and
crusades, conquests and re-conquests.” It was this essay that contained the
phrase ‘the Clash of Civilizations,’
later borrowed by Samuel Huntington for his controversial Foreign
Affairs article.
Yet the links that
bind Christianity and Islām are so deep and complex that the
intermittent confrontations should perhaps more
accurately be looked upon as a civil war between two
different streams of the same tradition than any essential
clash of civilizations. Despite their
differences, Muslims and Christians have always traded, studied, negotiated
and loved across the porous
frontiers of religious differences. Probe relations between the two civilizations at
any period of history,
and you find that the neat civilizational blocks imagined by writers such as Bernard Lewis
or Samuel
Huntington soon dissolve.
The Prophet Muhammad did not think he was “founding a new religion” so
much as bringing the fullness of divine revelation, partially granted to earlier prophets such as Abraham,
Moses or
Jesus, to the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. Islām accepts much of the Old and New Testaments,
and obeys the
Mosaic laws about circumcision and ablutions, while the Qur’ān calls Christians the "nearest
in love" to Muslims,
whom it instructs in Sūra 29 to "dispute not with the People of the Book
[that is, Jews and
Christians] save in the most courteous manner… and say, ‘We believe in what has been
sent down to us and what has
been sent down to you; our God and your God is one, and to him we have
surrendered’.”
When the early
Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet’s armies, they
assumed that Islām was merely a variant form of
Christianity, and in some ways they were not so far wrong.
Islam, of course, accepts much of the Old and New
Testaments, obeys the Mosaic laws about circumcision and
ablutions, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish
prophets. Indeed, the greatest theologian of
the early church, St John of Damascus (d. 749), was convinced that
Islam was at root not a new religion,
but a variation of a Judaeo-Christian form. This perception is particularly
remarkable, as St John had
grown up as a young Arab aristocrat in the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus – the hub of
the young Islamic
world – where his Orthodox Christian father was the Chancellor. St John was himself an intimate
boyhood
friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid, and the two boys’ drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were
the subject of much gossip in the capital. Later, in his old age, St John took the habit at the desert
monastery
of Mar Saba’ where he began work on his great masterpiece, ‘The Fountain of Knowledge.’ The book
contains an
extremely precise critique of Islām, the first ever written by a Christian, which,
intriguingly, John regarded as a
form of Christianity and closely related to the heterodox Christian
doctrine of Nestorianism. This was a kinship
that both the Muslims and the Christians were aware of. In
649 the Nestorian Christian Patriarch wrote: "These
Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay,
rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and
saints, and they make gifts to our churches and
monasteries." This tradition continued and led to many surprising
anomalies; Saladin’s private
secretary and the head of his war office were both Coptic Christians, as were the
Egyptian commanders who
defeated the Seventh Crusade in 1250.
Throughout the mediaeval period, Christians
and Muslims
continued to meet as much in the context of trade and scholarship as they did on the battlefield. The
tolerant and pluralistic civilization of Muslim Spain allowed a particularly fruitful interaction. A
revealing
moment was when, in 949, a Byzantine embassy presented the court of Cordoba with the works of the
Greek physician
Dioscorides. There were no scholars in Spain who knew Greek, so an appeal was sent back to
Constantinople. In
answer to their request a learned Greek monk named Nicholas was sent to Spain in 951. A
Muslim scholar from Sicily
with a knowledge of Greek was also found. Together these two expounded the text
to a group of Spanish scholars.
This group was a most interesting one. It included native Andalusian
Islamic scholars such as Ibn Juljul, who later
composed a commentary on Dioscorides; a distinguished Jewish
physician and courtier, Hasday ibn Shaprut; and a
Mozarabic bishop Recemund of Elvira who had been sent as
the Caliph’s ambassador to the German Emperor Otto I. It
was a truly international and interdenominational
gathering of scholars.
Throughout the Crusades, the
Venetians and other Italian trading cities kept
up a profitable trade with their Muslim counterparts, resulting in
a great many Arabic words surviving in
Venetian dialect and a profound Islamic influence on Venetian architecture.
Even Christian clerics who
cohabited with Muslims in the Crusader kingdoms came to realize that as much bound them
together as
separated them. As William of Tripoli reported from Acre in 1272: “Though their beliefs are decorated
with
fictions, yet it now manifestly appears that they are near to the Christian faith and not far from the path of
salvation.” At the same time the Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr noted that despite the military struggles for
control
of Palestine, “Muslims and Christian travelers will come and go between them without
interference.”
