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03/04/2004
The Roots of Muslim Rage, Part II
Following are more excerpts from a groundbreaking piece by
noted scholar Bernard Lewis that was written for the Atlantic
Monthly in September 1990.
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A Clash of Civilizations
The origins of secularism in the west may be found in two
circumstances – in early Christian teachings and, still more,
experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and
in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart. Muslims,
too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing
remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles
between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally
drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the
separation of religion from the state. Only by depriving religious
institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom
restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that
Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most
of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.
Muslims experienced no such need and evolved no such
doctrine. There was no need for secularism in Islam, and even
its pluralism was very different from that of the pagan Roman
Empire, so vividly described by Edward Gibbon when he
remarked that “the various modes of worship, which prevailed in
the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally
true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate,
as equally useful.” Islam was never prepared, either in theory or
in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs
and practiced other forms of worship. It did, however, accord to
the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as
theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until
the West adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
At first the Muslim response to Western civilization was one of
admiration and emulation – an immense respect for the
achievements of the West, and a desire to imitate and adopt
them. This desire arose from a keen and growing awareness of
the weakness, poverty, and backwardness of the Islamic world as
compared with the advancing West. The disparity first became
apparent on the battlefield but soon spread to other areas of
human activity. Muslim writers observed and described the
wealth and power of the West, its science and technology, its
manufactures, and its forms of government. For a time the secret
of Western success was seen to lie in two achievements:
economic advancement and especially industry; political
institutions and especially freedom. Several generations of
reformers and modernizers tried to adapt these and introduce
them to their own countries, in the hope that they would thereby
be able to achieve equality with the West and perhaps restore
their lost superiority.
In our time this mood of admiration and emulation has, among
many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In
part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation – a
growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long
dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and
overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. In
part this mood is due to events in the Western world itself. One
factor of major importance was certainly the impact of two
great suicidal wars, in which Western civilization tore itself
apart, bringing untold destruction to its own and other peoples,
and in which the belligerents conducted an immense propaganda
effort, in the Islamic world and elsewhere, to discredit and
undermine each other. The message they brought found many
listeners, who were all the more ready to respond in that their
own experience of Western ways was not happy. The
introduction of Western commercial, financial, and industrial
methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to
transplanted Westerners and members of Westernized minorities,
and to only a few among the mainstream Muslim population. In
time these few became more numerous, but they remained
isolated from the masses, differing from them even in their dress
and style of life. Inevitably they were seen as agents of and
collaborators with what was once again regarded as a hostile
world. Even the political institutions that had come from the
West were discredited, being judged not by their Western
originals but by their local imitations, installed by enthusiastic
Muslim reformers. These, operating in a situation beyond their
control, using imported and inappropriate methods that they did
not fully understand, were unable to cope with the rapidly
developing crises and were one by one overthrown. For vast
numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods
brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought
tyranny, even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly
surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling
them that the old Islamic ways were best and that their only
salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the
reformers and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for
his people.
Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two
enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism
is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature
denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern
world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the
United States. The war against modernity is for the most part
neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole
process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the
past century or more and has transformed the political, economic,
social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic
fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise
aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses
at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and
loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs,
their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even
their livelihood.
There is something in the religious culture of Islam which
inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a
courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in
other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and
disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and
courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of
rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient
and civilized country – even the spokesman of a great spiritual
and ethical religion – to espouse kidnapping and assassination,
and try to find, in the life of their Prophet, approval and indeed
precedent for such actions.
The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate
source of these cataclysmic changes in the West and in
attributing the disruption of their old way of life to the impact of
Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and
example. And since the United States is the legitimate heir of
European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged
leader of the West, the United States has inherited the resulting
grievances and become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger.
Two examples may suffice. In November of 1979 an angry mob
attacked and burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The stated cause of the crowd’s anger was the seizure of the
Great Mosque in Mecca by a group of Muslim dissidents – an
event in which there was no American involvement whatsoever.
Almost ten years later, in February of 1989, again in Islamabad,
the USIS center was attacked by angry crowds, this time to
protest the publication of Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.”
Rushdie is a British citizen of Indian birth, and his book had been
published five months previously in England. But what
provoked the mob’s anger, and also the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
subsequent pronouncement of a death sentence on the author,
was the publication of the book in the United States.
It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a
movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and
the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of
civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction
of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our
secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is
crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked
into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against
that rival.
Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or
native Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been
accepted by even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists,
usually without acknowledgment of source, and suffering a sea
change into something rarely rich but often strange. One such
was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices
of representation, election, and constitutional government. Even
the Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an
elected assembly, as well as a kind of episcopate, for none of
which is there any prescription in Islamic teaching or any
precedent in the Islamic past. All these institutions are clearly
adapted from Western models. Muslim states have also retained
many of the cultural and social customs of the West and the
symbols that express them, such as the form and style of male
(and to a much lesser extent female) clothing, notably in the
military. The use of Western-invented guns and tanks and planes
is a military necessity, but the continued use of fitted tunics and
peaked caps is a cultural choice. From constitutions to Coca-
Cola, from tanks and television to T-shirts, the symbols and
artifacts, and through them the ideas, of the West have retained –
even strengthened – their appeal.
The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only
Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open,
that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic
civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other
traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided
there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do
little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are
issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the
meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the
danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the
exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of
other religious and political cultures, through the study of their
history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same
time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better
understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand
and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves,
our Western perception of the proper relationship between
religion and politics. To describe this perception I shall end as I
began, with a quotation from an American President, this time
not the justly celebrated Thomas Jefferson but the somewhat
unjustly neglected John Tyler, who, in a letter dated July 10,
1843, gave eloquent and indeed prophetic expression to the
principle of religious freedom:
‘The United States have adventured upon a great and noble
experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the
absence of all previous precedent – that of total separation of
Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists
among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each
is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgement (sic).
The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes
are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible
judgement of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith.
The Mahommedan, if he will to come among us would have the
privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship
according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine
to Brahma if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration
inculcated by our political Institutions The Hebrew persecuted
and down trodden in other regions takes up his abode among us
with none to make him afraid and the Aegis of the Government
is over him to defend and protect him. Such is the great
experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits
which have resulted from it; our system of free government
would be imperfect without it.
‘The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but
if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish,
and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as
the light or as the air.’
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Hott Spotts will return March 18.
Brian Trumbore
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