On April 4, 1851 Maria I. Duymaer van Twist-Beck wrote to her sister Cecilia Beck from Suez describing her stay in Alexandria, Cairo and Suez. She was in Egypt with her husband A.J. Duymaer van Twist, the governor-general of what was then the Netherlands East Indies, on their way to the Dutch colonies in South-East Asia. The letter reflects the European couple’s little surprise at the social circumstances they met with in Egypt as social conditions in that country were much like what they were familiar with in their own country.
That letter can be taken as an anecdotal illustration to show that the differences between the Muslim world and the West were not very large in the eyes of the Dutch couple and their contemporaries in Europe of mid-19 th century. As Johannes Jansen writes in the Preface to his book The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (1997), though the Dutch lady expressed her surprise at the biblical scenes the couple saw during their travel in Egypt, the social circumstances there such as the distance between the servants and the elite and the rulers and the ruled, for instance, did not strike her as unusual.
One does not know for sure whether any member of the elite in contemporary Europe will say anything that suggests that the Islamic world and the West or other liberal democratic societies are not recognisably different. It is far from true to deny that the two worlds are fast drifting apart. Recent violent protests in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya and other parts of the Muslim world triggered by a despicable film depicting the Prophet of Islam in a poor light exemplified the divergent and mutually incomprehensible idioms that define meanings of freedoms of individuals, human rights, rule of law and blasphemy, among others.
History is replete with incidents of people killing and dying for their beliefs. Dominant religions of the world carry their own legacies of inhuman cruelties committed in the name of their respective faiths. History being what it is and we being where we are, what should concern us is the bleak prospect of a life that bears no resemblance to any idea of life in a decent, fair and democratic society if the fuming mobs that burn the embassies have their say in the affairs of this world. The Enlightenment and all the modern, scientific and democratic values it has engendered appeared to have firmly established the view of a better world in which individual freedoms are safeguarded, human rights are sacrosanct, rule of law is maintained and faith de-linked from the affairs of the state. The violent protests against the film Innocence of Muslims that led to the killing of four Americans including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in Benghazi are not just a manifestation of the apparent incompatibility of the value systems of Islam and liberal democracies. They also demonstrate the profundity of the drifting of the two disparate ways of thinking that leaves no room for a meaningful dialogue.
In terms of the message those protestors convey, the death of Chris Stevens and three other U.S. citizens in Libya for a film they were by no means responsible for making is no different from the killing of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, for the film he made. They were meant to reinforce the perceived irreconcilability of the Islamic world rooted in a value system that is antithetical to the idea of an open society, an idea based on liberal democratic values embedded in the Enlightenment rationalism and scientific worldview. The fault line of that divide was visible in the Rushdie Affair of 1989 that, according to Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (2009), marked 'the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a major political issue in Western society.'
The images of the U.S. consulate building in Benghazi stormed by the protesting mobs and of the violent protests outside the U S embassies in Cairo and Islamabad add to the repertoire of images of the rage of Islam seething not just within the Islamic world but also in the West and other parts of the world as well as in the cyberspace. These images define the contours of what many believe to be the mortal clash between Islam and the liberal democratic values. More than the actual divide, they invoke and perpetuate a sense of the widening civilisational gap that at this point of time appears to be unbridgeable.
As we are apparently at a crossroads of what could be a long drawn out struggle for meanings of freedoms and rights we have learned to take for granted, such images have a chilling effect. True, highly motivated people kill for causes dear to them. They knifed to death a filmmaker cycling to work in Amsterdam and murdered a doctor for running an abortion clinic in Kansas City. Some individuals or groups will always be there to commit brutal acts in the name of one or the other cause dear to them. But it will be a recipe for disaster if we respond to motivated cruelties with political correctness by refusing to call those cruelties by their true names. Zealots of all hues who perpetrate terrible crimes are driven by a sense of moral absolutism and the zealots who burn embassies or offer reward for the death of the maker of the anti-Islam film are no exception.
When a group of people believe that their certainties about right and wrong are absolute and beyond any scepticism, the rest of the world is in trouble. To be politically correct in the face of the absolutism of any brand of fundamentalism is equivalent to acceptance of a psychological dictatorship. It leaves people to live in what Jonathan Zittrain calls, in a different context in his book The Future of the Internet (2008), a 'hyper scrutinised reality' whose impact will be 'press conference behaviour' as people are inclined to moderate themselves instead of expressing their true views.
