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R.L. Rubenstein: Religion and the Clash of Civilizations
Written by DR. RICHARD L. RUBENSTEIN, President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Religion University of Bridgeport
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Delivered at conference on “God and World Peace: An Exploration of the Significance of God for a World in Crisis,” December 26-29, 2002
We would do well to reflect on the question of whether the “clash of civilizations” that Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued could be the fate of humanity in the twenty-first Christian century is already upon us. According to Professor Bassam Tibi, a devout Muslim and professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen, the “clash of civilizations” is both real and dangerous. According to Tibi:
After September 11 we can no longer afford to confine ourselves to warning of Islamophobia, if civilizational discord is addressed. The rhetoric of dismissing “The Islamic Threat” and the so-called “Myth of Confrontation” can no longer be pursued free of context. Discord can be related to clashing worldviews and it can assume a military shape. What else than a threat was September 11…. It is not correct to play down what happened in New York and Washington as an act of a small group or a “crazed gang;” this argument conceals instead of enlightening. In short: on September 11, an act of irregular war took place. That act was equally an assault on the values and the concept of order of the West. The event is placed in a civilizational context which cannot be overlooked.
Tibi counsels that it is crucial that we be able to distinguish between Islam as a religious faith and Islamism or fundamentalism which, he argues, is “an outcome of the politicization of Islam.”
Men do not blow themselves up in a spectacular attack on the preeminent icons of American financial and military power, or in a thwarted attack on the White House, symbol of American political power, in order to inflict harm on as many and as elite a group of the enemy as possible. Though present, that motive was subsidiary to a larger motive, the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism to American and Western civilization.
At the height of the first Gulf Crisis in September 1990, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the onset of a “New World Order.” After the Cold War and the apparent victory of American arms in the Gulf War, it appeared plausible to Bush and to elites within the Western world that such a “world order” might indeed be in the process of formation. In reality, the Gulf War was followed by intensifying international disorder rather than order. As Bassam Tibi has rightly observed, the unexamined principles behind Bush’s “world order” are based upon a fundamentally secular and anthropocentric worldview in which the nation-state is the sovereign unit of action in world order, acknowledges no superordinate principle or power-center that cannot be derived from its interest in maximizing its own power or, if necessary, maintaining a power equilibrium with its neighbors. This system of international order is achieved by commitments on the part of the sovereign states to interact peacefully and to honor mutually recognized boundaries.
For the West, the nation-state is thus a secular rather than a divine institution.
With the rise of the nation-state, we find growing acceptance of the ideas of human rights and democracy. These ideas were expressed authoritatively in the American Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 26, 1789). As we know, the American Declaration proclaimed the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and are “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The French Declaration stated that “all men are born and remain free and equal in rights” and that “the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inprescriptible rights of man.” Moreover, Article 10 of the French Declaration stated explicitly: “No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order [italics added].”
Although both the American and the French Declarations make mention of the “Creator” and the “Supreme Being” respectively, they are purely secular documents. “The source of all sovereignty,” the French document tells us, “lies essentially in the Nation.” Moreover, both the American and the French Revolutions were the intellectual offspring of the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental outlook of the Enlightenment was stated precisely and succinctly by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! (Dare to be wise!) Have the courage to use your own understanding! (1784)
Unconditionally rejecting any form of religious heteronomy, Kant expressed an attitude of absolute autonomy before any authority, claiming a privileged source of knowledge. As a Protestant, that did not present a problem to Kant. It most certainly did for the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed that its teaching authority in matters of faith and morals rendered the autonomy fostered by the Enlightenment wholly unacceptable.
Unfortunately, while the secular international order originating in the Enlightenment has provided freedom, security, and dignity for the West and its allies, for most Arabs and other Muslims that same secular order has been experienced as having brought oppression, exploitation, and dishonor. Absent recognition of this basic fact, there is little likelihood that dialogue capable of limiting the potential damage of the “clash of civilizations” can develop. Moreover, the ideal of a desacralized world order has never been accepted in most non-Western parts of the world. As the elites and then the masses in the non-Western world gained cultural self-consciousness, they began to question and then reject the West’s project of universal secular, cultural hegemony.
