Islam and the West

The onset of the post-Cold War world has witnessed a proliferation of theses by analysts on the trajectory of international conflict in the 21st century, of which Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s have received widespread attention.

The chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, Professor Samuel P. Huntington’s pessimistic prognosis predicts Islamic militancy:

As one significant dimension of the final evolutionary stage of international conflict, the clash between “the West and the rest” … [where] the West is defined in terms of a commitment to “individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state”, and arrayed against it are … opposing identities and movements [voicing] an expression of particularism and differences over universality and equality.

On the contrary, a political economist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic schema (pdf file 143KB) predicts Western models of liberal democracy to be “the final form of human government” and the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, as “[there will be] total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”.

This article addresses the usefulness (or the lack thereof) of their attempts to construct ways of understanding the aspirations of Muslim societies towards globalisation. “Globalisation” is defined here in political, technological, cultural and economic terms.

Huntington’s confusing civilisation paradigm

Islam, an Abrahamic faith, shares the monotheistic root and ethical vision of Huntington’s and Fukuyama’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” and “Christian universalism” that are equated with the root of Western civilisation and liberalism. Paradoxically, the actual track record of tolerance, concept of human rights, religious pluralism and freedom of religion exemplified by the early Muslim empires in treating non-Muslim citizens far exceeds its Judeo-Christian counterparts.

Islamic and Western civilisations boast a long history of mutual co-operation and integration. Examples include the amalgamation of mediaeval Islamic philosophy and Greek philosophy, the foundation of the Renaissance and the willful appropriation of modern science and technology by Muslim societies. Hence, in an increasingly interdependent world of today where the cultural “fault lines” have dramatically become more permeable, Huntington’s “the West and the rest” civilisation paradigm lacks much relevance.

Demographically, Islam today has spread across the Middle East, South Caucasus (Azerbaijan), Europe (Albania, Turkey), Asia, and Africa, encompassing 48 Muslim-majority nation states with diverse cultural heritages and traditions. Muslims make up a significant minority in the West including Bosnia, France, Germany, UK and US. Therefore, the spectre of a monolithic Islamic threat that both Huntington and Fukuyama perceive makes little sense.

Causes of anti-Western sentiments

Fukuyama’s misleading conjecture that Muslims’ anti-American sentiments are born out of a resentment of “western success and Muslim failure” obscures the fact the West in general, and the US in particular, is seen as having a double standard with regard to international policy-making. Examples include the US’s discriminatory stance on:

• the violation of UN resolutions (Israel, Iraq);
• the prevention of support for so-called terrorist organisations (IRA, HAMAS); and
• tolerance of the mixing of religion and politics in nation-states (Eastern Europe, Algeria).

Most important, despite its self-proclaimed espousal of the principles of intellectual and political liberalisation and pluralism, democracy, and right to self-determination, the West is seen to be supportive of the repression of authentic populist Islamic movements in countries including Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon.

Contrary to Huntington’s hypothesis, the clash of competing national, regional political and strategic interests, and socio-economic issues, rather than civilisational hostility, play the dominant role in the conflicts between the West and the Muslim world. This fact is further evident in the US’s differing relationships with countries identified with Islam, such as Bahrain, Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia, or its policy towards Japan or Saudi Arabia - countries belonging to cultural “fault lines” as articulated by Huntington.

Fukuyama’s “modernisation” issue

Speculation on the prevailing dearth of democratic systems in Muslim societies has made Fukuyama perceive the Islamic world as retrogressive, inherently undemocratic and anti-modern. This kind of over-simplification broadly misses the underlying complexities and multi-faceted elements that build a national polity.

Despotic forms of government in any society have always pursued an agenda of using religions or even secular ideologies to prop up corrupt regimes. Interestingly, the West has been seen to be persistent in its support for autocratic and repressive regimes including the Shah’s Iran, Saddam’s Iraq in 1980 and now Islam’s Uzbekistan, where democratisation would raise the likelihood of the “client states being transformed into … less predictable nations which might make Western access to oil less secure”.

Religious traditions are capable of having multiple and major ideological interpretations. For an instance, the Judeo-Christian tradition once supported divine right monarchies and political absolutism, and later, was re-interpreted to accommodate the modern Western democratic states. In the same manner, the Islamic ideals have been interpreted in the 20th century to support democracy, dictatorship, republicanism and monarchy, as opposed to Fukuyama’s presupposition of the rigidity of “Islamic theocracy”.

Islamic principles of reform had left a legacy of fresh interpretations in the matter of religion. Muslim reformers advocated for a wide array of secular developmental paths following the encounter of Western colonial power. The Muslim revivalist thinkers of the post-colonial, post-independence period - partially influenced as well as affected by the forces of globalisation - sought to delineate Islamic forms of democracy based on the concepts rooted in Islamic principles. However, they differed with the precise meaning of the term “democracy”. This is not atypical as analysts argue that indeed “democracy itself has had multiple meanings”.

Political Islam: a challenge

Islamic fundamentalist political activism possesses a shared concern with other religious fundamentalist movements against the “anti-foundationalist” discourse of post-modernism, wherein the liberal political theories preclude “a metaphysical conception of the good”. For instance, the ratio of the share in the global income of the world’s richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent people having been doubled from 30:1 to 61:1 in the past 30 years, free-market capitalism is seen by many as morally bankrupt and a euphemism for neo-economic imperialism. In many respects Islamist movements emphasise the shortcomings of post-Enlightenment rationalism and seek to re-establish a moral ethos into modern discourse.

Conclusion

Huntington’s theory tends to exaggerate the civilisational hostility between the Muslim world and the West, while the real sources of conflicts are the competing political, socio-economic and strategic interests of the nation-states. Fukuyama’s schema portrays a misleading conjecture that the Muslim societies are monolithic and retrogressive.

Ideologically not a monolith, the Muslim world presents a broad spectrum of perspectives on the issue of modernisation, while being selective about the Western model. Muslim societies, following their economic empowerment, have been seeking to inject ethical and moral considerations into the socio-economic principles and political ethos associated with secularism, as the Western models of secular modernisation are perceived by many to be contributing to economic exploitation, corruption and social injustice.