There
were, of course, no shortage of travelers on both sides who could see no good
in the infidels amongst whom they
were obliged to mingle, and tensions often existed between Muslim rulers
and the diverse religious communities
living under their capricious thumb: by modern standards Christians
and Jews under Muslim rule- the dhimmi-
were treated as second-class citizens. But there was at
least a kind of pluralist equilibrium (what Spanish
historians have called convivencia or ‘living
together’), which had no parallel in Christendom and which in
Spain was soon lost after the completion of
the Christian reconquista. Upon taking Grenada, the Catholic
Kings expelled the Moors and Jews, and
let loose the Inquisition on those – the New Christians – who had converted.
There was a similar pattern in
Sicily. After a fruitful period of tolerant coexistence under the Norman kings, the
Muslims were later
given a blunt choice of transportation or conversion.
Ten years ago I made a journey
through the
Christian communities of the Middle East which had survived 1400 years of Muslim rule, in sharp
contrast to
the Muslim communities conquered by Christian rulers. The journey finally appeared in print as ‘From
the
Holy Mountain.’ I had started the book expecting to record a tale of persecution of Christian minorities by
Islamic fundamentalists, but the longer I spent among Middle Eastern Christians, the more I became aware
that in
many ways the opposite story was more remarkable: the extraordinary degree of tolerance of Muslim
rulers relative
to their counterparts in the Christian West.
This was not a new observation. The
more I read I found that
the tolerance of Muslim rulers was something which had long struck European
visitors to the Mughul and Ottoman. As
Monsieur de la Motraye, a Huguenot exile escaping religious
persecution in Europe put it: "There is no country on
earth where the exercise of all religions is freer
and less subject to being troubled than in Turkey." At the same
time that most of Catholic Europe was given
over to the Inquisition, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was burnt for
heresy at the stake in the Campo dei
Fiori in India, the sixteenth century Mughal Emperor Akbar declared that "No
man should be interfered with
on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that
pleases him.”
On
my journey among the Middle Eastern Christians I was also struck by the extent to which
eastern Christian
practice formed the template for the basic conventions of Islām: the Muslim form of prayer with
its bowings
and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian Orthodox tradition still practiced in pew less
churches across the Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, square rather than round, derive
from the
church towers of Byzantine Syria; and Ramaḍān, at first sight one of the most distinctive Islamic
practices, is
nothing more than an Islamicization of Lent, which in eastern Christian churches still
involves a grueling all-day
fast. Certainly, if a monk from sixth-century Byzantium were to come back
today, he would find much more that was
familiar in the practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Ṣūfī than
in, say, a contemporary American Evangelical.
Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think
of Christianity as thoroughly Western, rather than the
Oriental faith that it actually is.
* *
*
In the decade since finishing ‘From the Holy Mountain,’ I
have continued writing about the
relationship of Christianity and Islām, but from a slightly different angle of the
18th and
19th century history of early colonial India, a period like that of 8th
century
Islamic Spain when East and West did again most certainly meet.
In ‘White Mughals,’ I wrote about
the often forgotten period in the 18th century India when East and West most certainly did meet. For in the
early
days of the East India Company during the 18th century, it was almost as common for westerners to
take on the
customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse.
These White Mughals had responded
to their travels in
India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, and adopting Indian dress,
studying Indian philosophy,
studying Islamic astrology, marrying Muslim wives and adopting the ways of the
Mughal governing class they came to
replace what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has
called ‘chutnification.’
Moreover, the White
Mughals were far from an insignificant minority: by the end
of the 18th century fully one-third of the British men
in India were leaving their possessions to Indian
wives.
In Delhi the period was symbolized by Sir David
Ochterlony, the British resident who arrived in
the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went
around Delhi in a procession behind their
husband, each on the back of her own elephant.
For all the humor of
this image, in such mixed households,
Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. In
one letter, for example, it is
recorded that ’Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to
Mecca.’
One of
the most moving of Ochterlony’s letters concerns his two daughters, and the
question of whether he
should bring them up as Muslim or Christian, If Christian, they would be constantly derided
for their "dark
blood," but Ochterlony also hesitated to bring them up as Muslims "as I own I could not bear that
one of my
daughters should be part of a numerous Ḥarīm." A letter, written to another Scot in a similar position,
who
has opted to bring up his children as Muslim Indians, ends rather movingly: "In short my dear M[ajor] I have
spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in mind but I have not yet been able to
come to a
positive decision."