In theory, a neat separation between faith and politics is not possible in Islam, though it is an exaggeration to say that all Muslims across the world have always practised their religion as a combination of piety and politics. In fact, majority of Muslims practice their faith as an expression of their personal piety. However, political component is integral to the doctrines and history of Islam. Perhaps no Muslim thinker has been aware of Islam’s political ambition as deeply as the 10 th century Muslim political philosopher Al-Farabi whose treatise Attainment of Happiness seeks to temper that ambition for a universal religion and a universal state. Al-Farabi envisages realisation of Islam’s ambition to spread Islam to the inhabited world. At the same time, he raises questions about the suitability of one homogeneous religion to the diverse human communities throughout the world. (Read Joshua Parens’ An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions: Introducing Alfarabi [2006] for a detailed account of the Muslim philosopher’s exposition of the virtuous society.)
Perhaps, that combination of faith and politics in Islam makes Muslim societies inherently unstable. Any perceived attack on Islam is countered by responses couched in a language of domination and subjugation. The protestors who scaled the U.S. Embassy walls, tore down the U.S. flag and replaced it with a black Islamic flag derived their motivation from that language. Any alleged insult to Islam always appeals to a deeply embedded sense of victimhood. The boiling anger of the Islamic world against the West has acquired a political dialect in the aftermath of the Arab Spring bolstered by the West. The irony of the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, which was protected by the West from the attacks of the brutal Qadhafi regime, is compelling. Equally gripping is the dichotomy of the symbolism of freedom found expressed in the rebellious fury against dictatorships in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya, on one hand, and the passionately violent protests outside the embassies of some Western countries against any kind of freedom of expression whose subject happens to be Islam, on the other.
There is always scope for academic enterprises to understand Islam or its fundamentalist strains and explain what they are aspiring to and their linkages to Islamic history and doctrines. There may still be facts to be known about the contemporary phenomenon of the anger of Islam. But we cannot wish away the facts that we already know and their impact on the meaning of life and liberty as we understand them today.
Back in 1851, the Dutch lady was impressed by the red Turkish cap worn by the Egyptian diplomat, Nuber Pasha, an Armenian Christian who was later to become Prime Minister of Egypt thrice between 1878 and 1895. She was just delighted to see the Armenian of the 'Greek religion' following 'the Turkish ways in dress and custom' in a social milieu which otherwise showed no major difference from that of Europe of the nineteenth century. That celebration of cultural diversity is passé now when new expressions of faith underlining religious absolutism inspire cultural practices, including dress and custom.
That letter can be taken as an anecdotal illustration to show that the differences between the Muslim world and the West were not very large in the eyes of the Dutch couple and their contemporaries in Europe of mid-19 th century. As Johannes Jansen writes in the Preface to his book The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (1997), though the Dutch lady expressed her surprise at the biblical scenes the couple saw during their travel in Egypt, the social circumstances there such as the distance between the servants and the elite and the rulers and the ruled, for instance, did not strike her as unusual.
One does not know for sure whether any member of the elite in contemporary Europe will say anything that suggests that the Islamic world and the West or other liberal democratic societies are not recognisably different. It is far from true to deny that the two worlds are fast drifting apart. Recent violent protests in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya and other parts of the Muslim world triggered by a despicable film depicting the Prophet of Islam in a poor light exemplified the divergent and mutually incomprehensible idioms that define meanings of freedoms of individuals, human rights, rule of law and blasphemy, among others.
History is replete with incidents of people killing and dying for their beliefs. Dominant religions of the world carry their own legacies of inhuman cruelties committed in the name of their respective faiths. History being what it is and we being where we are, what should concern us is the bleak prospect of a life that bears no resemblance to any idea of life in a decent, fair and democratic society if the fuming mobs that burn the embassies have their say in the affairs of this world. The Enlightenment and all the modern, scientific and democratic values it has engendered appeared to have firmly established the view of a better world in which individual freedoms are safeguarded, human rights are sacrosanct, rule of law is maintained and faith de-linked from the affairs of the state. The violent protests against the film Innocence of Muslims that led to the killing of four Americans including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in Benghazi are not just a manifestation of the apparent incompatibility of the value systems of Islam and liberal democracies. They also demonstrate the profundity of the drifting of the two disparate ways of thinking that leaves no room for a meaningful dialogue.
