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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”.
The
Middle Ages: From Theological Rivalry to the Creation of “the
Other”
From
the moment it emerged as a universal religion, Islam became a major
challenge for Christianity: it was a new dispensation from Heaven
that claimed to have completed the cycle of Abrahamic revelations.
The references to Jewish and Christian themes in the Qur’an and
Prophetic traditions (hadith), sometimes concurring with and
sometimes diverging from the Biblical accounts, contributed to the
Christians’ sense of both consternation and insecurity on the one
hand, and to the urgency of responding to the Islamic claims of
authenticity and family relation to monotheism, on the other.
The
earliest polemics between Muslim scholars and Christian theologians
that took place in the Islamic world attest to the zeal of the two
communities to defend their faiths against one another. Baghdad and
Damascus from the 8th through the 10th
centuries were the two main centers of intellectual exchange and
theological polemics between Muslims and Christians. Even though
theological rivalry is an invariable of this period, many ideas were
exchanged in the fields of philosophy, logic, and theology - taking
the mode of interaction beyond theological bickering. In fact,
Christian theologians posed a double challenge to their Muslim
counterparts because they were a step ahead in cultivating a
full-fledged theological vocabulary by using the lore of ancient
Greek and Hellenistic culture.
No
one single figure can illustrate this situation better than St. John
of Damascus (c. 675-749) known in Arabic as Yahya Al-Dimashqi
and in Latin as Johannes Damascenus. A court official of the Umayyad
caliphate in Syria like his father Ibn Mansur, St. John was a
crucial figure not only for the formation of Orthodox theology and
the fight against the iconoclast movement of the 8th
century, but also for the history of Christian polemics against
“Saracens” – a pejorative name used for Muslims in most of the
anti-Islamic polemics whose origins go back in all likelihood to St.
John himself.
St.
John’s polemics, together with his contemporary Bede (d. 735) and,
a generation later, Theodore Abu-Qurrah (d. 820 or 830), against
Islam - as an essentially ‘Christian heresy’ or, to use St.
John’s own words, as the “heresy of the Ishmaelites” - set the
tone for the perceptions of Islam and continued to be an operative
factor until the end of the Renaissance. In fact, most of the
theological depictions concerning Islam as a ‘deceptive
superstition of the Ishmaelites’ and a ‘forerunner of the
Antichrist’ go back to St. John, who had no intentions for an
interfaith understanding vis-à-vis Muslims. What is curious about
St. John’s impact on his coreligionists in Western Europe is that
he had a direct knowledge of the language and ideas of Muslims,
which was radically absent among his followers in the West. R.
W. Southern has rightly called this the “historical problem of
Christianity” vis-à-vis Islam in the middle ages, viz., lack of
first-hand knowledge of Islamic beliefs and practices as a
precaution or deliberate choice to dissuade and prevent Christians
from contaminating themselves with a heretic offshoot of
Christianity.
The
absence of direct contact and reliable sources of knowledge led to a
long history of spurious scholarship against Islam and the Prophet
Muhammad in Western Christianity, and as a result, Islam remained as
an eerie foe in the European consciousness for a good part of the
Middle Ages. The problem was further compounded by the Byzantine
opposition to Islam and the decidedly inimical literature produced
by Byzantine theologians between the 8th and the 10th
centuries on mostly theological grounds. Even though the
anti-Islamic Byzantine literature displays considerable first-hand
knowledge of Islamic faith and practices, including specific
criticisms of some verses of the Qur’an, the perception of Islam
as a theological rival and heresy was the leitmotif of this type of
literature and provided a solid historical and theological basis for
the later critiques of Islam.
If
deliberate ignorance was the cherished strategy of the period, the
out-and-out rejection of Islam as a theological challenge was no
less significant. The Qur’anic assertion of Divine unity without
the Trinity, countenance of Jesus Christ as God’s prophet divested
of divinity, and sustaining a religious community without the clergy
and a church-like authority were some of the challenges that did not
go unnoticed in the Western Christendom. Unlike Eastern Christianity
that had a presence in the midst of the Muslim world and better
access to the Muslim faith, the image of Islam in the West was
relegated to an unqualified heresy par excellence and
regarded as no different than paganism or Manichaenism from which
St. Augustine had his historical conversion to Christianity.
In
contrast to Spain in a later period where the three Abrahamic faiths
had a remarkable period of intellectual and cultural exchange, the
vacuum created by the spatial and intellectual confinement of
Western Christianity was filled in by folk tales about Islam and
Muslims, paving the way for the new store of images, ideas, stories
and myths that were brought in by the stories and fantasies of
Crusaders. Paradoxically, the Crusades did not bring any new or more
reliable knowledge about Islam but reinforced its image as paganism
and idolatry.
There
was, however, one very important consequence of the Crusades as far
as the perceptions of Islam are concerned. The Crusaders, it is to
be noted, were the first Western Christians to go into the Islamdom
and witness Islamic culture with its cities, roads, bazaars,
mosques, palaces, and, most importantly, its inhabitants. With the
Crusader came not only the legend of Saladin (Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi),
the conqueror of Jerusalem, but also the stories of Muslim life, its
promiscuity, its wealth and luxury, and a number of goods such as
silk and paper. Combined with popular imagery, these stories and
imported goods - presenting a world picture immersed in the luscious
joys and luxuries of worldly life - confirmed the wicked nature of
the heresy of the Ishmaelites. Even though the subdued sense of
admiration tacit in these stories did very little in ameliorating
the image of Islam, it opened a new door of perception for Islam and
Muslims as a culture and civilization. In this way, Islam, vilified
on purely religious and theological grounds, became something of a
neutral value - if not possessing any importance in itself.
The
significance of this shift in perception cannot be overemphasized.
