Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Perceptions?

2002 Report (Continued) Background Paper


3. Using History

In the current international climate, there is a tendency to view the historic relations between Islam and the West in simplistic terms. The current conflict is thus portrayed as the struggle of freedom versus oppression, tolerance versus fanaticism, civilization versus barbarism; it is put into religious terms, as Christianity versus Islam; and finally, it is reduced to the ultimate moral battle of good versus evil.50 Although these generalizations represent the human instinct to make sense of so much confusion and complexity, these patently reductionist terms are a recipe for ethnic “profiling” on a global scale.

It must be acknowledged, however, that both the story of the Muslim - Christian relationship and, more important, its interpretation, are loaded with memories from an often violent history. The most notorious of these episodes date back to the European wars to conquer the Holy Land of Palestine. The Crusades, which lasted from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, have provided the lens through which Muslims have viewed Christians ever since. By the same token, Westerners have regarded Islam through the prism of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the assaults on Vienna in 1529 and 1683, which are taken as evidence of an expansionist jihadist mentality that sought to strike at the heart of Christendom.

The reality, however, has always been more complex than either historical memory suggests. Muslim-Western encounters were often uncompromisingly hostile, but there were also periods of cooperation. For instance, Francis I of France and Sulayman the Magnificent signed a peace treaty in 1535. Very often this kind of accommodation reflected a frank Muslim recognition of their own inability to prevail against superior Western power. But long before the twentieth century Muslim political entities entered into regular diplomatic and trade relations that were tantamount to participation in the working international system. The emergence of states throughout the Muslim world--conforming at least outwardly to the dominant model of territorial sovereignty --suggested that notions of jihad were, at the most, of secondary importance and raison d'état was now paramount.

Symmetrical Judgments
While the twentieth century witnessed the independence of many Muslim countries from colonial rule, the establishment of Israel has been regarded by many as an extension of an historic campaign against Islamic lands. The West, particularly the United States, has been held responsible for supporting the original intrusion and for subsequently sustaining the Jewish state in the Middle East. 51 Radical groups in the Islamic world intentionally paint the current military conflict over terrorism in terms of a religious war, depicting the Western military response as a new "crusade" against Islam--a deliberate effort to bring together the international Muslim community, the ummah, to their side. These radicals' strategy often involves labeling some Muslim states as traitors to Islam and allies of the "disbelieving" West.

Indeed, Osama Bin Laden's hatred of the United States is said to derive not only from his opposition to American foreign policy in general, but more so from U.S. support for the house of Al-Saud. In his statement following the attacks on September 11, Bin Laden declared:

What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years. But if the sword falls on the United States, after 80 years, hypocrisy raises its ugly head lamenting the deaths of these killers who tampered with the blood, honor and holy places of the Muslims. The least that one can describe these people [is as] morally depraved. 52

Bin Laden's historical allusion is not entirely clear. He is probably referring to the demise of the caliphate, which was abolished at the hands of the Turkish reformer Kemal Atatürk. In Bin Landen's mind, this would have been decisive evidence of a dangerous alliance between secularism and imperialism--proof that even supposedly Muslim rulers were happy to do the bidding of an irreligious yet powerful West. Historically ambiguous though the allusion may have been, his audience undoubtedly would have grasped its moral message. In effect, he was saying that the past bears upon the present and that recent events stand as an indictment of the aggressive Other and as vindication of historical wrongs.

The Western pattern of moral judgment has been symmetrical. The self-confident assertion that history "proves us right" is not limited to Bin Laden and his followers. While leaders of the Western world such as George Bush and Tony Blair have asserted that Islam is not the enemy, such claims are greeted in the Muslim world with skepticism, particularly when these same leaders continue to use "loaded" or suggestive language. On September 16, 2001, President Bush announced that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." 53 For many, this choice of words was alarming, and it was not only hotly debated in the Western press, but was widely reported in the Islamic world as well. Whatever George Bush understood by the term "crusade" and however inadvertent its connotations, its usage evoked much historically charged sentiment. But the president may have been surprised to find himself speaking a parallel language to the leader of Al-Qaeda, who used the same terminology in his response to Bush:

We hope that these brothers will be the first martyrs in the battle of Islam in this era against the new Jewish and Christian crusader campaign that is led by the Chief Crusader Bush under the banner of the cross. We tell our Muslim brothers in Pakistan to use all their means to resist the invasion of the American crusader forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 54

Besides the rhetoric provoked by the current international climate, there is a general perception in the Muslim world that the West operates hypocritically--on the one hand advocating democracy and human rights, while on the other supporting dictatorships and ruthless regimes in the Muslim world. While proclaiming the benefits of the free market, Western governments and corporations intervene in Muslim economies to influence purchases of Western goods and equipment, often at the expense of local production, and sometimes even force countries to purchase goods that they do not need or cannot afford.

