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WILL THEY LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER? ...........An exploratory essay
TABLE OF CONTENTS Books Referred To START OF ESSAY
.See also Can Islamic Lands End the Blame Game and Make a Future Themselves?
7 January
2002; last modified 10 February 2002 Copyright © 2002 Richard P. Richter 
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ISLAM & THE WEST: WILL THEY LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER?
BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ESSAY
Esposito, John L. Ed. THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ISLAM. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999. Ursinus College Library: 297.09/Ox2.
Gray, John. TWO FACES OF LIBERALISM. New York: The New Press, 2000. Ursinus College Library: 320.51/G793t.
Huband, Mark. WARRIORS OF THE PROPHET: The Struggle for Islam. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Ursinus College Library: 320.55/H861.
Huntington, Samuel P. THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Ursinus College Library: 909.829/H926.
ISLAM & THE WEST: WILL THEY LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER?
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THIS ESSAY
1. The roots of resurgent Islamism are in colonialism
2. Muslims were humiliated, then exhilarated
3. Afghanistan is an object lesson
4. Islam & the West have started a long cultural engagement together
5. Four reasons to be encouraged
6. Four reasons to be discouraged
7. Peaceful engagement will depend on modus vivendi
8. Islam & the West might live together in a "multicivilizational" system
ISLAM & THE WEST: WILL THEY LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER?
modus vivendi: manner of living; an arrangement between two nations or groups that effects a workable compromise on issues in dispute without permanently settling them. Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.
1. The roots of resurgent Islamism are in colonialism
I was among those whose early response to the attack on America on 11 September 2001 was, "Wha?"
What strange things were happening in the Muslim world unknown to me that could provoke such a wondrously destructive event? How could I be so uninformed?
Several weeks after 9-11 on National Public Radio some booksellers were telling how sales of books on Islam were skyrocketing. They made me feel at least I was not the only one trying to get a grip.
A reading of The Oxford History of Islam, edited by Esposito, and of Mark Huband's Warriors of the Prophet helped identify some of the bolder strands of difference and conflict. At the same time, they awakened me to the fact that most of the discourse on postmodernism and "globalization" that I had been reading largely ignored the significance of Islam. This seemed to me at one moment farcical, at another moment tragic.
What made us think that Western capitalistic culture could keep spreading over a whole quadrant of the globe without provoking deep-seated resistance from the civilization deeply entrenched there?
Now I have some beginning thoughts where before there were few. Spelled out, they may become a platform for more responsible further study.
Mark Huband's Warriors of the Prophet suffers from the obsolescence everything on the topic suffers that appeared before 9-11. Still, Huband usefully reinforced the central thought that I gained from The Oxford History of Islam:
Resurgent Islamism as a political-cultural force has its roots in colonialism's effects, which the winning of independence in the 1960s did not terminate.
As The Oxford History made clear, the colonial era (say, 1860 to 1970) became possible because the internally weakened Ottoman Empire and its fragments after 1918 failed to resist European modernism. And the independence movement of the post-World War II period failed to recapture power and dignity for the Muslim multitudes.
The varieties of experience in particular regions and countries are too great to delineate in a beginning probe such as this. Speaking generally, the leaders who took over from the colonial powers stood apart from the indigenous Islamic orientation of their populace. Being Western-educated, they adopted the structures left by the colonial rulers rather than replacing them with Muslim ways. They perpetuated the attitudes of colonial rulers. The Muslim culture, they thought, had shown its inability to rule. Their new countries needed the technological expertise and administrative experience provided by Western colonial practice. Islamic law (shariah) was incompatible, in their view, with Western legal institutions and had to yield. They sustained the distance between ruler and ruled that colonialism had created.
Islamism became resurgent as an indigenous answer to the continuing failure of politics in the post-colonial Muslim world. It opposed the Western practices of the newly independent powers. It accepted the idea of an advancing society but offered its alternative vision of development based on Islamic law and custom.
The Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jamaat -i Islami, and similar groups favored a return to Islamic law (shariah) out of a cultural imperative: they wanted to recapture the sense of dignity and power that decline and foreign domination had destroyed.