After the 14th century when Christianity began to loose
its grip on the Western world, many lay people, who did not bother
themselves with Christian criticisms of Islam or any other culture
and religion for that matter, were more than happy to refer to
Islamic culture as a world outside the theological and geographical
confinements of Christianity. In a rather curious way, Islamic
civilization, to the extent to which it was known in Western Europe,
was pitted against Christianity to reject its exclusive claim to
truth and universality. This explains, to a considerable extent, the
double attitude of the Renaissance towards Islam; the Renaissance
Europe hated Islam as a religion but admired its civilization.
During
the passionate and bloody campaign of the Crusades, a most important
and unexpected development took place for the written literature on
Islam in the Middle Ages, and this was the translation of the
Qur’an for the first time into Latin under the auspices of Peter
the Venerable (d.c. 1156). The translation was done by the English
scholar Robert of Ketton who completed his rather free and
incomplete rendition in July 1143. As expected, the motive for this
translation was not to gain a better understanding of Islam by
reading its sacred scripture but to know the enemy better.
Regardless of the intention behind it, the translation of the
Qur’an was a momentous event since it shaped the scope and
direction of the study of Islam in the middle ages and provided the
critics of Islamic religion with a text on which they can build much
of their anticipated criticisms.
Parallel
with this was an event that proved to be even more persistent and
alarming to Europe. The extant literature on the life of the Prophet
of Islam in Latin is by far more extensive and elaborate as well as
ornate in depicting a picture of Prophet Muhammad that was to last
up to our own day. And although St. John of Damascus was the first
to call the Prophet of Islam a ‘false prophet’ before the 12th
century there are hardly any references to ‘Mahomet’ as the
Prophet Muhammad was known to the Latins, and he does not appear to
have any significance for the formation of Christian polemics
against Muslims. With the induction of the Prophet into the picture,
however, a new and eschatological dimension was added to the
preordained case of Islam as a villain faith because the Prophet of
Islam could now be identified as the anti-Christ heralding the end
of the times.
The
picturing of the Prophet of Islam suffered from the same historical
problem of medieval Europe to which we have referred, namely the
lack of the study of Islam based on original sources, texts,
first-hand accounts, or histories. The notorious fact that there was
not a single scholar among the Latin critics of Islam until the end
of the 13th century who knew Arabic resurfaced as a major
catalyst for the spurious depictions of the Prophet of Islam. The
first work ever to appear on the Prophet Muhammad in Latin was
Embrico of Mainz’s (d. 1077) Vita Mahumeti, culled mostly
from Byzantine sources and embellished with profligate details about
the personal and social life of the Prophet. The picture that
emerges out of such works largely corroborated the apocalyptic
framework within which the Prophet of Islam and his discomforting
success in spreading the new faith was seen as fulfilling the
Biblical promise of the anti-Christ. The theological concerns of the
time simply shun any appeal to reliable scholarship for the next one
or two centuries to come and laid the ideological foundations of the
image of the Prophet.
Almost
all of the Latin works that have survived on the life of the Prophet
had one solid goal: to show the impossibility of such a man as
Muhammad to be God’s messenger. This is exceedingly clear in the
picture with which we are presented. The prophet’s
‘this-worldly’ qualities as compared to the ‘other-worldly’
nature of Jesus Christ were a constant theme. The Prophet was given
to sex and political power, both of which he used, the Latins
reasoned, to destroy Christianity. He was merciless towards his
enemies, especially towards Jews and Christians, and took pleasure
in having his opponents tortured and killed. The only reasonable
explanation for the enormous success of Muhammad in religious and
political fields was something as malicious as heresy, viz., that he
was a magician and used magical powers to convince and convert
people. The focus on the psychological states of the Prophet was so
persuasive, so it seemed to the Latins, and so persistent that as
late as in the 19th century William Muir (1819-1905), a
British official in India and later the Principal of Edinburgh
University, joined his ‘medireview’ predecessors by calling the
Prophet a ‘psychopath’ in his extremely polemical Life of
Mohammed. There are many other details that can be mentioned
here such as the Christian background of the Prophet, his dead body
being eaten and desecrated by pigs or that he was baptized secretly
just before his death as a last attempt to save his soul. These
details are truly interesting and reveal various facets of the
spirit of the age in which the picture of the Prophet was drawn in
an exceedingly hostile, polemical, shallow yet steady manner.
The
foregoing image of the Prophet of Islam was an extension of the
erstwhile rejection of the Qur’an as authentic revelation. In
fact, with the Prophet in the picture as a possessed and
hallucinatory spirit, it was much more convincing in the eyes of the
opponents to attribute the Qur’an to such a man as Muhammad.
Having said that, there was also a deeper theological reason for
focusing on the figure of the Prophet. Since Christianity is
essentially a ‘Christic’ religion and Jesus Christ embodies the
word of God, the Latin critics of Islam presumed a parallel paradigm
for Islam according to which Muhammad was accorded a similar role in
the religious universe of Islam. At any rate, the rejection of the
Qur’an as the word of God and the representation of the Prophet of
Islam as a possessed spirit and magician immersed in the lusts of
the inferior world stayed with the Western perceptions of Islam
until the modern period.
Perhaps
the most important outcome of the medireview Christian repudiation
of Islam has been the exclusion of Islam from the family of
monotheistic religions. Even in the modern period where the
interfaith trialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has
come a long way, we are still far from speaking with confidence of a
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition by which Islam can be seen as
belonging to the same religious universe as the other Abrahamic
religions. It goes without saying that the absence of such a
discourse does nothing short of reinforcing the medireview
perceptions of Islam as a heretic and pagan faith, thwarting the
likelihood of generating a more inclusive picture of Islam on
predominantly religious grounds.
From
the Middle Ages through the Modern Period: The European Discovery of
Islam as a World Culture
The
impression that Islam left on Christianity as a heretical religion
was countered by the admiration of Islamic civilization in the works
of some late medireview and Renaissance thinkers. The Islamic
scientific and philosophical culture, inter alia, played a
significant role in this process, and we can mention here only two
examples both of which show the extent to which Muslim philosophers
were embraced with full enthusiasm.
