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Islam and the West

Personal Statement

A defining moment for me in my political and intellectual development was the Vietnam War. I was in my young teens when the conflict began. I fully believed that it was important for us to spread democracy to Southeast Asia and resist the expansion of Communism. In time though, I became aware of the fundamental disjunction between our political and cultural ideologies and those of Southeast Asia. Democracy is a political system that has developed in the West that is not necessarily compatible in other political and cultural contexts. This disjunction between cultures was central in the final failure of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia.

This experience has led me to look on our current conflict with the Islamic world with great concern. Our leadership has the expectation that we can "convert" the people of Islamic countries to our political system. I do not see us showing any awareness of the deep cultural differences between Western and Islamic civilizations. What follows is a list of some of the signficant cultural differences.

In making this list I need to acknowledge my own cultural ignorance. I am a product of western culture. In my education, I never directly studied Islamic culture. In the universities I went to there were no courses in Islamic Art and Culture. This Eurocentric foundation of my education was and unfortunately is still typical. The challenge for the next generation is to bridge this divide.

The list that follows is based on my secondary reading about Islam. It does not pretend to be authoritative.

The seventh century witnessed the rise of a powerful spiritual and political leader, Muhammad (c. 570-632). He founded a new religion, Islam, an Arabic word whose meaning is "submission to God." The essence of Muhammad's religious teaching is the realization by humans of their utter dependence upon God, and therefore the need to submit totally to the will of God. Muhammad rejected the polytheistic religions of Arabia, and adopted a monotheistic religion built on the traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Muhammad understood himself to be the last great prophet and leader of the faithful traced back through Jesus, Moses, Abraham and ultimately to Adam. For Islam, "There is only one God and Muhammad is His Prophet." For Muslims, meaning "those who submit," Islam was the continuation and completion of Judaism and Christianity. Allah --God-- had revealed to Muhammad the truth which he compiled in the sacred scriptures of the Muslims , the Qur'an. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is a religion of the book, but there is a fundamental difference. The Old and New Testaments are a collections of texts that were written over a wide period of time, while the Qur'an was a single text written by a single individual. As the word of Allah, the Qur'an was understood to be uncreated and eternal, divine and immutable. In addition to the Qur'an, the majority of Muslims accept a collection of the sayings or injunctions of Muhammad as preserving his teachings on points not covered in the divinely inspired Qur'an.

Christianity has an anthropomorphic conception of God, while in Islam Allah is unrepresentable and without limit: For Muslims, God is unique and without equal. They attempt to think and talk about God without either making Him into a thing or a projection of the human self. The Koran avoids this by constantly shifting pronouns to discourage believers from inadvertently reifying God and creating any physical image of Him.

The strong anthropocentric nature of Classical culture in combination with Christian theology has made it "natural" in western culture to give God human and more specifically male form. Genesis 1: 26-27 is the Biblical authority: "And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them." The Incarnation of Christ with the divine becoming human or "the Word made flesh" substantiated the Genesis claim. The second century theologian St. Irenaeus writes: "In previous times [referring to the Old Testament], man ... was said to have been made according to the image of God, but he was not shown as such. For the Word according to Whose image man was made was still invisible....But when the Word of God was made flesh...He truly showed the image by becoming what His image was...."

Consider the implications of this doctrine. It influences how we look at ourselves and our relationship to the world around us.

 

Christianity draws a distinction between temporal and religious authority. There is no corresponding distinction in Islam: With Constantine we saw the alliance of political and religious power. We saw the formulation of imperial power as being derived from God. The Emperor was the viceregent or earthly representative of Christ on earth. Despite the close alliance between political and religious power, they were never understood to be identical. Going back to the New Testament formulation of "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things which are God's" (Matthew 22:21), there was always a distinction between temporal and religious power within Christianity. In the Middle Ages there was a continual tension between the regnum and sacerdotium. In coronation practices in the west, the ecclesiastical hierarchy play a central role. For example, it was the Pope who crowned Charlemagne Emperor on Christmas Day, 800.

Islam does not draw a distinction between temporal and religious power. There is no priesthood in Islam. Muslims worship Allah directly without a hierarchy of rabbis or priests acting as intermediaries.

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam:p. 9: ...[T]here is no priesthood in Islam --no priestly mediation between God and the believer, no ordination, no sacraments, no rituals that only an ordained clergy can perform.... /p. 10: If one may speak of a clergy in a limited sociological sense in the Islamic world, there is no sense at all in which one can speak of a laity. The very notion of something that is separate or separable from religious authority, expressed in Christian languages by terms such as lay, temporal, or secular, is totally alien to Islamic thought and practice. It was not until relatively modern times that equivalents for these terms existed in Arabic. They were borrowed from the usage of Arabic-speaking Christians or newly invented.