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ISLAM & THE WEST: WILL THEY LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER?
2. Muslims were humiliated, then exhilarated
Two events in the post-colonial period heavily influenced the rise of radical Islamism. One humiliated Muslims; the other exhilarated them.
Muslims felt humiliated when Egypt lost the war to Israel in 1967. It discredited the Westernized ways of the Egyptian leadership. It said that Muslims finally had to reject Western adaptations to save themselves. The only way back to power and dignity would be through resurgent Islamism--the reassertion of the grand tradition reaching back to the Ottomans, the Mughals (in India), the Safavids (in Iran) at their height centuries before.
Muslims felt exhilarated when the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran in 1979 succeeded in overthrowing the Western-oriented government of the Shah and instituting an Islamic state. Iran became the symbol of Islamic pride and a revolutionary example for Muslims.
Left to itself after the colonial period, the Muslim world might have worked out its cultural and political problems. But the Cold War did not leave the newly independent Muslim states to themselves. The US and the USSR complicated their development even as they attained the formalities of independence. The complications--economic, military, and political--kept Muslim states from regaining the dignity and power for which they yearned. Many of them were ciphers in the geopolitical maneuvering of the superpowers. Their Western-oriented leaders played the international game to stay in power; they paid less attention to the needs of their people. They ceded to Islamic religious leaders the training of Muslims in a resurgent fundamentalist view of the world that demonized the non-Muslim West and did nothing for their material well-being.
In a 2 December 2001 New York Times op-ed piece, Saad Mehio wrote the following about the way Islam and politics mixed:
Arab and other Muslim tyrannies sought, by leaving the educational and cultural fields to Islamism, to acquire legitimacy at the cheapest and most opportunistic price: by keeping the masses ignorant and preventing them from improving their lot, politically and economically. Better to direct their hopes toward the hereafter. (Mehio is a regular contributor to The Daily Star in Lebanon and Al Khaleej in the United Arab Emirates.)
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3. Afghanistan is an object lesson
Afghanistan has become an object lesson for us in trying to trace the record of the Muslim world's engagement with the West. The USSR wanted Afghanistan for strategic Cold War reasons. Therefore, the US opposed Soviet domination of Afghanistan. It backed the Islamic mujahideen as a means of implementing that opposition. These "freedom fighters" of the 1980s, we now know, were not just Afghanis but also fighters from other Muslim nations, including young Osama bin Laden of Saudi-Arabia. A complex of Muslim motives was at play. Afghanis were resisting foreign domination. The Islamist fighters allied with them were motivated by the rising feeling that they could restore dignity and power to Islamic lands by reviving their religio-cultural traditions. That meant a vigorous rejection of the non-Islamic culture and governance systems still embedded in the structures of their post-colonialist world.
Armed by America through Pakistan, the Afghanis and their non-Afghani allies fought the Soviets. The al-Qaeda terrorist training camps arose from this complex war scene. The same scene inflamed internal conflicts among Afghani tribes. This led finally to the success of the Taliban regime. The Taliban merged state and religion, the dream of resurgent Islam, interpreting shariah in the most fundamental way. Money from al-Qaeda and Islamist fervor brought the bin Laden network and the Taliban regime together.
When the attack on America occurred, we were quick to pinpoint the enemy. Our military forces quickly reduced the camps and the Taliban regime. Afghanistan gained a six-month provisional government aimed at rebuilding civil society and political legitimacy. The world hopes that religion and the state will no longer create an explosive mix with the power to continue destabilizing the region and threatening the security of the rest of the world.
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4. Islam & the West have started a long cultural engagement together
With other Americans, I've been learning these things since the surprise and shock of 9-11. I keep looking for more. From The Oxford History and Huband some general statements arise about Islam and the West. Unworried for now about the oversimplification that limited knowledge yields, I've made two lists from my reading notes. One list is encouraging, the other discouraging. There will be time for revising as the perimeter of my understanding (slowly) expands and I worry more prudently about balance and accuracy.