Our
first example is Dante and his great work The Divine Comedy,
an epitome of medireview Christian cosmology and eschatology in
which everything is accorded a place proper to its rank in the
Christian hierarchy of things. Writing in his purely Christian
environment, Dante places the Prophet of Islam and Ali in hell in
Canto XXVIII where he describes the heretics in the ninth level of
hell. By contrast, he places Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes in the
limbo, thus granting them the possibility of salvation. This
positive attitude is further revealed by the fact that Siger de
Brabant, the champion of Latin Averroism, is placed in paradise as a
salute to the memories of Avicenna and Averroes. With this scheme,
Dante points to a way of coming to terms with the problem of Islam:
if Islam is to be rejected as a faith, its intellectual heroes are
to be accorded their proper place.
Another
closely associated case in which one can easily discern a different
perception of Islamic culture is the rise of Latin Averroism (the
philosophy of monopsychism) in the West and its dominance of the
intellectual scene of the Scholastics until its official ban in 1277
by Bishop Tempier. Even though Averroism was denounced as a
heretical school, it remained to be a witness to the deep impact of
Islamic thought on the West. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), one of the
luminaries of 13th century Scholasticism, called for the
study of the language of Saracens so that they can be defeated on
intellectual, if not religious, grounds. Albertus Magnus (c.
1208-1280), considered to be the founder of Latin scholasticism, was
not shy in admitting the superiority of Islamic thought on a number
of issues in philosophy. Even Raymond Lull (c. 1235-1316), one of
the most important figures for the study of Islam in the Middle Ages
in spite, or perhaps because, of his zeal to convert Muslims and
refute Averroism once and for all, was in favor of the scholarly
study of Islamic culture in tandem with his conviction that the
Christian faith could be demonstrated to non-believers through
rational means. Finally, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who
represents the pinnacle of Christian thought in the classical period
could not remain indifferent to the challenge of Islamic thought and
especially that of Averroes since Averroism was no longer a distant
threat but something right at home as represented by such Latin
scholars as Siger de Brabant (c. 1240-1284), Boethius of Dacia and
other Averroists.
It
is pertinent to point out that this new intellectual attitude
towards Islam comes to fruition at a time when Western Europe,
convinced of the promising threat of Muslim power, was hoping for
the conversion of the Mongols (“Tartars” as they were called by
Latins) into Christianity to solve the problem of Islam. With
Mongols embracing Islam under the leadership of Oljaytu, the
grandson of Chengiz Khan, however, these hopes fell on the ground
and the deployment of philosophical rather than purely theological
methods of persuasion presented itself as the only reasonable way of
dealing with the people of Islamic faith. Interestingly enough, the
interest of European scholars in Islamic culture minus its religion
in the 11th and 12th centuries contributed to
what C. H. Haskins has called the “Renaissance of the twelfth
century”.
The
belligerent attitude towards Islam as a heresy remained to be an
invariable even after the demise of the Christian Middle Ages when
Western Europe sat out to forge a new paradigm which would culminate
in the rise of a secular modern worldview. Pascal (1623-1662),
perhaps the most passionate defender of the Christian faith in the
17th century, for instance, was as harsh and
uncompromising as his predecessors in condemning the Prophet of
Islam as an impostor and fraudulent prophet. The ‘fifteenth
movement’ of his Les Pensées, called contre Mahomet,
voices an important sentiment of Pascal and his co-religionists on
Islam and the Prophet Muhammad: Muhammad is in no way comparable to
Jesus; Muhammad speaks with no Divine authority; he brought no
miracles; his coming has not been foretold; and what he did could be
done by anyone whereas what Jesus did is supra-human and
supra-historical.
A
similar attitude penetrates the work of George Sandys (1578-1644)
entitled Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610. Foure Books.
Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the
Holy Land, of the Remote parts of Italy, and Ilands adioyning,
which is one of the earliest travel accounts of the Islamic world to
reach Europe. A humanist as much as a Christian, Sandys saw Islam
under the same light as Pascal did and had no intentions of placing
his ‘humanist’ outlook over his Christian prejudices against
Islam. Sandys’ book contains important observations on the Islamic
world, highly polemical remarks about the Qur’an and the Prophet,
and finally some very edifying praises of Muslim philosophers. The
dual attitude of rejecting Islam as a religion while admiring its
cultural achievements is clearly exemplified in Sandys’ work. Of
“the Mahometan Religion”, Sandys has the following to say:
So
that we may now conclude, that the Mahometan religion, being
derived from a person in life so wicked, so worldly in his projects,
in his prosecutions of them so disloyal, treacherous & cruel;
being grounded upon fables and false revelations, repugnant to sound
reason, & that wisdom which the Divine hand hath imprinted in
his works; alluring men with those enchantments of fleshly
pleasures, permitted in this life and promised for the life ensuing;
being also supported with tyranny and the sword (for it is death to
speak there against it;) and lastly, where it is planted rooting out
all virtue, all wisdom and science, and in sum all liberty and
civility; and laying the earth so waste, dispeopled and uninhabited,
that neither it came from God (save as a scourge by permission)
neither can bring them to God that follow it.
By
contrast, Sandys follows suit in pitting Muslim philosophers against
Islam as a common strategy during the late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, the implicit assumption, voiced by a figure no less
prominent than Roger Bacon, being the secret conversion of Avicenna
and Averroes into Christianity or simply their professing the Muslim
faith for fear of persecution. Needless to say, this was the only
possible way of explaining the genius of Muslim philosophers and
scientists against the backdrop of a religion that the medireview
West abhorred, rejected, and ignored. Thus Sandys speaks of Avicenna
(Ibn Sina) in terms of an unmistakable vindication while discarding
Islam as irrational on the basis of the celebrated ‘double-truth
theory’ attributed by St. Thomas Aquinas to Averroes:
For
although as a Mahometan, in his books De Anima and De
Almahad, addressed particularly to a Mahometan Prince, he
extolleth Mahomet highly, as being the seal of divine laws
and the last of the Prophets… But now this Auicen, laying
down for a while his outward person of a Mahometan, and putting on
the habit of a Philosopher; in his Metaphysics seemeth to make a
flat opposition between the truth of their faith receiued from their
Prophet, and the truth of understanding by demonstrative argument…
And it is worthy observation, that in the judgment of Avicien one
thing is true in their faith, & contrary in pure &
demonstrative reason. Whereas (to the honor of Christian Religion be
it spoken) it is confessed by all, & enacted by a Council, that
it is an error to say, one thing is true in Theology, & in
Philosophy the contrary. For the truths of religion are many times
above reason, but never against it.
