SURVEY: ISLAM AND THE WEST

The next war, they say

Aug 4th 1994
From The Economist print edition

Are Muslims and the people of the West doomed to perpetual confrontation? Not if they both see that this is a moment for change, argued Brian Beedham in 1994

THIS survey is different from most surveys in The Economist. It is not about a country, an industry, a financial organisation or anything else that can be described and measured with some degree of precision. It is about an idea: perhaps the only idea of its kind in today's world.

The idea, Islam, ignores the frontier that most people draw between man's inner life and his public actions, between religion and politics. It may be the last such idea the world will see. Or it may, on the contrary, prove to be the force that persuades other people to rediscover a connection between day-to-day life and a moral order. Either way, it denies turn-of-the-century western conventional wisdom. This survey is an exploration of the misty territory of religio-political conviction.

If that sounds dreamy, think again. One of the commonest prophecies of the mid-1990s is that the Muslim world is heading for a fight with other parts of the world that do not share its religio-political opinions: above all, worry nervous Europeans, a fight with Europe. On current evidence, this is by no means impossible.

In Europe, Bosnian Muslims have for more than two years been brutally harried by Serbs who are theoretically Christians. On the border between Europe and Asia, Christian Armenians have thumped Muslim Azeris, admitted with rather more provocation, and Jews and Muslims still shoot each other in Palestine. Farther east, Muslims complain of the Indian army's brutality to them in Kashmir, and of Indian Hindus' destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in 1992. Such experiences tend to make Muslims think the world is against them. If it is, then they are against the world. Hence the xenophobia that gets foreigners murdered by Koran-quoting terrorists in Algeria and Egypt. Islam, as Samuel Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, has put it, has bloody borders.

It was Mr Huntington who provided the intellectual framework for the fear of a confrontation between Islam and the West. In a widely read article about a coming "clash of civilisations" in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993 he argued, correctly, that the nation-state is no longer the primary unit of international relations. Just as correctly, alas, he assumed that competition and conflict are not about to disappear from men's relations with each other. So the competition and the conflict will have to be worked out at another level—chiefly, says Mr Huntington, among the larger units known as cultures or civilisations, each consisting of groups of countries. Here comes the contest of the giants.

As a general thesis, this may be true enough; but, of the eight civilisations that Mr Huntington lists, four or five do not really fit his definition. Latin America is not fundamentally different from the western culture that brought it into being, as both parts of its name suggest. The same can be said, with little more hesitation, about the Slavs of the Orthodox Christian tradition, who are admittedly different from the Protestant and Catholic West but probably not enough to be called a separate civilisation. With one more degree of hesitation, that also applies to Japan and its connection with the Chinese culture to its west. The culture of India's Hindus is indeed sui generis, but Hinduism is not—and probably never will be—a player on the world stage. And Africa, as Mr Huntington himself seems to admit, is not really in this league.

The three prime numbers

There are in fact only three reasonably clear contenders in Mr Huntington's advertised clash of civilisations. The first is the West, the Euro-American culture that is the product of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and is the begetter of modern capitalism and democracy.

The second is the Confucian culture, the body of ideas that has grown up around the Chinese language and the habits of public life that are said to belong to the Chinese region. But this has its qualification. Those supposed Confucian habits of public life—a cheerful respect for authority on the part of the governed, based upon the assumption that Confucian governments honestly use their authority for the benefit of those they rule—may be no more than a polite fiction. The history of the Chinese-speaking world contains at least as much selfishness and brutality on the part of the rulers, and at least as much dumb suffering on the part of the ruled, as the history of any other part of the globe. The idea that there is today a special understanding between governors and governing in eastern Asia is largely self-protecting propaganda by the men in power in Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere.

The third contender is Islam. This does genuinely stand alone. There is good reason why the culture of the Muslim world is regarded by many people as the West's only real ideological competitor at the end of the 20th century. Unlike the Confucians—and even more unlike Latin Americans, Slavs and Japanese—Islam claims to be an idea based upon a transcendental certainty. The certainty is the word of God, revealed syllable by syllable to Muhammad in a dusty corner of Arabia 1,400 years ago and copied down by him into the Koran.

As a means of binding a civilisation together, there is no substitute for such a certainty. Moreover—and this is not happening anywhere else—new recruits are flocking to join this claim to certainty. Whether it is because of the repeated defeats inflicted upon Muslims by the outside world, or because of the corrupt incompetence of most of their own governments, the past 25 years have seen a huge growth in what outsiders call Islamic fundamentalism. Muslims themselves hate the phrase, but it is not inaccurate. A large number of people who feel ashamed of the past few centuries want to show they can do better. To do that, they need to rediscover a sense of identity. And to do that, they turn back to the Koran. You can call it a revival, or a resurgence; but it is also a return to the foundations.