Not long after 11 September 2001, I became convinced that the attack on America began a long, unprecedented engagement between the Islam and the West. I felt that this engagement would not end until these two cultures reached a new level of accord, something never before sought. This would be the work of many years, decades, perhaps, long after our violent responses to the violence of 9-11 ended.
My reading of the Oxford History and Huband as well as John Gray has reinforced that early feeling. The events of 11 September brought the very long process of global networking to another grand juncture. It is no less far-reaching than the process of accommodation in Europe and East Asia that started with WWII or the one that we have seen between the West and the former Soviet Union since 1990. At the end of this piece, I suggest that John Gray's notion of modus vivendi offers a useful tool for thinking about the promise of that long-term outcome.
Samuel Huntington probably would reject my emphasis on cultural "engagement"; but as I suggest at the end, his paradigm of a world order based on a "multicivilizational" political process is not far apart from the idea of modus vivendi.
What, then, are the chances that the West and Islam will find modus vivendi? My gut feeling remains one of hope for a new engagement never before seen. But my introductory reading hardly provides a solid foundation for that hope. My lists of four reasons to be encouraged and four reasons to be discouraged seem to suggest a stand-off. For better or worse, I present the lists below and then conclude with an appeal to Gray and to Huntington. In different ways, both of them reassure me of the ultimate outcome of the long, hard cultural engagement ahead.
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5. Four reasons to be encouraged
(1) Resurgent Islamism will be unable to revive the umma, the total body of Muslim believers that cuts across state boundaries. The ancient idea of the umma envisions a solidarity of believers throughout the Islamic world, transcending national and ethnic boundaries. This vision inspired Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar of the Taliban when they called on all Muslims to mount jihad against the infidel Westerners.
Huband dismisses our fear that Islamism will be a solidified global force mobilized against the West. Islamist movements, he observes, have emerged as responses to a "variety of colonial experiences" in specific places. The rise of political Islamism has not been a manifestation of a global doctrine of pan-Islamism, as Huband sees it. Political Islamism has responded to particular experiments with nationalism and socialism. The variety of these responses has moved Islamism away from a global doctrine not toward it. (138)
It is encouraging to think that we are not, therefore, in for a titanic clash to end all clashes between a monolithic West and a monolithic Islam.
(2) Open to "intellectual reasoning," Islamic law has a long history of development and is not frozen in a static fundamentalism or commanded by a single theological orthodoxy. The brutal system of law imposed by the Taliban was reputedly "original" Islam, based on the Quran and uncorrupted by adaptation to changing circumstances through time. An uninformed Westerner could fear that the insane Taliban system was indeed a purist ideal widely admired in the Islamic world.
(The double bind that the Taliban placed on medical practice in conformance with their idea of pure Islamic law exemplifes how insane it was. First they forbade female nurses and doctors from practicing. Then they forbade male doctors from touching the bodies of female patients. The effect was to leave women in childbirth without medical care.)
It is encouraging to know that Islamic law has been open to development from early times. Indeed, interpretation of the Quran and the Sunna (nearly canonical texts, next to the Quran) rests on very early applications of reason that arose shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE.
The Islamic law in its totality, called the shariah, centers in the Quran and Sunna. Human reasoning elaborates on the meaning of these sacred texts (the Arabic word for this is fiqh). So, Muslims recognize human reason as a second source of law after the divine revelation found in the Quran and Sunna. They call upon human reason to deal with the particularities of right and wrong behavior in time and place. (The Oxford History, 108).
Legal schools of interpretive reasoning arose in the 750-950 period. It was amazing to me that the laws developed through the ages in those still-functioning schools of thought continue to inform present-day Islamic practices. To underscore this amazing reality, I find it helpful to name the schools and their respective leanings.
The Maliki school was founded in Mecca and Medina, where Islam began. In its "Traditionalist" position, this school does not rely on human reason but rather seeks to find precedents in the Quran and early texts for its doctrines. However, it has shown versatility in accepting proofs of the shariah. It is predominant today in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, northern Egypt, Sudan, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
The Hanafi school began as a more liberal school than the Maliki and has retained this relative stance today. The Oxford History calls it "Rationalist" as opposed to the traditionalist Maliki. The Ottoman Turks adopted it in the 1500s, laying the groundwork for it to be the largest surviving school.