We
see a similar line of thought articulated in Peter Bayle’s
monumental Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical
and Critical Dictionary, 1697). Bayle (1647-1706) was one of the
pioneers of the Enlightenment and his skeptical scholarship had a
deep impact on the French Encyclopedists, championed by Diderot, and
the rationalist philosophers of the 18th century. His Dictionnaire,
which has been aptly called the “arsenal of the Enlightenment”,
devotes a generous and unusually lengthy twenty-three page entry on
the Prophet of Islam under the name “Mahomet” as opposed to
seven pages given to Averroes and only half a page to al-Kindi (“Alchindus”).
Even
though Bayle exercises caution in narrating the Christian bashings
of Islam and the Prophet and rejects some of the legendary stories
concerning the Prophet’s tomb being in the air, his dead body
having been eaten by dogs as a sign of Divine curse and punishment,
and his being the anti-Christ as simply foolish and baseless, he
joins his fellow Europeans in describing the Prophet of Islam as a
man of sensuality and the sword, as an impostor, and as a “false
teacher”. In The Dictionary, the Prophet appears under the
same light of medireview Christian polemics, and Bayle states, on
Humphrey Prideaux’s authority, that
Mahomet
was an impostor, and that he made his imposture subservient to his
lust … what is related of his amours, is very strange. He was
jealous to the highest degree, and yet he bore with patience the
gallantries of that wife [‘A’ishah], which was the dearest to
him
and
that
…
I choose to concur with the common opinion, That Mahomet was an
impostor: for, besides what I shall say elsewhere his insinuating
behavior, and dexterous address, in procuring friends, do plainly
show, that he made use of religion only as an expedient to
aggrandize himself.
Even
though Bayle’s entry is hardly an improvement upon the gruesome
picturing of the Prophet in the previous centuries, it contains some
important observations on Islamic culture based mostly on the
available travel accounts of the time. The modesty of Turkish women,
for instance, is narrated in the context of stressing the
‘normalcy’ of Muslim culture, which is contrasted to the common
mores of Europe, indicating in a clear way the extent to which
Europe’s self-image was at work in various depictions of Islam and
Muslims. Bayle also praises Muslim nations for their religious
tolerance and admonishes the zeal of medireview Christians to
persecute their own co-religionists. Bayle, like many of his
predecessors and peers, pits Muslim history against the injunctions
of the religion of Islam and explains the glory of Muslim history as
a result of the deviation of Muslim nations from the principles of
Islam rather than an application of them. Thus he says that :
the
Mahometans, according to the principles of their faith, are obliged
to employ violence, to destroy other religions, and yet they
tolerate them now, and have done so for many ages. The Christians
have no order, but to preach, and instruct; and yet, time out of
mind, they destroy, with fire and sword, those who are not of their
religion. ‘When you meet with Infidels,’ says Mahomet, ‘kill
them, cut off their heads, or take them prisoners, and put them in
chains, till they have paid their ransom, or you find it convenient
to set them at liberty. Be not afraid to persecute them, till they
have laid down their arms, and submitted to you’. Nevertheless, it
is true, that the Saracens quickly left off the ways of violence;
and that the Greek churches, as well the orthodox as the
schismatical, have continued to this day under the yoke of Mahomet.
They have their Patriarchs, their Metropolitans, their Synods, their
Discipline, their Monks … It may be affirmed for a certain truth,
That if the western princess had been lords of Asia, instead of the
Saracens and Turks, there would be now no remnant of the Greek
church, and they would not have tolerated Mahometanism, as these
Infidels have tolerated Christianity.
Interestingly
enough, however, Bayle, towards the end of his entry, refers his
curious readers to the work of Humphrey Prideaux (d. 1724) of
Westminster and Christ Church for further information about Islam.
Entitled in a typical manner as The true nature of imposture
fully display’d in the life of Mahomet: With a discourse annex’d
for the vindication of Christianity from this charge. Offered to the
considerations of the Desists of the present age, Prideaux’s
book, published in 1697, was one of the most virulent and bitter
attacks on Islam during the Enlightenment period and the title it
bears requires little explanation as to its content. That
Prideaux’s work became a best-seller in the 18th
century and was printed many times until the 19th century
is quite telling insofar as the Enlightenment’s philosophers’
approach to Islam is concerned.
The
Enlightenment’s robust rationalism and overt disdain for religion
was certainly a major factor in the reinforcement of the medireview
perceptions of Islam as a religious worldview, and attacking Islam
was an expedient way of deconstructing religion as such. This
attitude is much obvious in Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the most
widely read celebrities of the Enlightenment, who took a less
hostile position towards Islamic culture while maintaining the
erstwhile Christian representations of the Prophet Muhammad. In his
famous tragedy Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophete, Voltaire
projects Muhammad as a prototype of fanaticism, cruelty, imposture,
and sensuality, which was nothing new to his readers except for the
fact that he had invented his own legends and stories that he seems
to have thought served his purposes better. In a letter to Frederick
of Prussia, he states that:
a
merchant of camels should excite a revolt in his town … that he
should boast of being rapt to Heaven, and of having received there
part of this unintelligible book which affronts common sense at
every page; that he should put his own country to fire and the
sword, to make this book respected; that he should cut the
fathers’ throats and ravish the daughters; that he should give the
vanquished the choice between his religion and death; this certainly
is what no man can excuse.
