Topic 11: Encounters with the West

Essential reading:

Set Text: Rane, ch. 10, ‘Islam and the West’, pp. 219-248.

Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Islam: the roots of misperception’, History Today, Vol.41, 1991, pp. 29-37 [e-reserve].

Akbar S. Ahmed, ch.7, ‘Under European rule: the colonial impact on Muslim society’, in Discovering Islam. Making Sense of Muslim History and Society, London, Routledge, 1988, 2003, pp. 117- 140 [e-book]

Fred Halliday, ‘Transnational paranoia and international relations: the case of the West versus Islam’, in Stephanie Lawson (ed.), The new agenda for international relations: from polarization to globalization in world politics, Cambridge, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 37-53 [e-reserve].

Nathan Funk & Abdul Said, 'Islam and the West: Narratives of Conflict and Conflict Transformation', International Journal of Peace Studies, Vol.9, no.1, 2004, pp.1-28.

In an interesting overview of the historical relationship between Islam and the West the historian Akbar Ahmed (see his article: ‘the roots of misperception’) has described it in terms of a series of three broad ‘encounters’:

• The first encounter began a dozen centuries ago with the Muslim expansion into Europe through Spain and Greece, giving rise to the Crusades, and ended with the halting of the Ottoman Turks at Vienna in the seventeenth century. It took place when Islam, as a rival religious system to Christianity, was on the move and predominantly in the ascendant.

• · The second encounter was that between European imperialism and the entire Muslim world, a period in which the latter was completely subjugated by the former – commercially, culturally and physically. A traumatic encounter, it began about 1800 with Napoleon’s incursion into Egypt and ended in 1956 with the Suez Canal fiasco and the spectacular defeat of the type of gunboat diplomacy that had characterised so much of the European contact throughout this century and a half. As Akbar Ahmed describes it, the second encounter was ‘an encounter of the worst kind’, an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for Muslims caught up in it (Ahmed, p. 30).

• · The third encounter, which is ‘reactive’ and on-going, embodies what might be called an Islamic fight back. Although freed from Western hegemony, Muslims are now facing up to what Ahmed calls the ‘cultural blitzkrieg’ of Western modernism and materialism, which is just as bad. And they are responding by falling back on the fundamentals of their religion, and promoting an alternative traditional vision of society in line with their own history.

**************************************************************

Conceptually speaking can we envisage any of these encounters taking place at the level of civilization?

A. Encounter 1: Medieval Christianity and the Crusades

While the crusades have come to feature in the rhetoric of political Islam – Osama bin Laden referring to them as the first wave of European imperialism - at the time Muslim historians

made little of them and did not investigate their causes. Indeed they did not use the terms ‘crusade’ or ‘crusader’ at all, describing their protagonists as ‘Franks’.

Launched ostensibly to eject the Muslims from the holy lands, the crusades had more to do with European political rivalries, than with the spread of Islam or who should control Jerusalem.

B. Encounter 2: European Colonialism [1800-1956]

The second encounter was altogether different. For the first time in its history Islamic civilization, when faced with an expansionist Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was found wanting and, if not defenseless, its defenses were down.

- Militarily, the Ottoman empire was no match for the Europeans on land or at sea;

- Commercially, too, it was vulnerable to the aggressive capitalism that European commerce entailed; and

- Institutionally, the political and legal systems on which its empire had been built proved inadequate in meeting the various challenges Europe posed.

With the sort of society Islam had built up – its superstructure – buffeted and ultimately buckling under this assault, its substructure – its value system - began to buckle with it.

From about 1800 the economies of the Middle-East began to be opened up, captured and progressively tried into the European market system. Here was no level playing field, but one tilting progressively in Europe’s favour. Having borrowed heavily in Europe to modernize their states, the various regions of the Ottoman empire, including Turkey itself, were unable to meet their interest payments, and one-by-one declared themselves bankrupt. Such bankruptcies were invariably followed by the installation of European receivers, whose task it was to insure that national debts were paid off in full.

In the 1880s a period of informal empire began, when Britain and France in particular declared protectorates over those regions in which their investments and trading interests had come under threat - over Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Although not formally annexed, except Algeria by France in 1830, these countries were forced to accept a measure of not only economic but also political supervision.

As a result of WW1 and the defeat of Turkey what remained of the Ottoman empire – the provinces in Mesopotamia - was directly handed over to Britain and France by the League of Nations in 1919 as well. The Mandate system, as it was called, was theoretically designed to bring secular democracy to this region. Conceivably a large Fertile Crescent state might have been created to achieve this, since all the inhabitants of Mesopotamia were ethnically Arab, spoke the same language and shared the same culture. Indeed Britain and France held out this very possibility in trying to get the Arabs to turn against the Turks in 1916/17. Instead, after the war, they proceeded to balkanize the region, creating a whole lot of new Arab states – Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon - with boundaries that did not conform to geographic realities.

The creation of Israel fits into this history too. Given control of Palestine Britain allowed Jewish immigration to occur, to such an extent that by 1939 Jews and Arab Palestinians were almost in equal numbers. When Britain realized what it had allowed to happen – after Arab protest revolts had broken out all over the place – it was too late. Jewish immigration to Palestine was stopped in 1939, but along comes WW2 and the world changes.

The second encounter formally ended with the Suez Canal fiasco of 1956 when Britain and France, with Israel in tow, crossed the Canal after General Nasser of Egypt had nationalized it, and tried to reclaim it with old fashioned gunboat diplomacy. The attempt failed and Britain, which withdrew from the Middle East, passed on the baton to the US.

C. Encounter 3: Revivalism & fightback [1960-

All this history leads to a total Arab and ultimately Muslim backlash, not only against the West, but also the kind of reform the West was proposing. The third of the encounters identified by Akbar Ahmed, is characterised by the Muslim world regrouping around Islam and its value system.

With its defences down during the second encounter, that world was progressively laid siege to by Europe and was penetrated on a number of fronts. Secularism, nationalism and materialism combined to effect sizeable breaches in the structure of religious culture. Secularism operated to exclude religion from the public sphere; nationalism divided the once single Muslim community of believers on the basis of territoriality; and materialism placed emphasis on physical over spiritual fulfilment. The experience rocked Islamic society to its core, threatening to overturn the Islamic way of life and obliterate the sense of identity and direction associated with it over thirteen centuries.

For a time the West dazzled Muslims with its power and gave them a glimpse of a different more immediately realisable destiny. But it was an allure direct exposure to European imperialism proceeded to diminish, and a destination experiments in Westernisation brought Muslims no closer to reaching.

With its defences up, the Muslim world began to fall back on the beliefs and principles with which it is familiar and around which it had for so long intrinsically cohered. And it began to counter-punch by simultaneously moving to purify Muslim society of exotic inputs – to ‘westoxify’ itself – and by reasserting its Islamic identity.

For many Muslims the problem is ‘how to survive culturally and politically in a world still wholly shaped by western ideas, run by western technology and dominated by western power’. Will returning to an older pristine Islam – along the lines perhaps established by Muhammad – achieve this, even if it were possible? Or will it be achieved by the kind of ‘offensive’ jihad advocated by Al Qaeda, and conceived by Syed Qutb in terms of the Dar-al Islam [the sphere of Islam] taking on and overpowering the Dar al-Harb [the sphere of unbelief]?

Does any of this foreshadow a cultural counter-attack, as Akbar Ahmed infers, or is political Islam primarily motivated to eject the United States from the Middle East.?