Islam and the West: A Case of Selective Memory

by Richard Bulliet
http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=1312


Distorted by today's political lenses, European historical memory
selectively focuses on past violence perpetrated by Muslims and
either forgets Europe's cultural borrowings from Muslim societies, or
regards them as unimportant remnants of a closed chapter in European-
Muslim relations.

Fourteen European countries have been wholly or partly under Muslim
rule for at least one of the last fourteen centuries. With the
exception of Spain, national memory in all of these lands either
minimizes this experience or portrays the era of Muslim dominion as
one of unrelieved oppression and barbarity.

Violence is the dominant motif of Western histories on Islamic
relations. Everyone is reminded on a regular basis that a Muslim army
penetrated deep into northern France in 732 before being heroically
stopped by Charles Martel at Tours, and another Muslim army laid
siege to Vienna in 1529 before being turned back by bad weather and
heroic defenders. And they are similarly reminded that their own
Crusader ancestors seized Jerusalem from the Saracen unbelievers and
held it for almost a century. That Crusader conquest and rule might
have involved oppression and barbarity is generally omitted from the
story.

From episodes like this, today's ideologues concoct a myth of
unending and merciless hostility between Islam and the West. But even
the military tale is selectively told. Who recalls that France's
Renaissance monarch Francis I allied with the Muslim Ottoman ruler
Suleiman the Magnificent to fight against his Christian rival Charles
V of Spain? Who remembers that many generations of Muslim Tatars
fought for Christian Polish kings against their Christian foreign
enemies?

Closer to the present, Europeans are slow to recall the tens of
thousands of Muslim soldiers from West Africa and India who fought
and died on the Western Front in World War I against what the French
and the British then thought of as the "barbaric Huns"? And who
chooses to remember the reliance the United States placed on
Afghanistan's Muslim warriors in their struggle against the "godless
atheists" of the Soviet Union in the 1980s?

Muslims who have fought on behalf of Western political interests have
been forgotten. Muslims who have confronted the West militarily are
remembered. Not only remembered, but taken as examples of an
imaginary eternal opposition between Islam and the West.

Meanwhile, the diverse and long-standing peaceful side of European-
Muslim relations remains in shadow. When you arise in the morning,
your toothbrush and the hard soap you wash with are borrowings from
the Muslim world. At breakfast, your orange juice and coffee come
from the Muslims, and so does the sugar you put in your coffee and
the clear glass and glazed coffee cup you drink from. You read your
newspaper. Both paper and the idea of printing are borrowings from
Muslim society. What do you do later? Play chess? Eat pasta? Play
your guitar? All from the Muslim world.

Beyond daily life, of course, there are myriad other borrowings from
Muslim societies, particularly in the areas of medicine, chemistry,
and philosophy. Today these are normally treated as irrelevancies
from a long ago time. But that seemingly irrelevant long ago time was
actually the time of the Crusades that so many think are still highly
relevant. The languages of all European countries contain hundreds of
words of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish origin, mostly dealing with
science (alcohol, algebra), consumer goods (sugar, coffee), and
elegant living (lute, damask).

How is Muslim culture enriching us now? Through the phenomenally
popular poems of Rumi, one might answer. Through story characters
like Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor, who have become stock
figures in popular entertainment. Through contemporary Iranian films.
Through the spiritual experiences of people in the West who convert
to Islam. Through the working lives of the hundreds of thousands of
immigrants who, despite anti-immigrant sentiment and religious
hostility, choose not to give in to extremist appeals.

Europe needs to come to grips with its past. This could best be done
by a multinational commission charged with reviewing every aspect of
the history of Muslims in, and versus, Europe. The parallel history
of Europeans in, and versus, Muslims outside of Europe is of equal
importance; but that has already been addressed in hundreds of books
devoted to imperialism and its beneficial or baleful consequences.

There are two reasons why this urgent chore needs to be addressed
internationally. First, a number of countries -- Serbia and Bulgaria
come to mind -- have built a myth of demonic Muslim occupation into
nationalist ideologies that no longer ring true, however serviceable
they may once have been during struggles for independence. These
myths need to be reexamined outside the nationalist context.
Secondly, Muslims must be granted a role in reconsidering their
history within Europe. Modern efforts at reconciliation around the
world have amply demonstrated that disputed histories cannot be
clarified without participation by the parties concerned.

Throughout contemporary Europe the debate over Islam and Muslims
proceeds at a fevered pace. But without a comprehensive understanding
of the past, all sides in the debate build on weak foundations.
Working internationally to build that comprehensive understanding
will serve the future as much as the past.


Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and
author of Islam: A View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-
Christian Civilization.

===

Islamo-Christian Civilization
by Richard Bulliet
http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=319


Polls indicate that somewhere around 15 percent of the population in
most Muslim countries desire a religiously oriented government that
will impose their religious code of behavior on all citizens. After
the recent American election, can anyone doubt that at least 15
percent of the American electorate shares an identical desire? As
evangelical leader Bob Jones III put it in a letter to President
Bush: "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America --
though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of
paganism."