History
has its own checks and balances. The ambivalent attitude of the 17th
and 18th centuries, torn between the received images of
Islam and the Prophet from Christian polemics and the glory of
Islamic civilization witnessed by many travelers and scholars,
resulted in a different genre of writing concerning Islam, and one
very interesting work to be mentioned here is Stubbe’s ‘defense
of Islam’. A typical Renaissance man, historian, librarian,
theologian and a doctor, Henry Stubbe (1632-1676), published an
unusual book, which was to cause Prideaux to write his attack
mentioned above, with the following title: An account of the rise
and progree of Mahometanism with the life of Mahomet and a
vindication of him and his religion from the calumnies of the
Christians. Stubbe had no reservations in going against the
grain and responding to the traditional charges of violence and
sensuality associated with Muslims. More importantly, he openly
defended Islamic faith as more proximate to man’s reason and
nature as a tacit way of criticizing Christian theology and
sacraments. A typical passage from his book states that
This
is the sum of Mahometan Religion, on the one hand not
clogging Men’s Faith with the necessity of believing a number of
abstruse Notions which they cannot comprehend, and which are often
contrary to the dictates of Reason and common Sense; nor on the
other hand loading them with the performance of many troublesome,
expensive, and superstitious Ceremonies, yet enjoying a due
observance of Religious Worship, as the surest Method to keep Men in
the bounds of their Duty both to God and Man.
In
addition to the Islamic faith, the Prophet Muhammad himself receives
a very fair treatment from Stubbe who appears to be heralding the
rise of a new class of European scholars of Islam in the 18th
and 19th centuries.
In
contradistinction to the radical opposition of Pascal, Bayle,
Brideaux, and Voltaire to Muhammad as a figure of religion, some of
their contemporaries including Stubbe saw something different in the
Prophet of Islam as a man of the world. Divested of his claims to
have received God’s word, the Prophet Muhammad could be
appreciated for what he had accomplished in history. This is an
important shift from the strictly Christian assessments of Muhammad
as a false prophet to putting increasingly more emphasis on his
human qualities.
This
new attitude is also the beginning of the depiction of the Prophet
and many other figures of the past as ‘heroes’ and
‘geniuses’, the ostensibly non-religious terms that the
Enlightenment intellectuals were fond of using against the Christian
conceptions of history. The 17th and 18th
centuries witnessed the rise of many scholars and intellectuals who
looked at the Prophet of Islam under this new light and this, in
turn, led to more liberal and less inimical appraisals of Islam and
Muslims. In England, Edward Pococke (1604-1691), the first chair
holder of Islamic studies at Oxford, published his Specimen
Historiae Arabum, a medley of analyses and translations on the
history of Islam, its basic tenets and practices, and a selective
rendering of one of the works of al-Ghazali. Judged by the standards
of his time, Pococke’s work was a major step in the scholarly
study of Islam. Furthermore, Pococke was one of the first among the
European scholars of Islam to spend time in the Islamic world
collecting material for his studies.
Of
equal importance and prominence was George Sale (1697-1736) who
produced the first English translation of the Qur’an in 1734,
making use of Lodovico Marracci’s Latin translation, published at
Padua in 1698, rather than that of Robert Ketton published in the 12th
century. Sale had no intentions of granting Islam any
authenticity as a religion, and he made this point very clear in his
‘Preliminary Discourse’ written as a preface to his translation.
His overall approach to Islam that gained him the half-belittling
title ‘half-Mussulman’, however, was to set the tone for the 18th
and 19th century studies of Islam in Europe, paving the
way for the establishment of Orientalism as a discipline.
Sale’s
translation was a huge improvement on an earlier rendering of the
Qur’an into English by Alexander Ross from the French translation
of Andre du Ryer published in 1647 almost a century before Sale’s
laborious work reached the English reader. For better or worse,
Sale’s translation was the definitive text of the Qur’an in the
English language well until the end of the 19th century
and it was this very translation that Gibbon and Carlyle read
closely and discarded hopelessly as “a wearisome confused jumble,
crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement;
most crude, incondite; - insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing
but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Qur’an.”
While
the Qur’an and, by derivation, the religious foundations of Islam
were invariably denied, the human qualities of the Prophet of Islam
were repeatedly invoked by the humanist intellectuals of the 18th
and 19th centuries either to level subtle criticisms
against Christianity or simply to cherish the humanist-secular
philosophy of history. The depiction of the Prophet as a genius and
as a hero with a piercing mind and perspicacity, remarkable power of
persuasion, sincerity, and dedication reached a climax with Carlyle
and his heroic philosophy of history.
In
Carlyle’s work, the Prophet is presented as a remarkable man of
the world: a hero, a genius, a charisma, a personality that the
Christian spirit of the Middle Ages was incapable of seeing and
appreciating. Although Carlyle had placed his analysis of the
Prophet within a clearly secular framework and thus preempted any
charges of heresy, he still felt obligated to apologize for his
positive estimation of the Prophet:
as
there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to
say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his
secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what
the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable
question.
A
much more asserting voice of the time was that of Goethe (1749-1832)
who was neither secretive nor apologetic about his admiration of
things Islamic. His West-oestlicher Diwan was a loud
celebration of Persian-Islamic culture and his interest in the
Islamic world went certainly beyond the mere curiosity of a German
poet when he said, as quoted by Carlyle, that “if this be Islam,
do we not all live in Islam?” In 19th century,
Goethe’s call was taken up by a whole generation of European and
American poets and men of literature, which included such
celebrities as Emerson and Thoreau.
The
19th Century Perceptions of Islam: From the
Pilgrim to the Orientalist
Outside
the world of theology, philosophy and literature, there were many
Europeans whose thirst and curiosity for the Orient could not be
quenched by reading books. So they went to the Islamic world and
produced a sizeable literature of travel accounts about Muslim
countries, their customs, cities, and so on. These were the European
travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries whose
ranks included such celebrities as Burton, Scott, Kinglake, Disraeli,
Curzon, Warburton, Nerval, Chardin, Chateaubriand, Flaubert,
Lamartine, Pierre Loti, and Tavernier.