The Shafii school seeks to strike a balanced middle course between the Traditionalist Maliki and Rationalist Hanafi positions. It prevails today in southern Egypt (where its founder flourished in the early 800s), the Arabian peninsula, East Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria.
The Hanbali school came a little later than the Maliki school in the mid-ninth century but it too sought its doctrines through a traditionalist approach and avoided a rationalist approach. This school declined until the eighteenth century. Then the puritanical Wahhabi movement in Arabia revitalized it. It predominates today in Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and Oman. The traditionalist Wahhabi movement associated with the Hanbali school has direct government support in Saudi-Arabia. This form of Islam nurtured Osama bin Laden. (The Oxford History, 112-114)
The early rise of these different schools did not ensure that flexibility and adaptability based on reason and ongoing experience would characterize Islamic law through the centuries. From about 950 CE to about 1850 CE, an incredibly long sweep of time, the schools followed precedent, concentrating on commentaries on predecessors.
It was only in the modern period that scholars finally began applying reason, apart from precedent, to find contemporary relevance in the shariah for the experiences of living Muslims. This renewed willingness to think afresh about the texts, echoing the openness to new views of that ancient 750-950 period, doubtless opened the door to resurgent Islamism. Ironically, what it found was a new commitment not to rationality but to tradition.
The hopeful message buried in this finding is that rational interpretation can continue into the future. Muslims answer to no "Pope" and have no doctrine of absolute infallibility. They do not have a hierarchical clergy but rather respond to the legal findings of scholars in the various schools. If the new engagement with the West, started so abruptly on 11 September 2001, has the desired effect, Islamic scholars will find themselves reasoning about shariah in a globalized setting as they have never reasoned before. We can hope that this will fuel a renaissance of new thought about shariah, about Muslims living fulfilled lives in that global setting.
It ought to be possible for Islamic scholars to put new meaning on some of the most volatile notions about which we Westerners have been learning since 9-11. These include the relationship between the faithful and the "infidel," the meaning of "jihad," "martyrdom," and the deadly division of the world into "the house of Islam" and "the house of War."
(3) Basic principles of Islamic law resonate with basic principles in Western thinking. I confess that notions like infidel, jihad, martyrdom, House of War chill my blood as I think about Islam, especially because they are central to Osama bin Laden's rhetoric. So, it was encouraging for me to hear a familiar and comforting ring in some core concepts of Islamic law. Shariah aims for "justice, equality, public interest, consultation, enjoining good, and forbidding evil." Shariah admirably includes the following objectives:
the establishment of a consultative government; the realization of the lawful benefits of the people; the prevention of harm (darar); the removal of hardship (haraj); and the education of the individual by inculcating in him or her a sense of punctuality, self-discipline, and restraint. (The Oxford History, 135).
Individualism, to my surprise, has a high value in Islam, despite the appearance that it aims at social solidarity and demands a high level of behavioral conformity. It emphasizes individual conscience in its practice. Shariah aims to reform society by reforming individuals. It confers dignity as well as responsibility on the individual as an article of faith in God the creator of Adam. The Oxford History attributes Islam's individualistic propensity to the freedom of its private jurist-scholars from state dictates and ecclesiastical controls. (144-149)
Of course, this individualistic propensity operates within the general consensus of Muslim society. The history of Islam does not suggest that its tradition of individualism has equipped Muslims to function well in a pluralistic society where they are not in the majority. Nevertheless, the importance of individualism in Islam offers a piece of common ground. Muslims and Westerners seeking accord should be able to seek it out and stand together on it.