In terms of the message those protestors convey, the death of Chris Stevens and three other U.S. citizens in Libya for a film they were by no means responsible for making is no different from the killing of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, for the film he made. They were meant to reinforce the perceived irreconcilability of the Islamic world rooted in a value system that is antithetical to the idea of an open society, an idea based on liberal democratic values embedded in the Enlightenment rationalism and scientific worldview. The fault line of that divide was visible in the Rushdie Affair of 1989 that, according to Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (2009), marked 'the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a major political issue in Western society.'
The images of the U.S. consulate building in Benghazi stormed by the protesting mobs and of the violent protests outside the U S embassies in Cairo and Islamabad add to the repertoire of images of the rage of Islam seething not just within the Islamic world but also in the West and other parts of the world as well as in the cyberspace. These images define the contours of what many believe to be the mortal clash between Islam and the liberal democratic values. More than the actual divide, they invoke and perpetuate a sense of the widening civilisational gap that at this point of time appears to be unbridgeable.
As we are apparently at a crossroads of what could be a long drawn out struggle for meanings of freedoms and rights we have learned to take for granted, such images have a chilling effect. True, highly motivated people kill for causes dear to them. They knifed to death a filmmaker cycling to work in Amsterdam and murdered a doctor for running an abortion clinic in Kansas City. Some individuals or groups will always be there to commit brutal acts in the name of one or the other cause dear to them. But it will be a recipe for disaster if we respond to motivated cruelties with political correctness by refusing to call those cruelties by their true names. Zealots of all hues who perpetrate terrible crimes are driven by a sense of moral absolutism and the zealots who burn embassies or offer reward for the death of the maker of the anti-Islam film are no exception.
When a group of people believe that their certainties about right and wrong are absolute and beyond any scepticism, the rest of the world is in trouble. To be politically correct in the face of the absolutism of any brand of fundamentalism is equivalent to acceptance of a psychological dictatorship. It leaves people to live in what Jonathan Zittrain calls, in a different context in his book The Future of the Internet (2008), a 'hyper scrutinised reality' whose impact will be 'press conference behaviour' as people are inclined to moderate themselves instead of expressing their true views.
In theory, a neat separation between faith and politics is not possible in Islam, though it is an exaggeration to say that all Muslims across the world have always practised their religion as a combination of piety and politics. In fact, majority of Muslims practice their faith as an expression of their personal piety. However, political component is integral to the doctrines and history of Islam. Perhaps no Muslim thinker has been aware of Islam’s political ambition as deeply as the 10 th century Muslim political philosopher Al-Farabi whose treatise Attainment of Happiness seeks to temper that ambition for a universal religion and a universal state. Al-Farabi envisages realisation of Islam’s ambition to spread Islam to the inhabited world. At the same time, he raises questions about the suitability of one homogeneous religion to the diverse human communities throughout the world. (Read Joshua Parens’ An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions: Introducing Alfarabi [2006] for a detailed account of the Muslim philosopher’s exposition of the virtuous society.)
Perhaps, that combination of faith and politics in Islam makes Muslim societies inherently unstable. Any perceived attack on Islam is countered by responses couched in a language of domination and subjugation. The protestors who scaled the U.S. Embassy walls, tore down the U.S. flag and replaced it with a black Islamic flag derived their motivation from that language. Any alleged insult to Islam always appeals to a deeply embedded sense of victimhood. The boiling anger of the Islamic world against the West has acquired a political dialect in the aftermath of the Arab Spring bolstered by the West. The irony of the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, which was protected by the West from the attacks of the brutal Qadhafi regime, is compelling. Equally gripping is the dichotomy of the symbolism of freedom found expressed in the rebellious fury against dictatorships in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya, on one hand, and the passionately violent protests outside the embassies of some Western countries against any kind of freedom of expression whose subject happens to be Islam, on the other.
There is always scope for academic enterprises to understand Islam or its fundamentalist strains and explain what they are aspiring to and their linkages to Islamic history and doctrines. There may still be facts to be known about the contemporary phenomenon of the anger of Islam. But we cannot wish away the facts that we already know and their impact on the meaning of life and liberty as we understand them today.
Back in 1851, the Dutch lady was impressed by the red Turkish cap worn by the Egyptian diplomat, Nuber Pasha, an Armenian Christian who was later to become Prime Minister of Egypt thrice between 1878 and 1895. She was just delighted to see the Armenian of the 'Greek religion' following 'the Turkish ways in dress and custom' in a social milieu which otherwise showed no major difference from that of Europe of the nineteenth century. That celebration of cultural diversity is passé now when new expressions of faith underlining religious absolutism inspire cultural practices, including dress and custom.
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