While the subject of "Islam and the West" is vast
and one on which much has been written throughout the ages,
the time frame of this article is contemporary and the focus
of enquiry limited. The discussion here revolves round on
how the West, more precisely the United States, and the
Islamic world have come to perceive and treat each other
in the wake of 9/11.
The European view of Islam
is a little nuanced and tempered, at least in appearance,
but has been submerged in the flood of American perceptions
that have somehow overwhelmed the debate.
In the US, Islam has come
under severe scrutiny through the filter of some narrow
issues defined by the "prism of pain" of 9/11.
This is an age of media, mass politics and popular democracy
in the West where governments have come to live and lead
at the level of public opinion. They are especially deferential
to the interests of their core constituency.
And the media, more specifically
American, powerfully reflects as well as affects the public
mood and perceptions. It has magnified the threat of terrorism
as much as the response, and endlessly plays out the drama
of an angered nation that soothes its anxiety by wringing
out its trauma by beating up on the "enemy".
Indeed, the entire range
of America's intellectual life as well as intelligence
agencies and the political leadership have joined the
media in this daily ritual. Much of the intellectual effort
is inspired or sponsored by ideologically laced institutions
or special interests; and the intelligence agencies have
either been tempted by survival instinct to exaggerate
the threat or seduced by an extreme rightwing government
to adapt analysis to political purposes.
Of course, there are saner
voices out there, specially of well-reputed and non-partisan
think tanks and institutions, but these are in a minority
and too faint to influence either government policies
or public opinion in a nation polarized by politics but
united by a paralysing fear of "radical Islam".
When it comes to terrorism there is but one America.
Each of the dominant and
influential strands of opinion and analysis as well as
government policy has responded to Islam from its own
perspective. First, the academia. Most US academics are
conditioned by a secular bias, almost secular fundamentalism,
and historical misrepresentations about Islam. Religion
helps to emphasize and exaggerate historical memories
and feeds contemporary issues; and the fact is historically,
Islam and the West have not had the happiest of relations.
Both expanded at each other's
expense and the story of their seesaw struggle is all
too familiar. The Arab and the Ottoman empires prospered
in the decline of the West whose own rise to domination
later led to the colonization of much of a faltering Islamic
world.
The western domination
was capped by the planting of Israel in the heart of the
Islamic world, a monument to the defeat and decline of
the glory that Islam once was, a strategic instrument
of future Western primacy in the region, and an alibi
for much of the Arab world to wallow in the past.
Except for European literature,
western writings on Islam are by and large silent about
the fact that the West and Islam in their collision and
cooperation had also learnt from each other raising the
potential of their societies. For them somehow their relations
have always seemed so irreconcilable. Unfortunately, the
contemporary extremism in the Islamic world helps to sustain
this anti-thesis.
Religion and socio-political
issues across civilizational divides do not lend themselves
easily to objective analysis. There is no scientific truth
involved - only opinions, perspectives and moral or didactic
impulses are at play. That is why you have exceptionally
smart people from the West, on the one hand, and some
of the brightest intellects from Asia, on the other, disagreeing
vehemently, and sometimes in utter honesty, about the
same issue.
One is speaking from a
western, liberal, Judeo-Christian perspective, and the
other from the framework of Asian or Islamic values. The
two sides' terms of reference are different; their concepts,
philosophies, values irreconcilable. Even their perspectives
on history clash, one representing the colonialist or
imperialist view, entertaining a sense of cultural superiority
and material advancement, and the other that of the colonized
nursing its historical grievances. And where the subject
happens to be religion the disagreement is sharper, particularly
against the background of 9/11.
As for the media, its approach
to Islam, often bereft of any intellectual pretence or
dissimulation, is even more partisan, driven largely by
the sweeping changes in American society in the recent
past. The overwhelming power has somewhat disfigured American
idealism and masked the strains caused by rising prosperity
but uneven distribution of wealth, an extraordinary ascendancy
of individualism, declining family and moral values, and
growing influence of the Christian right.