(4) Scientific and technological development are not inimical to Islamic religious traditions. I have a picture in mind of Muslims that seems antithetical to modern Western material life. In the picture they have styles of dress and manner that seem to contradict material comforts and a technological environment. Bin Laden's campaign of "holy war" seems to be compatible with this picture. It smacks of the medieval and other-worldly. Bin Laden in a cave, shunning creature comforts while pursuing a dream of joining Allah in Paradise as a martyr, seems just right. (So far, to be sure, his dream has been of others going to Paradise as martyrs, but that's a quibble.) The Taliban regime's cavalier disregard of the material well-being of its subjects and its fixation on barbaric punishments reinforce the picture further.
Such a picture could too easily lead one to conclude that Islam takes an anti-materialistic stance against technological development based on science. One might think it opposes the development and improvement of the physical earth for the benefit of humankind. The abysmal economic underdevelopment of much of the Muslim world might further support this conclusion.
I was somewhat surprised to find that the religion of Islam has not stood against the material development of the physical world on doctrinal grounds. Science and mathematics have an illustrious place in the history of Islamic culture through the centuries. In medieval and Renaissance Christendom, the Church high-handedly interdicted scientific invention and discovery when it appeared to flout religious dogma. Islam has no such record of conflict between religious principles and secular scientific enterprise.
Why, then, has Islamic culture failed to compete with the modern West's stunning record in the sciences and technology? Whatever the answer, it does not seem to lie in over-arching religious dogma. Even resurgent Islamists are comfortable with the notion of developmental science and technology. In what I labeled a "Muslim Manifesto," for example, Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, embraced material progress even as he declared against the hegemony of Western culture.
The Middle East is the site arguably of the most important economic enterprise on earth, namely, the production of oil. The Islamic world thus in a basic way drives the economy of the West, in spite of the cultural conflicts that have surfaced so dramatically since 9-11. I take encouragement from Islam's comfort with scientific and technological development and specifically from our critical economic relationship through oil. The Muslim world and the West already have a proven record of economic relations. Those relations need to be more adjusted in numerous ways as relations following 9-11 change. But they already show that both camps can work together in a new world order that values developmental technology.
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6. Four reasons to be discouraged
(1) Al-Qaeda's international roster shows that resurgent Islamism has pan-Islamic appeal. The suicide hijackers were from several Muslim countries. "The street" is a potent player in the political strife of the Middle East, whether the street runs through East Jerusalem, Baghdad, or Teheran. The new all-news TV cable channel, al-Jazeera, broadcasting out of Qatar, puts pan-Islamic voices and faces in front of the whole region all day and night. Despite the horrific effects of the terrorists on 9-11, Islamic voices against the terrorists have only cautiously emerged and then with modulated tone. To this moment, many Muslims presumably believe that 9-11 was the work of Jews.
Although there is no solid umma a-borning around the world, the evidence of a sympathetic feeling among Muslims of many different stripes is inescapable. The tradition of "brotherhood" among fellow believers runs through the history, especially in the black-and-white division of the world into the "House of Islam" and the "House of War."
The West may take some comfort from Huband's doubt about the rising of pan-Islamic solidarity (the umma). But it must expect Muslims, all things considered, to prefer to deal with Muslims over non-Muslims (just as Muslims can expect to see Westerners prefer to deal with other Westerners).
(2) The dispersion of political authority across many Muslim states combines with the solidarity of religious loyalty, rooted in Islamic history, to limit the West's ability to deal comprehensively with Islam. The lack of an ecclesiastical hierarchy with a final authority at the top is encouraging in that it diffuses viewpoints and inhibits solidarity against non-Islamic positions. On the other hand, that lack of pan-Islamic organizational order does not lead to a lack of pan-Islamic feeling of solidarity based on the religion. This solidarity is cultural rather than organizational. It is the product of centuries of cultivating a shared Islamic style in a variety of political venues across the Muslim map.