The
wealth of information these travelers brought back to Europe
contributed to the popular, if not academic, perceptions of Islam
and Muslims whereby the impenetrable world of the Saracens and the
Orientals was now opened for many Europeans through the first-hand
accounts of their fellow men and women. In some curious ways, the
travel accounts of European pilgrims to the Islamic world and to the
‘Orient’ had an impact similar to that of the Crusades almost a
millennium ago: a first hands-on experience of the Orient was made
available for public consumption in Europe and it was entrenched not
in the religious concerns and hostilities of Christian theologians
but in the new mission of the Occident to ‘civilize’ the Orient
– the celebrated mission civilisatrice of the colonial
period.
Like
their intellectual peers in the 17th and 18th
centuries, those travelers were interested in the worldly qualities
of Islamdom, perhaps with a good intention of dispelling some
long-standing misgivings about a world in which Europe had now a
vital interest or simply because Islam did not offer anything of
value in view of the theological, if not historical, superiority of
the Christian faith to which they belonged. Their narrations,
ranging from recondite and arid inventory of names and places to
spirited depictions and imaginary ruminations, display not so much
interest in penetrating into the Islamic world as reflecting and
constructing it through the eyes of an upper class Westerner.
A
somewhat crude indication of this is the fact that many of those
travelers, notwithstanding such notable exceptions as Sir Richard
Burton, did not learn any of the Islamic languages or made any
serious study of the beliefs and practices of Muslims other than
what was available to them in Europe as common knowledge. An
important outcome of this literature was what Said called
‘Orientalizing the Orient’, viz., the further romanticizing of
Muslim peoples, reinforcing the mystique of the Orient, the exotic
harem, the sensuous East, the Oriental man and his concubines,
streets immersed in mystery, and so on, all of which are to be seen
vividly in the naturalistic European paintings of the Orient in the
19th century. Needless to say, these images of the Orient
are still alive in the Western mind and continue to be an
inexhaustible resource for Hollywood constructions of Islam and
Muslims.
It
would not be a stretch to say that the 19th century is
the longest period in the history Islam and the West. It was in this
century that the academic study of Islam exploded more than any one
in Europe could have imagined a generation ago. The new interest in
Islam was certainly tied to the political, economic and most
importantly colonial circumstances of the 19th century
during which time a handful of European countries had occupied a
good part of the Islamic world.
As
we can see from the long list of Orientalist scholars, the 19th
century witnessed a sudden and dramatic rise in the study of Islam,
surpassing both qualitatively and quantitatively the work of the
last millennium over a period of sixty to seventy years: Silvestre
de Sacy (1758-1838), the father of French Orientalism, E. W. Lane
(1801-1876) whose Arabic-English Lexicon is still a classic,
Karl Pfander, a German missionary working in India and famous for
his controversy with Indian Muslim scholars, J. von Hammer-Purgstall
(1774-1856), known for his meticulous studies on Ottoman history and
Arabic, Persian and Turkish poetry, William Muir whose name was
already mentioned, F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), a prominent theologian
of the Church of England and the author of The Religions of the
World and Their Relations with Christianity, a key text for the
understanding of Christian perspectives on Islam in the 19th
century, Ernest Renan (1823-1892) who incited a long controversy
with his famous lecture at Sorbonne on Islam and science to which a
number of leading Muslim intellectuals of the time including Jamal
al-Din Afghani and Namik Kemal wrote responses.
These
and many other figures writing on Islam and the Islamic world in the
19th century unearthed a new terrain for the study of
Islam and ushered in new modes of perception vis-à-vis the Islamic
world. In so far as shaping the modern Western images of Islam is
concerned, the contribution of these scholars was manifold. First,
they were the direct conduits of satisfying the curiosity of
European populace about the Islamic world that was now, after
centuries of menacing presence and bewildering success, under the
unquestionable dominance of the West. In this limited sense, the
picture of Islam that arises out of the works of such scholars as
mentioned above was intractably tied to the new colonial identity of
Western Europe.
Secondly,
the torrent of information about the Muslim world, its history,
languages, geography, ethnic texture, and so on was as much
knowledge serving scholarship as it was knowledge serving power. It
can hardly escape our attention that a good number of scholars,
travelers, and translators of the 19th century, credited
duly with relative expertise, were colonial officers sent to the
Orient with clear and detailed job descriptions. The third and, for
our purposes, the most important legacy of this period was the
completion of the groundwork for the full-fledged establishment of
what came to be known as Orientalism – a new set of categories,
typologies, classifications, terminologies, and methods of coming to
terms with things Oriental and Islamic.
Orientalism
reached a climax in the second half of the 19th century,
and a truly impressive and ambitious venture was set in motion by a
dozen or so European academics who were to mould the modern study of
Islam in Western universities. Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), Snouck
Hurgronje (1857-1936), Duncan Black Macdonald (1863-1943), Carl
Becker (1876-1933), David Samuel Margoliouth (1858-1940), Edward
Granville Browne (1862-1926), Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (1868-1945),
Louis Massignon (1883-1962), and Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb (1895-1971)
were, inter alia, the towering figures of the Orientalist
study of Islam with all of their ambitions, fervor, differences,
diligence of scholarship, and distinctly Western identities. By
producing a massive body of books, journals, articles, translations,
critical editions, reports, and academic posts for the study of
Islam, Orientalists generated an enduring legacy that has shaped the
parameters of the modern study of Islam and the Muslim world up to
our own day.