Nowhere has that countermovement been stronger than in Islam, where the self-conscious rejection of the West was given authoritative expression in the thought of the Egyptian thinker Sayyed Qutb (1906-1966), the intellectual father of modern Islamic fundamentalism and one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. Qutb is the spiritual and intellectual opposite of Immanuel Kant. For Qutb, man-centered cultural modernity has been the spiritual destroyer of the West and now threatens to destroy the Islamic world. Originally impressed with modern Western culture in his early years, he came bitterly to reject it as corrupt and immoral after being assigned by Egypt’s Ministry of Public Instruction to study the education system in the United States from 1948 to 1951. American support of the birth of the state of Israel added to his bitterness. Qutb came to see all of modern culture as jahiliyyah, the barbarism, heedlessness, and ignorance of God that characterized pre-Islamic Arabic society. He used the term with great effect to designate all that is alien to Islam in the modern world, including all attempts to modernize Islam. He offered an informed analysis of the weaknesses of capitalism, communism, and nationalism alike, all of which he saw as jahiliyyah. He taught it was the task of the true Muslim first to separate himself from jahiliyyah and then seek to destroy it in order to build a true Muslim state on its ruins. Qutb took as his model the example Muhammad, who left Mecca in 622 (year 1 Hijira), where jahiliyyah prevailed, for Medina, only to return eight years later, overthrowing idols and proclaiming Islam. He argued that world peace and order can be achieved only under the banner of Islam, which he regarded as alone fit to assume the leadership of the world.
Regarded as subversive by President Gamal Abdul Nasser, Qutb was imprisoned in 1954 and subject to brutal torture. He was, however, permitted to write, and much of his literary output comes from his prison years. Briefly released in 1964, he was accused of participating in a failed attempt to overthrow Nasser’s regime in 1965 and executed on August 29, 1966. With his death, radical Islam had gained its first philosopher-martyr.
Opposing the twin Western doctrines of the sovereign state and the supposedly inalienable rights of the individual in the private sphere, Qutb insisted that human institutions have no sovereignty, that Allah alone, the perfect sovereign, rules. In effect, he proclaimed an alternative universalism to that of the West, the universalism of what he believed to be “true religion.” In place of the Western-originated system of sovereign states or the pax Americana, Qutb and thinkers such as the Pakistani thinker Abu al A’la al Mawdudi confidently predicted the triumph of a pax Islamica. For a very long time, Western thinkers paid scant attention to the works of these men. Today, their ideas have appeal in large sectors of the world’s Muslim population and place strong limitations on their rulers’ ability to cooperate with the West.
Moreover, the “clash of civilizations” is no longer between two distinct but geographically separate civilizations. Globalization involves reciprocal interaction. According to Professor John Kelsay, “The rapidity of Muslim migration…suggests that we may soon be forced to speak not simply of Islam and, but of Islam in the West.” Nevertheless, in their bitter condemnation of Western secular society as jahiliyyah, Muslim fundamentalists either refuse to recognize or ignore what should be the obvious fact that it is only because of the heritage of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions that Muslims have been able to migrate to the West in large numbers and freely practice their religion. The expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain in 1492 serves as a reminder of what can happen to non-Christians in a non-secular Western society.
There is considerable confusion concerning the nature of the secularization process. Secularization is definitely not atheism, nor is it necessarily unabated materialism. Fundamentally, secularization makes religion a matter of individual choice without legal penalty. Admittedly, this is contrary to the way religion is currently understood in Islam, and secularization may not be a viable choice in historically Muslim lands, but there is no other choice in those jurisdictions in which a multiplicity of religions must coexist. The fact that there are mosques in Rome today and that Pope John Paul II has visited the ancient Roman synagogue is indicative of the fact that, however reluctantly, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted pluralism and diversity. At least in the Muslim diaspora, this is a choice that Muslims must accept if there is to be any degree of religious peace in the world.