This was not an era when notions of clashing civilizations would have
made sense to
anyone. The world inhabited by Ochterlony was far more hybrid, and had far less clearly
defined ethnic, national
and religious borders, than we have all been conditioned to expect.
It is
certainly unfamiliar to anyone who
accepts at face value the usual caricature of the Englishman in India,
presented over and over again in films and
television dramas, of the narrow-minded sahib in a sola topee,
dressing for dinner in the jungle. My most recent
book, ‘The Last Mughal,’ continues the story, by
looking at what happened next – why the surprisingly easy
relationship of Islām and Christianity seen in
the 18th century India collapsed so quickly, and why the
relatively easy inter-racial and inter
-religious relationships, so evident during the time of Ochterlony, gave way
to the hatreds and racism of
the high 19th century Raj: how a close clasp of two civilizations turned into a bitter
clash.
Two things
in particular seem to have put paid to this easy co-existence. One was the rise of British
power. In a few
years the British had defeated not only the French but also all their Indian rivals; and in a
manner not
unlike the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the change in the balance of power quickly led
to
an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.
No longer was the West prepared to study and learn from the
subcontinent; instead Macaulay came to speak for a whole generation of Englishmen when he declared his view
that "A
single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
The other
factor was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social,
sexual and racial
attitudes that this brought about.
The wills written by dying East India Company
servants show that the practice
of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up
in one-in-three wills between 1780 and
1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By
1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the
century, they have all but disappeared.
In half a century, a
surprisingly multicultural world refracted back into
its component parts, while the children of mixed race
were corralled into what became effectively a new Indian
cast, the Anglo-Indians who were left to run the
railways, posts and mines.
Like today, this process of pulling
apart, of failing to talk, listen or trust
each other took place against the background of an increasingly
aggressive and self-righteous West, facing
ever stiffer resistance to Western interference.
For, as anyone who
has ever studied the story of the
rise of the British in India will know well, there is nothing new about the Neo-
Cons. The old game of
regime change of installing puppet regimes, propped up by the West for its own political and
economic ends
is a game that the British had well mastered by the late 18th century.
Sometimes the parallels are
almost
uncanny. By the end of the 1990’s, the hardliners in London, who were calling for regime change, found that
they now had a president who was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative,
aggressive
in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled
global power.
It
was best, he believed, simply to remove a hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist
the West. The first to be
targeted was a Muslim dictator who had usurped power in a military coup.
According to British sources, this leader
of state was a "furious fanatic," who had "perpetually on his
tongue the projects of Jihād." He was also deemed to
be "oppressive and unjust, [and a] perfidious
negotiator."
It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sulṭān of
Mysore, and the president of the Board of
Control, Henry Dundas, sent Richard Wellesley, elder brother of the Iron
Duke, to India in 1798 with
instructions to replace Tipu with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley
had to justify to the
British public a policy whose outcome had already been long decided in private. Wellesley,
therefore,
began a campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as an aggressive Muslim, a view strongly
disputed by many modern historians who tend to see him instead as a modernizing technocrat. Tipu was duly
invaded
and killed in the lucrative war of 1799.
By the 1850s the British had progressed from
aggressively removing
independent-minded Muslim rulers, such as Tipu Sulṭān who refused to bow before the
will of the hyper-power, to
destabilizing, then annexing even the most pliant Muslim states. By this time,
many British officials were nursing
dreams to impose not only British laws and technology on India, but
also British values, in the form of
Christianity.
If the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing
opposition to British rule and creating a
constituency for the rapidly multiplying jihadis, so the
existence of "Wahhābī Conspiracies" strengthened the
conviction of the Evangelicals that a "strong attack"
was needed to take on such "Muslim fanatics."
Today,
West and East again face each other uneasily
across a divide that many see as religious war. Suicide jihadis fight
what they see as a defensive action
against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered.
As before, western
Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate
fiends" and
simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again western
countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised
to be
attacked as they see it by mindless fanatics.
As we have seen in our own time, the histories of
Islamic
fundamentalism and western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a
curious but
concrete way, extremists and fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce
each other’s
prejudices and hatreds.