Both Christianity and Islam are triumphalist: A significant similarity between Christianity and Islam is the triumphalism of both religions. Judaism understands that the Hebrews are the Chosen People but there is no emphasis given to the role of the faith to convert the non-believer. In contrast Christianity and Islam understand their role as to convert the non-believer to the true faith. The Infidel is to be defeated.

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 31: In Muslim tradition, the world is divided into two houses: the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam), in which Muslim governments rule and Muslim law prevails, and the House of War (Dar al-Harb), the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. The presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or /p. 32: submits to Muslim rule. Those who fight in the jihad qualify for rewards in both worlds --booty in this one, paradise in the next.

Christian triumphalism has influenced liberal democratic thought with the idea that it is the goal of liberal democracy to spread throughout the world. Democracy will replace authoritarian systems of government. In our ideology there is a certitude about the "natural" rightness and destiny of liberal democracy that echoes the zeal and conviction of Christian missionaries which was combined with the Imperial dream inherited from Rome. To question this ideology is to be unpatriotic. It is this certitude that is driving current American foreign policy in the Middle East. Because of our notions of the separation of church and state, we assume that we can overlay democracy onto Islamic societies.
In the West government is organized by institutions while in Islam relationships are defined personally and not institutionally:

Bernard Lewis, "Islam and Liberal Democracy," The Atlantic, February, 1993: Every civilization formulates its own idea of good government, and creates institutions through which it endeavors to put that idea into effect. Since classical antiquity these institutions in the West have usually included some form of council or assembly, through which qualified members of the polity participate in the formation, conduct, and, on occasion, replacement of the government. The polity may be variously defined; so, too, may be the qualifications that entitle a member of the polity to participate in its governance. Sometimes, as in the ancient Greek city, the participation of citizens may be direct. More often qualified participants will, by some agreed-upon and recurring procedure, choose some from among their own numbers to represent them. These assemblies are of many different kinds, with differently defined electorates and functions, often with some role in the making of decisions, the enactment of laws, and the levying of taxes.

The effective functioning of such bodies was made possible by the principle embodied in Roman law, and in systems derived from it, of the legal person-- that is to say, a corporate entity that for legal purposes is treated as an individual, able to own, buy, or sell property, enter into contracts and obligations, and appear as either plaintiff or defendant in both civil and criminal proceedings. There are signs that such bodies existed in pre-Islamic Arabia. They disappeared with the advent of Islam, and from the time of the Prophet until the first introduction of Western institutions in the Islamic world there was no equivalent among Muslim peoples of the Athenian boule, the Roman Senate, or the Jewish Sanhedrin, of the Icelandic Althing or the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot, or of any of the innumerable parliaments, councils, synods, diets, chambers, and assemblies of every kind that flourished all over Christendom....

[A]lmost all aspects of Muslim government have an intensely personal character. In principle, at least, there is no state, but only a ruler; no court, but only a judge. There not even a city with defined powers, limits, and functions, but only an assemblage of neighborhoods, mostly defined by family, tribal, ethnic, or religious criteria, and governed by officials, usually military, appointed by the sovereign.

One of the major functions of such bodies in the West, increasingly through the centuries, was legislation. According to Muslim doctrine, there was no legislative function in the Islamic state, and therefore no need for legislative institutions. The Islamic state was in principle a theocracy --not in the Western sense of a state ruled by the Church and the clergy, since neither existed in the Islamic world, but in the more literal sense of a polity ruled by God. For believing Muslims, legitimate authority comes from God alone, and the ruler derives his power not from the people, nor yet from his ancestors, but from God and the holy law. In practice, and in defiance of these beliefs, dynastic succession became the norm, but it was never given the sanction of the holy law. Rulers made rules, but these were considered, theoretically, as elaborations or interpretations of the only valid law -- that of God, promulgated by revelation. In principle the state was God's state, ruling over God's people; the law was God's law; the army was God's army; and the enemy, of course, was God's enemy.

Without legislative or any other kind of corporate bodies, there was no need for any principle of representation or any procedure for choosing representatives. There was no occasion for collective decision, and no need therefore for any procedure for achieving and expressing it, other than consensus. Such central issues of Western political development as the conduct of elections and the definition and extension of the franchise therefore had no place in Islamic political evolution.

Not surprisingly, in view of these differences, the history of the Islamic states is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. The Muslim subject owed obedience to a legitimate Muslim ruler as a religious duty. That is to say, disobedience was a sin as well as a crime.
 

 

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