The religion of Islam separated from the direct rule of Muslim states through a long historical process. In the beginning, Muhammad's rule combined religion and the state, leaving no doubt about the solidarity of the sacred and the profane. After a gradual differentiation of the two polities over several centuries, separate but mutually supportive elites led the religion on one hand and Muslim secular power on the other. The Oxford History describes this arrangement:
A Muslim society became in practice a society governed by state elites, who protected and patronized Islam, and religious leaders, who legitimized alien states. This condominium of elites and cooperative relations between institutions would be for many centuries the Middle Eastern Muslim solution to the problem of state and religion. (362)
This separation of religion and state, albeit with mutual support, remains evident today. It helps to explain, for example, Saudi-Arabia. There the Wahabbist Islamic leaders, who receive the patronage of the royal government, maintain separate religious institutions and teach their conservative religion in their schools. This casts people in the non-Islamic West as infidels. Yet, at the same time, the government has a firm alliance with the US. This is the religio-political climate that produced Osama bin Laden.
The lack of a pan-Islamic religious hierarchy contributes further to the complexity that the West faces in dealing with Islamic polity. Religious leaders rise in their respective cultural environments, supported by their respective schools of Islamic law. There is no overarching Islamic ecclesiastical authority to discipline their religious doctrine. Nor, as we have seen, is the political authority of the state likely to step across the line and impose a religious discipline. I take it that bin Laden's presumptuous voice calling for "holy war" against the West has cache in the Islamic world in part because of the legitimacy that he can seize upon in this situation.
We should note that contemporary resurgent Islamism seeks to alter the complex separation of religion and state. The Taliban demonstrated how thoroughly the extreme Islamists want to merge religion with state. Bin Laden reportedly wants to cast out the Saud royal family from his home state. He wants to institute an Islamic state in which religion and political authority would merge.
In sum, the complex religious and political relationships in the Islamic world, grounded in centuries of development, discourage one from thinking that a clear protocol presents itself to us for freshly engaging with Islam. Our engagement will have to concentrate on the creation of new processes of communicating in numerous venues. Only after new processes are established will we be able to communicate seriously on substantive issues.
(3) The puritanical anti-rationalist impulse in resurgent Islamism gains credibility from its deep roots in Islamic history. I took encouragement from the long tradition of "intellectual reasoning" in Islamic law. This indicated an openness and an opposition to static fundamentalism. But this encouraging note finds its opposite in another thread of tradition. Resurgent Islamism draws on the anti-rational tradition of Ibn Taymiyah (1263-1328). Taymiyah opposed theological and philosophical proofs about the faith. He advocated returning to the ways of "pious ancestors" who stuck with the Quran and the immediate commentaries on it by Companions of the Prophet and their immediate successors. He preached against Aristotelian logic and other forms of rational demonstration. This anti-rational tradition survived through the centuries to inspire Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792). He founded the Wahhabist movement in Saudi-Arabia mentioned above. (The Oxford History, 290-291) This reactionary movement apparently fuels much of the thinking of resurgent Islamism. The West will find it hard to reason with people who follow a long tradition of not valuing reasoning.
(4) Some Muslims believe that they would display unfaithfulness to Islam if they engaged in dialogue and sought accommodation with non-Muslims. The Oxford History illustrates this with the difficulties faced by mosques in non-Muslim countries such as the US and Britain. These mosques often draw on imams who were born and trained in Muslim countries. They are often unsympathetic to the Western environment within which their people must function. If they seek to accommodate their teachings to that environment, they run the risk of condemnation by those Muslims "who believe that any compromise or adjustment to the Western environment is tantamount to rejection of the faith." (625)
On the broader borders of interfaith relations, this fear of contamination inhibits discussion with Christians, Jews, and others about common concerns. Muslims fear that Christians have a covert conversion agenda. (The Oxford History, 627) The conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority exacerbates suspicion and raises defenses when Muslims engage in dialogue with people in the West. They (rightly) fear that such people support Israel.
In sum, such Muslim fears and suspicions will not facilitate the Islam-West cultural engagement.
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7. Peaceful engagement will depend on modus vivendi
With these and other encouragements and discouragements in mind, I remain hopeful that we are at the beginning of a long and unprecedented era of growing engagement between Islam and the West. In this new era, people will gradually come to understand everyone else's need to believe in something in order to function as human beings. They will come to understand that others, like themselves, need to feel worthy by participating in a familiar and affirming culture. But they will gradually stop believing that other people must ultimately adopt their particular belief. They will learn not to insist that the culture that affirms them is the one and only culture that ought to affirm everyone. Human beings universally will value difference as an essential condition of global survival.