The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other. There are
clear lessons here. For,
in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, himself a fierce critic of British
aggression in India, those who fail to
learn from history are always destined to repeat it.
* *
*
Since 9/11 there has rightly been a great
deal of scrutiny of the failings of the Muslim world:
much has been written about the absence of freedom and a
civil society in almost all Muslim countries, as
well as the failure of Muslim elites to bring either mass
education or economic prosperity to their people.
There has also been much pertinent questioning as to why so many
of the world’s conflicts, and so much of
its terrorism, are associated with Islamist groups.
There has also
been a great deal of reflection
on the difference between the tolerant pluralistic intellectual past of Islām and
its often intolerant
present. In this respect I would recommend to you a fine essay, entitled, ‘In the Court of the
Lions I Sat
Down and Wept,’ by Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh. al-Shaykh writes about her feelings on visiting
the
Alhambra and her depression in feeling that:
“We Arabs have no connection with the Arabs of Andalucia,
with those who, having borrowed the pens and chisels of angels, have carved and embellished to such
melodious
perfection…
“Why is it,” she asks, “that we didn’t complete our cultural journey, and how
is it that we have
ended up today in the very worst of times? What is it that made our predecessors pore
over their desks, writing
down and recording the marvels of mathematics and science and searching out the
skies with the stars and
constellations in order to discover their secrets, and, driven by the love of
knowledge, to study medicine and to
devise medicaments even from the stomach of bees. It is enough for us
to mention the works of al-Farabi, Avicenna,
Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd, Ziryab, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Zeydoun and
countless others.”
This soul searching, which has
taken place both within the Islamic world and
amongst the wider Muslim Diaspora, has been for the good. Few Muslims
would now dispute that much has gone
badly wrong with contemporary Islām, particularly with the way that the Saudis
have used their petrodollars
to spread around their particularly narrow and intolerant Wahhābī brand of
Islam.
But at the moment,
in the aftermath of the horrors in Abū Ghraib and Guatanamo Bay and the entirely
avoidable massacres of
ordinary Iraqi civilians in Falluja and elsewhere, it is highly debatable whether it is now
the moment for
putting only the Arab world on the psychiatrist’s couch. Surely, at this point, it is us in the West
who
should be engaged in some introspection?
For what Abū Graib has shown yet again is the continuing
tendency of the imperial Christian West to treat “the other” as untermenchen - subhuman. Racism is
not
static: its targets change. For much of the history of Christendom it was the Jews who suffered the
brunt of
European bigotry. But it is increasingly apparent that just as Islām is now replacing Judaism as
Europe’s second
religion, so Islamophobia is replacing anti-Semitism as the principal Western statement of
bigotry.
Last
year, on a lecture tour in the States, I came across the full force of Middle American
views on Muslims. The only
language they understand is force, my Detroit taxi driver assured me: “This
liberal whining is because the U.S. is
being too soft on those Camel Jockeys.” He went on to tell a joke
how Muslims came in two varieties: push buttons
(a reference, apparently, to Hindu women’s bindis) and pull
starters (a reference to turbans), before reminding me
that after all, it was Saddam who was responsible
for 9/11. Earlier in the summer, following the beheading of the
kidnapped American Nick Berg, Rush Limbaugh
went on air to reassure Middle America that “They are the ones who are
perverted. They are the ones who are
dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman. They are the ones who are human
debris, not the United
States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards.”
Nor do we in
Britain have any
right to sneer at America. When Limbaugh’s British counterpart, Kilroy-Silk, was sacked for
writing that
the Arabs were little more than “loathsome” “suicide bombers, limb amputators and women repressors,”
97% of
callers to the Express – about 22,000 people – agreed that the BBC had been too harsh with him. It is
still clearly acceptable to people in this country to make the sort of racist asides about Arabs and
Muslims that
would now be considered quite unacceptable if made about Jews, Catholics or Black people.
Consider this letter I
received a couple of months back from William Roff, who was formerly professor of
History at Columbia University in
New York, and has now retired to Edinburgh where he supervises students
in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. This
is what he wrote:
“Within the past few years, four of my
Malaysian students have been subjected to racist
violence directed against them as "Pakis" or Arabs (and
Muslims). One had emerged from Friday prayers at a mosque
in Dundee when he was hit in the face by a stone
and nearly lost an eye. Another, living in a village with his
young family, had obscene graffiti scrawled
on the house and excrement pushed through the letter box. A third lived
with his wife and young children on
an Edinburgh housing scheme, where they were so harassed by vituperation and
threats of violence that they
were forced to move into central Edinburgh, at a much higher rent which required him
to take a job and
prevented him completing his thesis. The fourth, a month or so ago, returned to Edinburgh from
fieldwork
with his wife, a toddler and a baby, and had a brick thrown through the bedroom window.