In the opinion of a great many Muslims, the West is an oppressive power, using economic and military force to punish uncooperative Muslim countries. International institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank are perceived as being biased against Muslim states. 55 Some accuse the United Nations of selectively enforcing Security Council resolutions, since sanctions are maintained against Iraq but not against Israel. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is criticized for using interventionist tactics when it came to saving the Russian economy, but failing to do so in Indonesia. While attention was paid to the political and economic rights of 600,000 largely non-Muslim Timorese, the plight of over 6 million Muslims in the Southern Philippines went unheeded. Even countries like Egypt, which have followed wholesale the Western institutions' prescriptions for political and economic development, have not prospered. 56

The Lure of Nostalgia
As opposed to a vision of history as a series of holy wars and violent encounters, many Muslims remain nostalgic for a past that contrasts with the disarray in the Islamic world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These individuals long not only for the days of the Islamic "empire," but for the golden age of scientific inquiry and discovery, when Islamic scholars fused the ancient knowledge of Persia and India with the classical heritage of Greece, preserving and translating manuscripts in centers of learning from Baghdad to Córdoba. Indeed, not only did these scholars preserve the legacy of Western civilization through Europe's Dark Ages, but they also made significant contributions of their own to almost every field. Islamic scholars discovered logarithms and devised the decimal system. They made original discoveries in geometry and trigonometry, and they invented algebra, which is itself an Arabic word. 57 In medicine, Muslim physicians demonstrated circulation of the blood, developed the theory of optics, and published the first clinical account of smallpox. Well into modern times, two medieval Muslim physicians, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 981­1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126­98), were considered by Easterners and Westerners alike as the ultimate medical authorities. Muslim astronomers, seeking to fix times of prayer and the direction of Mecca, developed the quadrant and astrolabe, made star charts, and were the first to use the magnetic needle in navigation. Muslim architects excelled in the technique of vaulting, and their monuments provided the inspiration for some of Europe's Gothic cathedrals. In multicultural Islamic Spain, Christians, Jews, and Muslims interacted at various levels in society, government, science, medicine, and literature. In contrast to the "chronic antisemitism" prevalent in Europe, writer Karen Armstrong noted in The Guardian that "Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain--a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe." 58 By the sixteenth century, Islamic civilization was among the most widespread and important civilizations on Earth.

As the West entered the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, it came to challenge Islamic preeminence. 59 The Turkish Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Islamic empires, finally collapsed at the end of the First World War. Colonial domination and subsequent experiments with socialism and nationalism then brought chaos to the Muslim world. 60 The disappointments of the modern age have set many Muslim intellectuals on a curiously ahistorical search for authenticity (asalah). If Muslim societies had deviated from the "straight path" (Qur'an 1:6), they must return to core principles and unadulterated values; Muslims must be true to themselves and not follow prescribed nostrums such as "modernization," open-door economic policies, or even democratization simply because they are told that these are universal imperatives. Describing this empowering impulse, author Robert D. Lee argues that: "where modern life seems a product of forces beyond the control of individual human beings and small, impotent political entities, authenticity evokes self-determination and choice." 61 Diverse writers--including Muhammad Iqbal (1873 - 1938), Sayyid Qutb (1906 - 66),'Ali Shari'ati (1933 - 77), and numerous intellectuals today­have thus embarked on a quest to define what is authentic for modern Islam and to question, in various ways, the presumed dichotomization of tradition and modernity. Traditional values speak to the modern condition, they have argued, and it is the job of modern believers to recapture and apply the essence of those values rather than to implement them unthinkingly and literally. None of these thinkers, however, has operated within an intellectual vacuum; in different but discernible ways, they have all been influenced by currents of Western thought, responding to and perhaps adapting Western notions of equality, modernity, liberation, and autonomy. The "authentically Islamic" is, in the end, elusive and historically detached, remaining largely in the eye of the beholder.

