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Western
Perceptions of Islam
Yesterday and Today
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Ibrahim
Kalin
George Washington University
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14/04/2003
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The
long and checkered relationship between Islam and the West entered a
new phase in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America. A
ubiquitous sense of suspicion and denouncement swept through the
public sphere in many Western countries and in the US that had so
far interacted with the Islamic world in a modus operandi
considerably different from that of its European equivalents. The
legacy of anti-Islamic sentiment deeply rooted in the Western
perceptions of Islam and Muslims, a short summary of which will be
given below, has been only tangentially present in the American
conscience and in cases where it is an unmistakable determinant (it
is mostly imported from the European and Christian memory of
theological and political rivalry that came about between the two
civilizations since the advent of Islam).
The
long history of the Islamic and Western worlds, taking a number of
divergent forms from theological polemics in Baghdad in the 8th
and 9th centuries to the experience of Andalusia from the
11th through the 14th centuries, informs in
many subtle ways the current perceptions and qualms that permeate
the attitudes of the members of the two civilizations vis-à-vis one
another. One may justifiably argue for the overcoming of such
categories as Islam and the West to focus on larger questions of
human (co-) existence and offer a frame of analysis that would
render such a conceptualization simply redundant or irrelevant. Even
though this enterprise merits serious consideration, it does not
obviate, at least for our purposes here, the possibility of
maintaining the categories of Islam and the West. On the contrary,
using the interlocked history of the two can help us stand on a
firmer ground.
In
making sense of the 9/11 attack and its repercussions for both
worlds, it is important to look at some of the salient features of
the history of Islam and the West and put things in a proper
historical perspective. In many ways, the monolithic representations
of Islam, created and sustained by a highly complex set of
image-producers, think-tanks, academics, lobbyists, policy makers,
and the media, which dominate the present Western conscience, have
their roots in both the West’s perception of itself, as well as in
its long history with the Islamic world. The primary goal of this
essay is to trace the history of the Western perceptions of Islam
from the 8th century when Islam came upon the historical
scene and soon was perceived to be a theological and political
threat by Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. The medieval
Christian views of Islam as a heresy and its Prophet as an impostor
have had a lasting impact on how Europeans came to see Islam and
Muslims for over a millennia and this mode of perception continues
to be a key factor in modern depictions of Islam in certain parts of
the Western world.
Although
some of the Renaissance thinkers saw Islam under the same light as
they saw all religions and thus derided it as ‘irrational’ and
‘superstitious’, they nevertheless had a sense of appreciation
for the philosophical and scientific achievements of Islamic
civilization. This rather new attitude towards Islam had a major
role in the making of the 18th and 19th
century representations of Islam in Europe and paved the way for the
rise of Orientalism, the official study of Oriental and Islamic
issues for the next two centuries to come; hence the need to analyze
Orientalism within the context of the Western perceptions of Islam
and how it has effected the modern picturing of Islam. We will also
look very briefly at how the modern reference to violence,
militancy, terrorism, and fundamentalism - categories used
disproportionately to construct a belligerent image of Islam as
‘The ‘Other’ of the West - find their root in early medieval
views of Islam as the “religion of the sword”.
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