“Such incidents
testify to a culture of active racism in Britain that is the product of levels of ignorance inadequately
addressed
by educational authorities and fostered by the sneering, casual racism of much of the tabloid
press.”
After
the bombs in the London tube, and the discovery of other plots to wreak havoc, Muslims
in Britain are now used to
endless suspicion, and occasional abuse, discrimination and violence, and little
of which gets reported. The
massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, never led to articles about
the violence of Christianity. Yet
every abominable act of al-Qaeda terrorism brings to the surface a great
raft of criticism of Islām as a religion,
and dark mutterings about the sympathies of Western Muslims –
even from the Anglican Archbishops. Meanwhile British
Muslims remain firmly on the margins of our national
life. Considering the size of our Muslim community it is
scandalous that there are only four Muslim schools
in the state sector. It is even more alarming that there are
only four Muslim peers, two Muslim MPs and a
single lonely British Muslim MEP. One of Tony Blair’s most senior
Downing Street advisers recently told me
that Labour did not take Muslim sentiment seriously, as there was yet to
emerge a serious Muslim lobby
capable of reacting in a political coherent manner.
Of course this sort of
thing is not just a
British problem. In the U.S. we have recently had Congressional candidates comparing Arabs to
“pond scum,”
and while in France Le Pen may rail against Muslim North African immigrants and howl for their mass
repatriation, his outbursts look positively benign beside those of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane in Israel
("The Arabs
are a cancer, cancer, cancer in the midst of us... let me become defense minister for two
months and you will not
have a single cockroach around here! I promise you a clean Israel!") or indeed
those of Bal Thackeray in Bombay ("I
believe in constructive violence... these people must be kicked out.
Even if a Hindu is giving shelter to these
Muslims he also must be shot dead").
Yet perhaps the most
worrying thing about this trend is the extent to
which it has gone largely unrecognized and uncriticized:
indeed despite centuries of prejudice and violence against
Muslims, the term Islamophobia was only coined
within the last decade. Moreover intellectualized versions of this
anti-Islamic revulsion have come to find
acceptance in defense and political circles: not long ago, Nato’s
then secretary-general, Willy Claes,
told the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung that "Islamic fundamentalism
is just as much a threat to
the West as Communism was," going on to contrast barbaric Islām with "The basic
principles of civilization
that bind North America and Western Europe."
Meanwhile, in Washington, despite
the Democrat victory
in the mid term elections, there is still talk blithely of moving on next year from Iraq to
attack Iran and
Syria. To add petrol to the flames, they then invite Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who
has
branded Islām a ’very wicked and evil’ religion (Christianity and Islām, he writes, are “as different
as lightness and darkness”) to be the official speaker at the Pentagon’s annual service - and this
immediately
prior to Graham’s departure to Iraq to attempt converting the people of Baghdad to
Christianity.
All
the while, the paranoia and bottled-up rage in the Muslim world grows more
uncontrollable, queues of angry young
men volunteer for suicide bombings and attacks by Islamic militants
gather pace, with ever wider global reach and
technical sophistication. No wonder we feel scared.
It
is clear we will never win the war on Islamist
terrorism until we win the battle for Muslim hearts and
minds. It is decent, moderate Muslim opinion – not torture
chambers – that is our best defense against the
spread of Islamist radicalism, yet at the moment we seem to be
doing all we can to persuade the people of
the Middle East that we are all hypocrites, sadists and liars. In one
summer, the abuses of Abū Ghraib,
the mass murders of Iraqis in Faluja combined with the continuing betrayal of the
Palestinians by Bush and
Blair, allowing illegal settlers to annex great junks of the West Bank, has succeeded in
inflaming even the
most moderate Muslim opinion. The sad truth is that the Islamic World is now united against us
more
forcefully than at any time since Suez. Unless we change our ways, its not just Iraq that we stand to lose,
it’s the entire war against Militant Islamist ultra-radicalism. Bin Laden must be delighted.
* * *