At the same time, they will not therefore assume that anything goes just because somebody believes it. There will be an irreducible list of rights and wrongs universally shared. Killing others will be wrong, for whatever reason. It will be wrong, for example, to kill others because you think that their beliefs are wrong and should yield to your beliefs. Other such rights and wrongs will be identified but the ban on killing others for your beliefs--or theirs--suffices here.
This transformation will require agile thought and resolute behavior at every level. It will require a distribution of production and labor that we do not yet see in the world. Globalized capitalism in its present state fails to deliver such a distribution. In the present division between Western capitalist culture and Islamic culture, neither one shows appreciable evidence of understanding and accepting such a modus vivendi.
Gaining such an understanding and acceptance will be a challenge to the West as much as a challenge to Islam--more so, perhaps, because Western modern capitalistic culture holds hegemonic sway through much of the world in a way that Islamic culture does not.
But modus vivendi rises like a banner, beckoning human civilization as a whole. I see jihad and crusade blending someday into an agenda that neither Prophet nor Pope alone could ever have championed.
Sure, I've spelled out a hope that looks as realistic as the Land of Oz. Look for a moment, though, at John Gray's idea of modus vivendi. He helps us realize that the hope for a new era with modus vivendi as its dominant note is as necessary as it is radical.
Gray identifies "two faces" of Western liberal "tolerance" of non-Western values. One face tolerates difference as a means toward the end of ultimately universalizing Western culture. It tolerates, say, Islamic culture, on the assumption that Muslims will finally see the light of natural reason and yield eventually to the dominant Western rational consensus on human rights. Meanwhile, this brand of liberalism says that we should be tolerant of the deficiencies of Muslims' enlightenment. We should help them move along toward the light. This is the face of the hegemonic Enlightenment project. (It is also a rationale for colonialism.)
The other face of Western liberalism, Gray says, tolerates non-Westernism as a "condition of peace" and does not expect it finally to yield to the Western rational consensus. This face of liberalism represents a permanent acceptance of difference. (It thus stands firmly in the camp of postmodernist thinking.) It does not assume that universal human rationality will inevitably lead all humans in the end to the same conclusions about justice and human rights--or to the final global monoculture that will bring an end to history.
Gray sums it up this way:
We should give up the view of the liberal project as a prescription for an ideal regime and adopt instead a conception in which the pursuit of modus vivendi among incommensurable and conflicting values is central. (70)
Modus vivendi, in Gray's thinking, is an earth-bound strategy for mediating compromises. It does not insist upon absolute human rights for all time. The project of modus vivendi rises out of the times in which people operate. It sees human rights as conventions that are always contingent and never totally enforceable by any regime. (107)
Gray thus appears to take a squishy relativist position over against the hard universalism of traditional liberalism. Not quite so. Relativists too are wrong, he says. They are right to say there are no universal liberal values but wrong to say there are no "universal standards." (109)
There are minimal standards of decency and legitimacy that apply to all contemporary regimes, but they are not liberal values writ large. (109)
Gray recognizes "universal evils"--humiliation, for example--but denies that we can remove them by projecting absolute and universal liberal values throughout the world. (110)
To illustrate modus vivendi in operation, Gray calls the old Ottoman Empire a "regime of toleration," of all things--a dramatically ironic example for us in this piece. (109) His point is that the Ottoman system recognized and legally protected non-Muslim religious communities. He is not recommending the Ottoman system as a present-day solution because it accorded no recognition of personal autonomy within those communities. But it did offer a way of living together to different religious communities. This had practical merit then and there for those communities, though it was not a model for the ages.
Gray's critique of the universalist imperative of classical liberalism and his situational approach to living together mainly measures how attitudes in the West need to change to make modus vivendi with Islam possible. He does not help us much when we ask how Muslims can change their attitudes. The answer to some extent may lie in the encouraging notes identified earlier in this piece. They emphasize development through the application of reason not just traditional doctrine; they emphasize life-affirming values meaningful to the West as well Islam.