Popular slogans like "clash of civilizations" and "what went wrong?"
drive wedges between Muslims and non-Muslims by teaching that Islamic
belief and practice are incompatible with the modern world. In fact,
Islam and the West belong historically, theologically, and
emotionally to a single Islamo-Christian civilization. Their current
hostility toward one another is not unlike the hostility that kept
Protestants and Catholics at one another's throats for centuries. But
in the end, Protestants and Catholics learned tolerance; and in the
end, Muslims and the non-Muslims of the West will live together.

What binds Christians and Jews in a Judeo-Christian civilization is
not just a shared belief in God and a shared scripture. It is a
history of conflict and compromise, horrors and heroes, a history
that ends in mutual respect and recognition of common values. What
binds Islam and Western Christendom, along with the modern secular
West that western Christendom gave rise to, is the same god and the
same scriptural tradition, along with periods of warfare interspersed
with periods of cultural borrowing.

Muslims often observe that the West willfully denies the Islamic
heritage of science and philosophy that formed the foundations of its
modernity. This is a fair accusation. However, it is equally true
that the borrowings of science and philosophy have gone the other way
over the past two centuries.

Cultural borrowing also takes place on the mundane level. The soap
you showered with this morning was borrowed from the Islamic world,
as were the coffee and orange juice you drank for breakfast, the
sugar you put in the coffee, the colorful glaze on the coffee cup,
and the clear glass you sipped the juice from. The newspaper you read
was a further product of cultural borrowing, both the paper itself
and the idea of printing.

When Europe was deeply immersed in this cultural borrowing, it was
talking incessantly of crusades and warfare. Now that the Islamic
world is on the borrowing end of the relationship, we hear warlike
words and denunciations of Western culture from the other side. No
one likes to think of themselves as in need of someone else's culture.

The preachers of confrontation nevertheless tell us that Islam is
incompatible with democracy and dedicated to war without end. And
they observe that even if we do have a few fanatics on our side --
Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma bombing fame, for one -- our culture does
not produce international conspiracies that fly airliners into
skyscrapers.

These tired claims about democracy and endless war are belied daily
by the hundreds of Muslim thinkers currently writing and talking
about evolving Islamic thought in a peaceful twenty-first century
context.

The question of terrorism requires more serious consideration. If a
secular American president used police powers to suppress all
religious voices in the American political arena and threw into
concentration camps all preachers and lay leaders who openly
disagreed with his views, evangelical America would take up arms. The
same would happen if an evangelical president similarly oppressed
secular Americans who tried to oppose him politically. Americans
don't fly airplanes into skyscrapers not because they are all
reasonable people, but because they have a free and open political
system that guarantees their right to express their views and seek
governmental change through elections.

The problem of the Muslim world, and the root of Muslim religious
discontent, is lack of freedom, not hatred of modernity or of the
West. However, when Western governments show political and military
support for tyranny, as they have done in many countries for decades
and are still doing today, they become targets for Muslim anger.

The road out of our mutual dilemma lies with political
liberalization, not with war. Everyone knows this. But liberalization
is difficult to achieve because the autocratic regimes have so much
to lose. Not only is war easier, but it encourages dictatorial rulers
in their belief that America will never abandon its "friends," no
matter how brutally they suppress dissent.

This situation must change. No one on any side should be dying to
perpetuate tyranny. The challenge to the West is how to back away
from support of oppression. The challenge to the oppressors is to
find ways of liberalizing that do not lead to chaos. The challenge to
the vast population of Muslims who want for themselves and their
children a share in choosing the governments they live under is to
show their openness to political pluralism. The test of all these
challenges is free elections with Muslim political parties
participating on a level of equality with all other political forces.

In the meantime, the sooner people in the West acknowledge their
religious roots, and admit to the role of religious bigotry in their
suspicions of Muslims, the more we can hope for a reduction in
tensions. And the sooner Muslims gain enough confidence in the
prospects for liberalization to reject the jihadists in their midst,
the more the West can reject pleas of support from dictatorial
friends.

Islamo-Christian civilization has been a reality for centuries,
though no one on either side has ever seen a good reason to admit it.
Living physically separated by seas and armed frontiers, both sides
felt free to indulge in warlike bombast. But we are no longer living
apart. Today's world cannot afford yesterday's militancy, or the
extension of that militancy into the indefinite future through a
bombastic "war on terror."

Jews and Christians began to experiment with mutual tolerance in the
nineteenth century. It didn't work very well; but when the worst
horrors were past, people on both sides embraced the novel idea that
they all belonged to a Judeo-Christian civilization. Let us hope that
the Muslim and Western nations can realize their common roots and
their common destiny in an Islamo-Christian civilization without
going through a century of similar catastrophe.


Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and
author of Islam: A View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-
Christian Civilization (September 2004).