Contemporary politics and the media have too often produced a narrative of conflicting paradigms that sees the world and the history of relations between the West and Islam in terms of a clash of civilizations, Orientalism versus Occidentalism, fourteen centuries of jihad versus Crusades and colonialism, Islamophobia and anti- Westernism. Lost in the cultural crossfire are the religious, historical, political, and cultural diversity rather than monolithic nature of the West and the Muslim world and positive interactions and exchanges and cross- fertilization.
Despite common historical and theological roots and beliefs, Muslim- Christian relations have often been overshadowed by political and economic as well as religious conflict as the armies and missionaries of Islam and of Christendom have been locked in a struggle for power and for souls: from the fall of the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire before Muslim armies in the seventh century to the Crusades during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the expulsion of the “Moors” from Spain and the Inquisition; the Ottoman threat to overrun Europe; European (Christian) colonial expansion and domination from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries; the political and cultural challenge of the superpowers in the new colonialism or American “neocolonialism” since the latter half of the twentieth century; the creation of the state of Israel by Western “Christian” countries and Palestinian exile; the competition of Christian and Muslim missionaries today from Africa to Southeast Asia; and the contemporary reassertion of Islam in Muslim politics around the world.
Theologically, the very similarities of Christianity and Islam put the two on an early collision course. Islam belongs to the Abrahamic family of great monotheistic faiths. Muslims, like Jews and Christians, view themselves as the children of Abraham, as proclaimed in each of their sacred scriptures: the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an. Despite specific and significant differences, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a belief in one God, the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe who is beyond ordinary experience. And all believe in angels, Satan, prophets, revelation, moral responsibility and accountability, divine judgment, and reward or punishment. Yet while Jews and Christians claim descent from Abraham and his wife, Sarah, through their son Isaac, Muslims trace their religious roots back to Abraham (Ibrahim) through Ismail, his firstborn son by Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian servant.
Both religions had a universal message and mission. Both possessed a supersessionist theology— that is, each community believed that its covenant with
God was the fulfillment of God’s earlier revelation to a previous community that had gone astray. While Christians had little problem with their supersessionist views toward Judaism, a similar claim by Muslims to have the final revelation was unacceptable and, more than that, a threat to the uniqueness and divinely mandated role of Christianity to be the only means to salvation.
Christendom experienced the early conquests and expansion of Islam not only as a theological but also as a political and civilizational challenge to its religious and political hegemony. Muslim rule quickly spread from the Byzantine and Persian empires to Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and swept across North Africa and into Europe, where Muslims ruled Spain and the Mediterranean from Sicily to Anatolia.
For non- Muslim populations in Byzantium and Persia, who had been subjugated by foreign rulers, Islamic rule meant an exchange of rulers rather than a loss of independence. Many in Byzantium willingly exchanged Greco- Roman rule for that of new Arab masters, fellow Semites, with whom they had closer linguistic and cultural affinities and to whom they paid lower taxes. Upon declaration of their allegiance to the Islamic state and payment of a poll (head) tax, these “protected” (dhimmi) peoples could practice their faith and be governed by their religious leaders and law in matters of faith and private life.
Islam often proved more tolerant than imperial Christianity, providing greater religious freedom for Jews and indigenous Christians; most local Christian churches had been persecuted as schismatics and heretics by a “foreign” Christian orthodoxy. As Francis Peters has observed:
The conquests destroyed little: what they did suppress were imperial rivalries and sectarian bloodletting among the newly subjected population. The Muslims tolerated Christianity but they disestablished it; henceforth Christian life and liturgy, its endowments, politics, and theology, would be a private not a public affair. By an exquisite irony, Islam reduced the status of Christians to that which the Christians had earlier thrust upon the Jews, with one difference. The reduction in Christian status was merely judicial; it was unaccompanied by either systematic persecution or blood lust, and generally, though not everywhere and at all times, unmarred by vexatious behavior.1
The rapid spread and development of imperial Islam produced a rich Islamic civilization that flourished from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Urban cultural centers emerged in Cairo, Baghdad, Cordova, Palermo, and Nishapur. With significant assistance from Christian and Jewish subjects, Muslims collected the great books of science, medicine, and philosophy from the West and the East and translated them into Arabic from Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, Syriac, and Sanskrit. The age of translation was followed by a period of great creativity as a new generation of educated Muslim thinkers and scientists made their own contributions to learning in philosophy, medicine, chemistry, astronomy, algebra, optics, art, and architecture. Towering intellectual giants dominated this period: al- Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna, 980– 1037), Ibn Rushd (known as Averroes, d. 1198), al- Biruni (973– 1048), and al- Ghazali (d. 1111). The cultural traffic pattern was again reversed when Europeans, emerging from the Middle Ages, turned to Muslim centers of learning to regain their lost heritage and to learn from Muslim advances in philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and science. They retranslated the Greek philosophers and the writings of their great Muslim disciples: men like al- Farabi, who had come to be known as “the second teacher or master” (the first being Aristotle) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), remembered as “the great commentator on Aristotle.” Many of the great medieval Christian philosophers and theologians (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus) acknowledged their intellectual debt to their Muslim predecessors.
From the Crusades to European Colonialism
Few events have had a more shattering and long- lasting effect on Muslim- Christian relations than the Crusades. For many in the West, the specific facts regarding the Crusades are but a dim memory. Few remember that it was the pope who called for the Crusades and that on balance the Crusaders lost.