Insofar
as the relation between Islam and the West is concerned, the
Orientalist journey in the path of representing Islam contributed
very little to the amelioration of the mystique of Islam and the
Orient inherited from the pre-modern era. Some of the Western
students of Islam were simply not interested in such an enterprise
and focused their energies on their solitary work. In some other
cases, the dark image of Islam as a decadent and dying civilization,
as a backward, irrational and sensual world was reinforced and made
its ways into popular culture through fictions, TV images, Hollywood
productions, and media reporting. In this regard, Arberry’s
conciliatory remark that the seven British scholars of Islam,
including Arberry himself, whom he chose to analyze in his Oriental
Essays, “have striven, consciously or unconsciously, by the
exercise of somewhat specialized skills to help build a bridge
between the peoples and cultures of Asia and Europe” appears to be
no more than an unfinished project and unfulfilled will if it was
ever willed at all. Notwithstanding individual exceptions,
Orientalism was marred by a number of structural and methodological
problems some of which are still operative at the current
representations of Islam. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can
highlight some of these issues, albeit briefly, as follows.
First
of all, Orientalism in its early stages functioned, consciously or
unconsciously, within the matrix of the 19th century
European mindset. The currents of thought from Romanticism and
rationalism to historical criticism and hermeneutics which had
shaped Western humanities on the one hand, and the new colonial
order, on the other, were at work in the remaking of the picture of
Islam, and the Orientalists showed little interest and/or effort in
dispensing with the limitations of studying another culture with
categories that were patently Western.
It
was within this framework that the perennial search for
‘correspondences’, homogenous structures, and orthodoxies in the
Islamic tradition became a hallmark of the Orientalist tradition
whether one was dealing with popular Sufism, political history,
science, or jurisprudence. Inevitably, this has led to grotesque
generalizations, often couched in the abstract language of academic
parlance, that were no less inhibiting and essentializing than the
medireview conceptions of Islam – conceptions that continue to
play out in popular images of Islam in the West today.
Secondly,
the Orientalist tendency was to analyze the Islamic world as a case
of decaying civilization whose only import, at least for the Western
student of Islam, was either its obscure textual tradition or the
variegated responses of Muslim intellectuals to the challenges of
the modern world. For instance, all of the leading figures of
classical Orientalism were unanimous in depicting Islamic philosophy
and sciences as no more than a port for the transmission of Greek
lore to Europe.
In
reading some of the classics of Orientalism on the subject, one
hardly fails to get the impression that Islamic philosophy, if this
name was allowed at all, was essentially a long commentary in Arabic
on Greek and Hellenistic thought. The best compliment one could
accord the Islamic intellectual tradition was, in the words of von
Grunebaum, “creative borrowing”, and within this framework the
obsessive search for ‘originality’ in Islamic thought was
destined to fail. Thus Islam, having lost its universal appeal and
vitality, was seen not as a living tradition with a human face but
as an object of study to be historicized, contextualized, and
relativized.
The
Legacy of Orientalism and the New World: Islam as the ‘Other’ of
the West?
The
modern Orientalist structuring of Islam, it is to be emphasized, was
a rather substantial improvement on the earlier depictions of things
Oriental and Islamic as sensual, despotic, backward, underdeveloped,
tribal, promiscuous, aberrant, irrational, and mysterious. Some of
these conceptions, however, proved to be persisting and are to be
seen on a day-to-day basis in Western media. While Orientalism
remains to be an important chapter in the history of Islam and the
West, new modes of approaching Islam, ranging from dialogue and
critical understanding to confrontation and rejection, continue to
make their appearances in various forms and arenas.
In
the second part of the 20th century, an exclusive focus has been
placed on what came to be labeled as political, militant and
fundamentalist Islam. The relegation of the word ‘Islam’ to
political and military confrontation in the minds of many Westerners
has also the added effect of reducing Islam to a subcategory of the
Middle East conflict. Ironically, or perhaps tragically we should
say, many people in the West turn to Islam as a way of understanding
the causes of the lingering and violent conflict in the Middle East,
and this approach, perpetuated in Western media on a daily basis,
reinforces the image of Islam as a distant and foreign phenomenon,
as a violent and militant faith, and as a monolithic world prone to
extremism of all kinds.
In
this context, Islam, in keeping with the secular purview of modern
politics, is seen not so much as a religious heresy, even though
many conservative Christians still hold on to this idea, as a global
threat to Western civilization and its values. In many ways, the
historical depiction of Islam as the ‘other’ of the West and
everything the West is presumed to stand for has now reemerged in
the highly articulate and widespread discourse on political Islam,
keeping the image of monolithic Islam within the context of
religious violence.
At
this point, we can distinguish two main attitudes towards Islam as
they have become especially clear in the aftermath of September 11.
The first is the resurfacing of the medireview descriptions of Islam
as the religion of the sword, the Prophet as a violent person,
Muslim societies as power-driven collectivities, and so on. The
second attitude has been to identify Islam as a code of belief and
action that is obstinately irrational, anti-modern, rigid,
religious, traditional, and so on, and expectedly all of these
qualifiers have been employed to account for the root causes of the
current confrontation between the Islamic and Western worlds.
The
identification of Islam with violence and militancy is now a very
powerful image by which things Islamic including the question of
human rights and women in Islam are understood and judged in the
Western hemisphere. It therefore becomes necessary to address,
albeit very briefly, the question of religious violence in relation
to the current perceptions of Islam.
In
recent decades, many academics, policy-makers, the so-called
experts, and their lay readers repeatedly claimed that Islam is the
only religion in the world that condones and produces religious
violence and terrorism on a consistent basis. The images of suicide
bombers, hijackings, assassinations, street riotings and uprisings
inform the coded language of ‘militant Islam’, and their raison
d’etre is related in an astonishingly simplistic way to the
religion of Islam rather than to the particular political
circumstances that have given rise to them.
At
this point, it is crucial to note that the long journey of the
Islamic world in the last two centuries cannot be understood
properly without paying attention to the legacy of colonialism to
which the Muslim world responded in a myriad of ways from
millennialism (mahdism) and reformism to modernism and political
confrontation. These responses, whose full analysis we have to leave
for another study, have had two major results. The first is the deep
impact they have on the Muslim perceptions of the West as a
colonialist power on the one hand, and as a secular civilization, on
the other. The memory of colonialism, it is to be remembered, is
still alive in the Islamic world as it struggles to overcome the
political and economic predicament that surrounds it, and this
memory breeds the anti-Western sentiments in the Muslim world.