As often happens, what was intended as internal self-critique has ended up reinforcing external misperceptions and disappointments. Thus Bernard Lewis, in his examination of "What Went Wrong?" states, "In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East--and, indeed, in all the lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. The primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to see." 62 For Western historians such as Lewis, the failure of Muslim political economies is attributed to a lack of freedom and democracy. 63 These historians are critical of the Muslim tendency to blame Europe and the West for the lack of prosperity and progress in Islamic countries. Even those who condemn colonial rule and American influence see it as a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Muslim states and societies. The emergence of groups that are alternatively called radical, extremist, or fundamentalist is likewise seen as an internal failure of Islam to think critically. For these historians, the persistence of such groups stands in stark relief to the obvious successes of the Western liberal story.

Thus the use and manipulation of history is common to both Western and Islamic agendas. The sense that the Other never measures up to an idealized version of one's own history is a powerful filter through which to view the world, whether one speaks of Muslims claiming that "the West did not have as glorious a scientific and cultural history as us Muslims" or Westerners stating that "Muslims have not been able to develop the tolerance and pluralism that we modern democrats espouse." These self-serving criticisms are as crucial to the understanding of contemporary events as are the challenges presented by the demands of economic globalization, social modernization, and political opposition.

Implications for Policy
Relations between the Islamic world and the West have been complex and should not be seen just through the paradigm of the crusade or jihad. Patterns of cooperation and mutual accommodation are interspersed with violent episodes. Recent history demonstrates that the bloodiest war since the Second World War was the long Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). As illustrated by Western support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq in this tragic affair, Western states and "Muslim" ones may share political interests. The Iran-Iraq War also highlights how profound differences often exist between states that, at least nominally, form part of the wider Islamic community (ummah). This notion was underscored just a few years later in the Gulf War of 1990-91. The coalition that was put together by the United States to drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait included three major Muslim/Arab states--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

The manipulation of history is not simply a technique used by individuals and societies to make a case; rather, it also has implications for policy makers. Foreign-policy elites do not operate in a cultural vacuum. They themselves may view national interests through the filter of historical memory, drawing on broadly gauged yet strongly felt lessons, such as, in the case of Muslims, the "West cannot be trusted," or, in the case of Westerners, "Muslims are uncompromising and hypocritical." One wonders, for instance, whether American-Iranian relations would have been the same had Ronald Reagan and Ayatollah Khomeini not held such predetermined, negative views of the other's history. When these civilizational biases are felt by the population at large, they become a tool for rallying public opinion in support of particular policies. In this sense, what counts for policy makers is not the history of historians, but the popular memory of events, however ill defined or even inaccurate. One does not even need to go as far as R. Stephen Humphreys, who says that "policy is the struggle of memory to control the future," in order to recognize that local memory can easily be manipulated to legitimize specific political positions. 64

But history also shows us that there are often unexpected changes. Historical outcomes are not predetermined; hostility can be contained and conflicts can be resolved. The legacy of past Muslim-Western encounters does not preordain conflict in the future. The great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), like Western writers such as Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Vico (1668-1744), noted that political orders and historical patterns develop out of specific circumstances and evolve and decline not in response to some unseen destiny, but according to the realities of shifting forces like social solidarity, urbanism, and political skill. A nostalgic framing of the past may at times function as the broad milieu within which interests are perceived, but the form that relations take depends on the constraints and possibilities of the specific moment. 65 Despite the rhetoric, for instance, Khomeinist Iran and Reaganite America became entangled in the Iran-Contra affair in ways that might have seemed impossible.

Even when realpolitik asserts itself, the emotiveness of history remains a problem. When the rhetoric overtakes the record, when appeals to an idealized past--exaggerated for purposes of authenticity or delegitimization--become paramount, Muslim-Western encounters assume a burden that may be diasabling. The rhetoric of the extremes, whether in the West or in Muslim countries, only serves to fuel media distortions and to encourage popular distrust of the Other.

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© 2006, The Center for Dialogues: Islamic World - U.S. - The West

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