For Muslims, the memory of the Crusades lives on as the clearest example of militant Christianity, an early harbinger of the aggression and imperialism of the Christian West. If many in the West have regarded Islam as a religion of the sword, Muslims down through the ages speak of the Christian West’s Crusader mentality and hegemonic ambitions.
For Muslim- West relations, it is less a case of what actually happened in the Crusades than how they are remembered. Political and economic motives and incentives are often forgotten or overlooked as each community looks back with memories of its commitment to defend its faith and with heroic stories of valor and chivalry against “the infidel.” Both Muslims and Christians saw the other as militant, somewhat barbaric and fanatic in religious zeal, determined to conquer, convert, or eradicate the other, and thus an enemy of God.
A second far-reaching and influential event affecting the relationship of Islam to the West is the experience of European colonialism. Its impact and continued legacy remains alive in Middle East politics and throughout the Muslim world today. No one who has traveled in and studied the Muslim world can be oblivious to the tendency of many to associate their past and current problems in large part with the legacy of European colonialism. European colonialism abruptly reversed a pattern of self- rule that had existed from the time of the Prophet. By the nineteenth century, Europeans had colonized many Muslim areas: the French in North, West, and Equatorial Africa and the Levant (Lebanon and Syria); the British in Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, the Arabian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent; and in Southeast Asia, the British in Malaya (Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei) and the Dutch in Indonesia.
As the balance of power and leadership shifted to Europe, much of the Muslim world found itself either directly ruled or dominated by the “Christian West,” threatened by “crown and cross.” Many Europeans believed that modernity was not only the result of conditions producing the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, but also due to the inherent superiority of Christianity as a religion and culture. The British spoke of the “white man’s burden” and the French of their “mission to civilize” as they colonized much of Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia.
The external threat to Muslim identity and autonomy from European Christendom raised profound religious as well as political questions for many in the Muslim world: What had gone wrong, and why had Muslim fortunes been so thoroughly reversed? Was it Muslims who had failed Islam or Islam that had failed Muslims? How were Muslims to respond?
Islam and the West: Challenge or Threat?
Since the late 1990s, a growing chorus of voices have charged that Islam and the West are on a political, civilizational (or religiocultural), and demographic collision course. Immigrants and immigration have become an explosive political issue in Europe and America. The impact of religious extremism and terrorism— in particular 9/11, followed by attacks in London and Madrid and Osama Bin Laden’s declaration of a global jihad against the West— have fed stereotypes and fears characterized as a war between Islam and the West.
After September 11, 2001, the clash of civilizations became part of a now- notorious set of Manichaean depictions of the forces arrayed in the “war on terror,” routinely described in presidential addresses and editorial pages as a war between the civilized world and terrorists who “hate” Western democracy, capitalism, and freedom or as an existential struggle against “evil” and “the merchants of death.” America’s international pursuit of its broad- based war on terror, as well as the political rhetoric of the Bush administration— which spoke of the struggle as a “crusade” and initially dubbed the invasion of Afghanistan “Operation Infinite Justice,” in a direct affront to Muslim believers, for whom only God can embody such a trait unto infinity— convinced many Muslims that the war was indeed against them and their religion.
The most influential proponent of a clash of civilizations was Samuel Huntington, who in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article “The Clash of Civilizations?” argued that cultural and religious differences were supplanting the struggle for ideological dominance that had characterized conflict in the cold war era. In his subsequent book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), he sounded a more urgent note, arguing that such cultural- cum- religious rivalries had emerged as the biggest threat to world peace. Western dominance and “universal” ideas, according to Huntington, were going to be challenged by new rivals, in particular Muslim and Chinese ones. The September 11 attacks narrowed his focus further: In a December 2001 Newsweek piece, “The Age of Muslim Wars,” he declared that the age had officially begun, presaging intensified battle between Islam and the West. Huntington’s conclusion that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards,” is a view that explicitly and simplistically attributes bloodshed to the religion of Islam— rather than to the actions of a minority of Muslim terrorists whose primary grievances are political.
This reasoning flattens cultural and historical forces into a template that distorts the true nature of the societies and religious traditions. In laying out a grand new theory of global conflict, he failed to appreciate the significant diversity that existed not only among but also between and within the countries and societies he grouped under the rubric of a given civilization to be Islamic or Western.
In the twenty- first century, understanding relations between the West and Islam is pivotal and critical both in foreign and in domestic policy in Europe and the United States. The failure of the conventional wisdom based on a paradigm that often questioned whether Islam was compatible with modernity and whether Islam and Arab culture were compatible with democracy has been discredited by the Arab Spring. At the same time, in Europe and the United States, where Islam is the second or third largest religion, integration and pluralism are challenged by the rise of Islamophobia and the threat of domestic terrorism.
As in the past, so too today a reductionist approach that sees the religion of Islam as the primary driver in Muslim- West relations and as a necessary source of conflict and a clash of civilizations is a dead end and dangerous. It obscures or downplays historical, political, and economic causes for conflict, posits a monolithic Islam and Muslim world as well as a monolithic Europe and America. Europe and the Islamic World: A History is a major antidote of this dangerous myopic worldview, offering a critical and balanced assessment of a historic encounter marked not only by religious competition and conflict but also by coexistence and cooperation in domestic politics and foreign relations, trade and commerce, science and culture. So too today, we face a world in which religion remains strong globally and as in the past is a source of guidance and morality, a source of conflict and violence but also of peace and conflict resolution and of interreligious and intercivilizational dialogue.