This has led to two contradictory
trends in American society; it is getting politically
conservative but culturally liberal. Indeed the Islamic
world also faces its own dilemmas and contradictions.
On top of that, both the West and Islam find themselves
in a disordered world which seems to have come specially
unstuck after the end of the Cold War to which globalization
and the worldwide ascendancy of fundamentalism have made
no small contribution.
The powerful American media
feeds on these tensions within Islam and between it and
the West. Unfortunately, for the last few years Islam
has attracted overwhelmingly disproportionate attention
of the international media for radiating a wide array
of negative and troubling impulses. It is thus bristling
with subjects of intense media interest, many of which
have direct impact on the security of citizens and quality
of life in advanced societies
The media feeds on myths
of an expansionist and revivalist Islam, the "looming"
clash between the dominance of American power and resurgent
nationalism in the Islamic world - to which religion imparts
a sense of mission - fear of another tragedy like 9/11,
and the increasingly assertive identity of the Muslim
immigrant population in America and Europe.
Take the controversy about
the scarf in France which Muslim girls insist on wearing,
in part as a compromise with their traditional past, and
partly as a badge of individual freedom and cultural identity
in a democratic, pluralistic and tolerant society that
paradoxically has become scornful of it. Such is the fear
of "radical Islam".
The media has abdicated
its traditional role of educating society and panders
to the pleasure seeking mass population which is hungry
for entertainment, and looking for fast news like the
food of the same name - appetizing, quick to ingest but
lacking nourishment. The media is led by the visual image,
that is television, as the prime source of news. To hold
the attention of viewers, who have the choice of scores
of channels is a big challenge.
To achieve the optimum
results issues are presented in stark terms, not beyond
average understanding. Indeed the line between entertainment
and news is getting blurred. This makes it still harder
to disentangle truth and fiction.
To be fair, there are some
excellent programmes also disseminating knowledge and
quality entertainment for those who care, but their opinion-building
role is only marginal. For the discerning audience or
readership, there are also erudite analyses in print but
they are scanty and written often from a perspective.
Very few are strictly objective.
Indeed, the same holds
true of the media in Islamic societies. When it writes
about the western world does it not write from its own
perspective? Whether it is about the "arrogance"
of the sole remaining superpower or about its perceived
anti-Islam bias, or most recently, the Iraq war, or the
promiscuousness of western society, the perspective is
singularly its own.
Now the role of the US
government. What contribution has it made to exacerbate
the debate on Islam? President Bush's war on terrorism,
resting on a neat division of the world between those
who are with the United States and those who are with
the terrorists, is reminiscent of the early Marxists who
too differentiated the world into "us" and "them".
The war also shares their ideological zeal, and is being
fought single-mindedly as a military conflict.
Yet again the world seems
to have been divided in two armed camps - one led by the
religious extremists and the other by Washington neo-conservatives.
One is peddling a dangerously false version of a great
religion to dominate the Islamic world. And the other
using its post Cold War monopoly of power to guarantee
unchallenged assertion of its will on the world.
Ironically, the 9/11 tragedy
has played into the hands of both, one using it as a provocation
and opportunity to seek public support for the conservative
agenda, and the other exploiting the perceived excesses
of the war on terrorism to similarly arouse an indignant
Muslim world.
The administration's approach
has resulted in a paradox. On the one hand terrorism is
being treated as if it were a rootless and self-sustaining
entity that requires no understanding or remedying of
what has caused it. This is a self-serving approach as
it pins no responsibility on the US or its vital strategic
ally Israel to own any responsibility for the causes of
terrorism; and ironically on the other hand, a dangerous
war hysteria has led to the profiling of Islam as a universal
creed of terrorism thus bearing sole responsibility for
this phenomenon.
This obscures the reality
of terrorism as well as of Islam making the war on terrorism
look like a war on Islam.
