A major reason why the West is faltering in its response to Islamic fundamentalism is its attempt to straddle two leaky boats. It struggles to revive a dying Christian ethos as a counterpoint to Islam, and simultaneously clings to post-War artifices like secularism and pluralism. Failure is built into such a contrary script. America best symbolizes this fiasco in its inane conviction that awesome firepower can atone for ideological bankruptcy. Actually, the physical threat posed by Islam is less critical than the internal crisis of civilizational coherence.
The gravest threat comes from Marxist intellectuals, carefully nurtured with tenured jobs in the faculties of all major western universities, even as the Cold War was waged to contain Communism. That duplicity has now come home to roost as the West realizes that over the decades Marxists have forged an indestructible bond with Islam, and their anti-America, anti-West tirades are undermining the war against terror.
Unfortunately, even intellectuals subscribing to the clash of civilizations theory hesitate to call a spade a spade. Bernard Lewis argues that the modern West defines itself in terms of nationality, and views religious and political allegiances as subdivisions of this larger entity. He claims only 11 September 2002 made the West aware of a religion subdivided into nations.
This is too clever by half. Christianity conquered Europe, America, Australia in much the same way as Islam later triumphed in Arabia and other lands – by the sword, by wholesale annihilation of existing cultures and religious traditions, capped by an overriding supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. So suffocating was this control that the faithful seized the first opportunity afforded by intellectual and commercial vibrancy to break free. The Reformation and Renaissance created the nation-state as recipient of the individuals’ primary loyalty, and separated the Christian faith from Christian (Western) civilization, which could incorporate even non-Christian elements.
Islam, like Christianity, is an absolutist doctrine, with little patience for modern niceties like pluralism. Unlike Christianity, it does not pretend mutual respect for other faiths and civilizations. I say ‘pretend’ because despite the grim crises in their own societies and the horrible scandals about centuries of sexual abuse in the Church, not to mention the still hushed-up financial scams, all Western nations unhesitatingly fund militant evangelists to forcefully convert vulnerable groups in countries like India, trampling over their traditional cultures with the disdain of colonial bigots. So when the West claims that the war against terror is being fought for the high values of freedom and self-determination, India is entitled to a measure of unbelief that is of a far more fundamental nature than concerns about arms sales to Pakistan.
The West will therefore have to face the Islamic challenge by itself; if it seeks help from India, it must give India’s ancient, autochthonous civilization the respect it deserves. A complete end to funding of missionary and surrogate missionary groups would be regarded as evidence of genuine respect to a tradition once ‘guru’ to the world.
The trouble with the Western response is that it views the conflict with Islam in terms of old battles and old battlegrounds. Lewis recalls that the Arabs planted Islam in the then Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and even Southern Europe, while the Tartars took it to Russia and Eastern Europe, and the Turks to the Balkans. Christianity retaliated with the Reconquista in Spain, the Crusades in the Levant, Russian overthrow of the Tartars, and finally European imperialism in Islamic lands.
In the post-colonial period, the West dominated the international intellectual discourse with its notions of democracy, pluralism, end of ideology, and above all, by delegitimising religion and culture in the public realm. As Marxists formed the natural vanguard in the fight against the “opium of the people,” they became pampered recipients of tenured postings in top universities. As a corollary, Marxist fellow-traveller academics were cultivated and built up across the globe, especially in Third World countries like India. Abetted by anti-Hindu rulers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Left-dependent leaders like Indira Gandhi, they grabbed virtually all posts in the groves of academia.
In both the West and India, Marxism proved unequal to Islamic resistance to change or reform. It succumbed to an inequitable alliance, emerging as Islam’s chief apologist in the public realm. This was tolerable so long as countries like India were at the receiving end, but the situation became unpalatable after Nine Eleven, when it became evident that the White Man’s world was the principal target of Islamic ire.
That rage, like the faith, is universal. The Pak-origin British citizens arrested in Ilford for planning terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, cared two-pence for the fact that they were living in a free society that gave them several privileges and enabled them to escape the oppression of their native land. The West today faces the harsh fallout of liberal immigration policies, with 15 million Muslims in the European Union alone, largely from the Gulf and North Africa.
Far from basking in the sunshine of open societies, Islam radicalized in the space of one generation, and turned its wrath upon bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief) and the kafirs (unbelievers). Islamic radicals resented assimilation attempts, and prepared to bring the new homelands under the banner of Islam. Attitudes towards women hardened and this is currently the cutting edge of Western confrontation with Islam, as witnessed in France’s decision on the wearing of headscarves in public.
Yet Islam has extracted its pound of flesh from the “secular” West. We in India are used to being abused when we speak of Article 370 and the uniform civil code. Yet the arrogant West – advocate of the rule of law and equality of all citizens before uniform laws – has also retreated before Islam, with Canada becoming the first Western State to permit application of Sharia over its one million Muslim citizens (Law Times, 25 November 2003).
The West cannot fashion a coherent response to Islam without assessing the dimensions of the challenge. European containment of Islam through mastery over the high seas from the time of the Renaissance is redundant today; its physical control over the oil-rich and strategic Gulf has ended. West-friendly Islamic regimes are regarded with contempt by their own peoples, and Islamic radicals have displayed an unnerving tenacity in war-torn zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. Secularism, democracy, pluralism and rule of law are poor weapons against a faith that perceives these concepts as evidence of its enemy’s weakness and prepares for the kill.
The crux of the matter is that Christianity, for all its evils, could ultimately reform itself because it did not owe its early victories to the personal leadership of Jesus or the Apostles. Moreover, it became a composite culture when it reclaimed its Graeco-Roman heritage, which enabled it to subordinate the hitherto fratricidal faith to more human and humane concerns. Islam had no such limitations. From the time the Prophet proclaimed his religious and political leadership at the Battle of Badr, Islam has railed against the de facto separation of the two in subsequent history. Ironically, events in the modern world (Iran, now Iraq) have bestowed a new legitimacy upon Muslim religious leaders. A morally denuded West – under sniper fire from its own intellectuals – is unequal to their appeal.
The Pioneer, 20 April 2004