At present, nothing comparable to the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council of 1962-65 has taken place in Islam that would permit the kind of relatively free and equal coexistence of Islam with non-Islamic religions that has developed in Christian lands. Thus, mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands carries with it the possibility that Christian culture and religion could eventually be subordinated to Islam. Such subordination is not outside of Muslim historical experience. Predominantly Muslim Asia Minor was once the heartland of the Fathers of the Church; Algeria can claim as her native son Augustine of Hippo (354-430), one of the greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church.
Subordination of Christianity to Islam is an outcome to which some highly influential Muslim leaders publicly and explicitly aspire. For example, Sheikh Yousef Al Qaradhawi, an influential Sunni cleric, often makes the claim that “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror.” In a fatwa posted on the website www.islamonline.net (December 2, 2002), Sheikh AlQaradhawi wrote of the “signs of the victory of Islam,” citing a well-known Hadith (Islamic tradition):
The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?” He answered: “The city of Heracles will be conquered first”—that is, Constantinople…Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Heracles [later to become Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia (Spain), and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.
Sheikh AlQaradhawi qualified his statement by adding, “I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology….”
Similar sentiments have been expressed by other mainstream Muslim leaders, such as the Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd AlRahman Al’Arifi, imam of the mosque of the King Fahd Defense Academy, who discussed the same Hadith in a website article entitled, “Don’t Be Sad, Allah Is with Us,” in which he wrote,
We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims in Kosovo—and before then in Bosnia, and before then in many places in the world—will yet pay us the Jiziya [the poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule] in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam
I do not think that it stretches the imagination to suggest that before European or American Christians accept the status of dhimmis and pay the Jiziya “in humiliation,” there will be a tragic but monumental struggle in which much blood will be shed.
Although these imams speak of the Muslim “conquest” of Europe as a consequence of Islam’s superior message, neither they nor Pope John Paul II, who pleaded for a reversal of Italy’s declining birthrate before the Italian parliament, are unaware of the power of mass immigration to bring about religious and cultural change. Writing in the section on Islam in the latest edition (2002) of the widely used textbook World Religions: Western Traditions, Mahmoud M. Ayoub asserts, “It is expected that by the early decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims will constitute half the population of France.” Should Professor Ayoub be even partly correct, France will experience revolutionary cultural changes in the foreseeable future. In this context, we can understand the pope’s concern for “the crisis of the birthrate” and his plea that the crisis be confronted now.
Professor Kelsay sees clearly the nature of the conflict that lies before us:
Much of the contemporary return to Islam is driven by the perception of Muslims as a community with a mission to fulfill. That this perception sometimes leads to conflict is not surprising. In encounters between the West and Islam, the struggle is over who will provide the primary definition to world order. Will it be the West, with its notions of territorial boundaries, market economies, private religiosity, and the priority of individual rights? Or will it be Islam, with its emphasis on the universal mission of a trans-tribal community called to build a social order founded on pure monotheism natural to humanity?… The very question suggests a competition between cultural traditions with distinct notions of peace, order and justice. It thus implies pessimism concerning the call for a world order based on notions of common humanity.
Those of us who are Muslim, Christian or Jewish are all spiritual descendants of Abraham. We are united in recognizing the God of Abraham as our God; our different understandings of what the God of Abraham demands of us is what divides us. The American poet Robert Frost used to say that good fences make good neighbors. In a globalized age, we no longer have the security of fences. The choice before us is either speech or the sword, and today, the sword is no longer a blade but a weapon of mass destruction. If through speech we are unable fully resolve our present crisis, it is only through speech and dialogue that the crisis can be managed. As spiritual descendants of Abraham, the choice before us is fraternity or fratricide.