On
a more philosophical level, the secular character of modern Western
civilization is seen as a threat and area of confrontation for the
Muslim world which remains by and large more religious and
traditional than any other part of the world. Exportation of modern
consumerist culture, its popular icons, and the modes of behavior
that come with them are perceived to have an eroding effect on the
texture of traditional Muslim societies and propel many to denounce
the West as a materialist and worldly civilization. This view of the
West is nothing new to a conservative Christian living in Europe or
in America who sees sex, drugs, violence, destruction of the family,
capitalism, and so on under the same or similar light as a devout
Muslim, Jew or Hindu. The difference is the deep culture shock that
accompanies a non-Westerner’s perception of modern culture.
Having
said that, it should also be emphasized that the primary target of
such anti-modernist and anti-Western discourse is not so much the
West in and of itself but the West in the Islamic world,
viz., what some have referred to as the “macdonaldization” of
the world. Tropes and commodities of modern Western culture become a
source of contention when they are exported to traditional societies
in the name of modernization, development, and globalization.
Paradoxically, when these criticisms are translated from the Islamic
world back to the West, they are typically presented as bases for
militant fundamentalism and anti-modernism while similar criticisms
in the West are divested of any such militant or political
connotations.
This
leads us to the second impact of the Muslim responses to the
challenges of the modern world and it is the projection of Islam and
Muslims as a menacing power directed at the foundations of modern
civilization. It is usually in this context that the charges of
militancy and terrorism are brought up against the Islamic world.
There is no denying the fact that certain groups that remain to be a
very small minority in the Islamic world resort to violence to
achieve their goals. What is of importance for the Western
perceptions of Islam, however, is the way the coded language of
fundamentalism, militancy, terrorism, extremism, and so on is used
to make essentialist and reductionist statements about Islam as a
religion.
The
obvious cases of violence are picked out from the Islamic world to
bolster the image of Islam as a militant threat to the West in spite
of the fact that such acts of violence committed in the name of
Islam are rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. More
often than not, use of violence in different Muslim countries is
related in one way or another to the religion of Islam itself, and
the so-called experts of Islam and terrorism labor to show that
there is an essential relation between the two, that the Qur’an
contains some teachings that are violent in nature, that the early
history of Islam was entrenched in violence, that the spread of
Islam was the result of Islam’s militant tendencies, and so on.
These claims, which do nothing more than invigorating the monolithic
image of Islam as a violent and militant religion, take us back
where the long journey of Islam and the West had begun, viz., the
medireview perceptions of Islam as the religion of the sword.
The
fact that Islam is singled out among other religions or religious
groups against which charges of violence and extremism can
justifiably be brought up goes to show the extent to which we can
become captives of our own history. In spite of the colonial period,
the golden age of Orientalism, and the massive body of information
about Islam and the Muslim world in Western institutions of
learning, Islam is still perceived to be an alien phenomenon outside
the religious and intellectual horizon of Western hemisphere.
The
lack of knowledge and acquaintance that had obstructed the study of
Islam for centuries during the Middle Ages continues to be a
stumbling block for the appreciation of the rich tapestry of Islamic
culture and history. Since the average Westerner is much more
familiar with the Judeo-Christian tradition, he or she is in a
better position to appreciate the diversity of that tradition and
distinguish between the rule and the exception that proves it such
as the ones mentioned above. In the case of Islam, we scarcely refer
to a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition whereby the historical
unknowing of Islam can be undone and a more improved picture of
Islam can be constructed.
*
* *
As
the foregoing survey shows in bare outline, Western perceptions of
Islam have a long history and display considerable diversity. From
the early Byzantine polemics against Islam to the accounts of
European travelers in the 17th and 18th
centuries and the current views of Islam in our time, there are
continuities as well as ruptures and discontinuities that inform the
relationship between Islam and the West. Both worlds, we may
justifiably argue, see one another through the eyes of its own
self-understanding as they strive to come to terms with their own
identity and their view of the other.
The
Muslim perceptions of the West are inevitably encoded in Muslim
modes of self-understanding that has undergone a number of changes
throughout Islamic history, generating new modes of perception and
relation towards European civilization. A Muslim’s view of
Christianity or Greek philosophy in the 9th century is
not the same as his approach to modern science and technology in the
18th or 19th centuries.
When
we speak of continuities and discontinuities in the history of Islam
and the West, we can do so only within the context of the
perseverance and/or waning of certain types of self-perception and
self-understanding. In this sense, the encounter of the Muslim world
with the modern West, its science and technology, its military and
economic might, or its worldview is also an encounter with itself in
that the Muslim world’s self-perception informs the ways in which
the ‘West’ as a term of contrast and comparison is constructed
in the Islamic world. Such burning issues as tradition and
modernity, revival of Islamic civilization, economic and political
development in Muslim countries, modern science and its
philosophical challenges and so on cannot be properly discussed in
today’s Islamic world without having the West in the back of our
minds.
By
the same token, the West’s encounter with Islam is also a coming
to terms with its own self-image. Ethnocentrism, universalism versus
particularism and locality, representations of the other, the legacy
of colonialism, globalization, human rights, pluralism, and the
limits of modernism are only a few among the many issues that define
the West in its relation to the non-Western world. In a day and age
in which national and cultural boundaries are crossed over in a
myriad of media, none of these issues can be discussed without
attending to their meanings and implications for cultures and
identities beyond the precincts of the Western world.
At
this juncture, studying Islam and its Western constructions is an
exercise in looking at ourselves and our modes of perception as they
are reflected in the images and categories by which we understand
the other. Whether Islam is conceived to be a religious heresy,
theological challenge, sister civilization, or simply an alien
culture, we can no longer fail to see its relevance and urgency for
West’s understanding of itself vis-à-vis Islam.
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