This is what has set scalps tingling in other parts of the world, especially among Europeans. They see the Last Ideology on the march. A Muslim crescent curls threatening around the southern and eastern edges of Europe. A new cold war could be on the way. And it may not stop at being a cold war.

The writer of this survey is not convinced. It is true that some Muslims are behaving ferociously these days, and that on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, in particular, some ugly things are taking shape. It is also true that Europe and Islam have had a rough time together in the past. That rough time included two penetrations by Muslim armies deep into Europe, the largely incompetent European counter-attacks called the crusades, and the absorption of virtually the whole Muslim world into various European empires in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not a good-neighbourly story. But past enmities and present bad temper need not be the premises of a syllogism that is bound to end: therefore, new war between Islam and the West.

For one thing, these two civilisations have more in common with each other than either has with the Confucian world or the Hindu one, or most of the rest of the Huntington culture collection. Both have their origins in religions that believe in a single God (and any westerner who asks what that has to do with modern life needs to think about what made the West as it is today). Few westerners believe that God dictated the Koran, and no Muslim believes that Jesus was the son of God. Those are important disagreements, but they sit alongside a large number of shared convictions. A Muslim and a westerner both believe, more clearly than most other people, in the idea of individual responsibility. They can exchange opinions about the nature of good and evil, or property rights, or the preservation of the environment, in something like a spirit of brotherhood.

It is even tempting to wonder whether Islam's bloody clashes with Europe in the past could have been avoided had geography and history been a little kinder. Of course, religion was one of the things that drove these two peoples into battle with each other, especially in the early days when the Arabs pushed up to Poitiers and the crusaders lumbered to Jerusalem. But religion was never the entire explanation for such clashes.

These were two young cultures, full of energy and eager to show what they could do; and in the world of that time, between Muhammad's death in 632Ad and the capture of Louis IX of France in Egypt during the seventh crusade in 1250, they had nobody to unleash their zeal on but each other. The rest of the world was still largely a blank to them. Had they lived in today's many-peopled world—or been separated from each other by sea or desert, so that they could not so readily march and counter-march—their religious differences might not have had such bloody results. But self-assertion and propinquity did their work, with the usual results.

The difficulty with neighbours

The trouble is that propinquity and self-assertion are still at work today. The proposition of this survey is that there is no insuperable reason why Muslims and westerners cannot live peaceably with each other. It will take sensible handling by both sides, and some re-examination by both of their present ideas about the world. In particular, Muslims will need to find a way of adjusting their habits to three specific requirements of modern life. There is no fatal obstacle to this; nothing in the essentials of either civilisation to make harmony impossible.

The hope contained in that proposition has even survived the Iranian revolution of 1979. Iran is the chief home of the Shias, the always quarrelsome 15% minority of Muslims who broke away from the Sunni majority way back in the early days of the faith. Iran's revolutionaries started out as snarling enemies of the West. They can still growl, and bite. But time, and the sobering experience of government, have made them noticeably milder in their foreign policy as well as in what they do at home. They do not destroy the belief that, in the long run, Islam and the West can co-exist.

Unfortunately, in the shorter run—meaning within the next year or so—something may happen in North Africa that could throw at least a temporary spanner into the works. This is the highly probable collapse of the present government of Algeria, and its replacement by a singularly intransigent bunch of Islamic rebels, fundamentalists of the most bloody-minded sort. A series of mistakes—first by the generals running Algeria, then by most of the West's governments—seems likely to bring to power in Algiers a group of men who will, for a time, be very hard to deal with. They are for good reason angry both with the corruptly authoritarian regime they will be replacing and with the West for having supported that regime, even when it had plainly been rejected by the Algerian people.

If this happens in Algeria, the effects will spill over into other parts of North Africa, and maybe even farther into the Islamic world; and a familiar cycle will begin all over again. Anti-western anger on one side of the Mediterranean will provoke anti-Muslim resentment on the other, which will further feed that anti-western anger. Europe and Islam will, for a period, be at it again.

Three articles later in the survey will look at the three things Muslims need to do (and in some countries are already doing) to move confidently into the 21st century. They are, in rising order of difficulty, coping with a modern economy, accepting the idea of sexual equality, and, hardest of all, learning to absorb the principle of democracy. But first a closer look at that swelling thunder-cloud on the southern coast of the Mediterranean.

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