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8. Islam & the West might live together in a "multicivilizational" system
But if we assume that Muslims will hold fast to their very own style of thought and belief, accommodation will be hard. Perhaps they will find their way, with us, toward a "multicivilizational" system of living together while we each forthrightly assert our unique values and style. This is Samuel Huntington's paradigm. It is worth ending by searching Huntington's paradigm for the saving strength that Islam and the West will need to avoid permanent hostility.
Huntington's paradigm of clashing civilizations gives a sweeping view of what has been happening since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
Like John Gray, Huntington scoffs at the glib expectation that a universal global civilization, following the Western model, will emerge. He sees a declining role for the West, a rising role for non-Western civilizations in a multipolar world system of relationships. These relationships often will involve conflict for the West, especially with Islam and China. Civilizations, each with its own cultural uniqueness, are nine in number by Huntington's reckoning (Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Christian Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese). Civilizations rather than nation states will be the more powerful force in pulling allies together and defining enemies in the world order he envisions. He thinks that world order will prevail only if leaders buy into the "multicivilizational character of global politics" and cooperate realistically on that basis. (21)
Huntington usefully places the contemporary (but pre-9-11) conflict between Islamic and Western civilization in historical context. That context from the very beginning of Islam displayed "a sequence of momentous surges, pauses, and countersurges." (209) Like The Oxford History, Huntington emphasizes the powerful influence of Western colonialism in molding the subsequent Islamic resurgence that fuels our current conflict. But he extends the account. Now that territorial control is no longer the central issue that it was in the colonial period, tension rises from cultural differences of "what is right and what is wrong" and, therefore, of "who is right and who is wrong." (212) This is a serious and persistent difference:
So long as Islam remains Islam (which it will) and the West remains the West (which is more dubious), this fundamental conflict between two great civilizations and ways of life will continue to define their relations in the future even as it has defined them for the past fourteen centuries. (212)
Huntington's pessimism seems fitting as we watch the simplicities of military action against terrorists in Afghanistan begin to yield to the complexities of diplomacy for containing terrorism worldwide. The complexities will continue to arise as much as anything from the affinities among Muslim states, even those at odds with one another, and their collective disinclination to hold hands too forthrightly with the West.
On the other hand, Huntington's call for a kind of Realpolitic among the nine civilizations is not that far afield from the concept of modus vivendi advanced by John Gray. Huntington criticizes Americans for their paradoxical promotion of multiculturalism at home and of universalism abroad. He urges us to reverse these positions. We should reassert our Western cultural uniqueness at home and should adopt multiculturalism abroad. This, he argues, would put our own distinctive civilization legitimately within the group of civilizations that make up the global human phenomenon. At the same time, it would free us from the conceit that Western civilization has a sacred mission to spread around the globe and replace other civilizations. (319)
Huntington, of course, like Gray, is telling the West, not Islam, how to adapt. Clearly, if modus vivendi is to come about, Islam needs Muslim Huntingtons and Grays. The Muslim world needs to modify its behavior as much as we in the West need to modify ours.
My hopeful long-term view rests on the assumption that 11 September 2001 began a uniquely new period in the relationship between the West and Islam. Neither we nor they will terminate this new cultural engagement when military actions diminish. The dangerous and persistent pressures of our global anti-terrorist campaign, if nothing else, will keep everyone engaged on both sides. Hard attitudes over time will soften as we perceive the civilizational strengths in Islam and as they strive to see our humane values without the blinkers of extremist ideology. At least that's my feeling at this point.
I'm quite prepared to learn that some of the assertions and hopes expressed in this piece are untenable in the light of the real situation. But like the unimaginable sight of those planes ramming the twin towers and their quick collapse into lower Manhattan, like the unthinkable damage to the heart of our military command center, they're a beginning.
end of 8. Islam & the West might live together in a "multicivilizational" system
END OF ESSAY
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Table of contents Books referred to
7 January 2002; last
modified 13 January 2002 Copyright © 2002 Richard P. Richter
