From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 538-543.

Muslim encounters with the West

Islam's experience with the world of Europe and the Americas is best reviewed and interpreted from within Islam's own sense of how politics and religion fit together. The Mediterranean Sea was the main theater and lasting symbol for the course of Islamic endeavors. In the hijra, or emigration of 622 from Mecca to Medina, Muhammad made himself a ruler to further his vocation as religious prophet. Ever since, in a union of creed and community, Islam has been the most essentially politicized of religions.

When the new faith expanded its power, it rapidly established itself across the African shore of the Mediterranean. Most of Spain, which was conquered by Muslims in 711, was ruled for more than a century from the caliphate (successors of Muhammad) in Damascus, in what is now Syria. Muslim domination of Spain long delayed the ambition of European Christendom to repossess Muslim-held territory in the Holy Land. The Crusades, beginning in the late eleventh century, were impelled by politico-religious motives that ultimately yielded the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Mediterranean islands--Rhodes, Cyprus, and Sicily--figured notably over the centuries in the East-West conflict, with resounding clashes like the naval battle of Lepanto (1571) off the coast of Greece between a Venetian coalition and the Ottoman Turks or the prolonged revenges throughout the Mediterranean of Barbary corsairs from Algiers.

Sharp entanglements, both religious and political, dominated much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but a strangely mutual superior-inferior complex in the psyches of both the Muslim and the Western worlds has marked their entire exchange. As the final religion ("religion with God is Islam," Surah 3.19), Islam perceived other faiths as, at best, inferior to its own, at worst, misguided and idolatrous. Corroborated by the idea of infallible Scripture and a divinely sanctioned social, moral, and political order, Islam legitimated a deep superiority complex, which it saw vindicated in its rapid and irreversible expansion west and east of its native Arabia. That belief and the claim of dominance brought a sense of physical and spiritual inferiority to Eastern Christendom. The Islamic sense of greatness was further stimulated by the majesty of the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, symbolized by Sulayman the Magnificent (1520-1566) and by the Safavid dynasty in Persia.

The West, for a variety of reasons, denigrated Islam, partly in reaction to Muslim success and partly because the initial thrust of Islam in its first centuries acquired the sophistication of its theology, its architecture, and its arts in appreciable measure from the lands and cultures it overran. Insofar as it was pupil, however, Islam appreciably bettered its tuition. It put Western thought into its debt by preserving classical knowledge in the Middle Ages, with polymaths like Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (980-1037), and its influence on the Western Renaissance at its height in the fifteenth century. Accordingly, when Western science and technology came riding into Islamic realms in the nineteenth century, Muslims felt decadent where they had once been dominant, inferior to pupils of their own past. The far-reaching Western penetration into the Muslim realm in the modern world, although bringing material changes not to be refused, spelled deep resentments for its implied disparagement of Muslim peoples and a perceived threat to their pride and tradition. This love-hate relationship forms a continuing feature of the whole encounter between the Muslim East and the Christian West. That culture and technology were accompanied by political power and empire only made the experience, as Muslims knew it from within, all the more vexing and ambiguous.

Faith and Governance

It makes sense to begin with the political in this encounter between the Muslim world and the West. It is where every Islamic instinct begins and where history is best first analyzed. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 is symbolic. The invasion was fueled by Anglo-French imperial rivalry expressed in British India, where for decades the British had been established in the form of the East India Company, later to be taken over by the British Crown. Napoleon's tactical sponsorship of Islam was short lived, as was his tenure on Egyptian soil. The subsequent regime in Cairo of an Albanian adventurer, Muhammad Ali, marked the first significant breach of Ottoman suzerainty. The nineteenth century saw steady European penetration into Ottoman power.

Trade and finance helped pave these inroads into the Muslim world. The Ottomans conceded consular and community rights to European merchants--rights known as "capitulations"--an ironic word, in the event. Although the meaning referred to documented concessions, the effect was to weaken Muslim authority and to erode the image of a prestigious caliphate. A restiveness was fostered within the Arab provinces of the Ottoman lands. Istanbul lost the heady magnificence of its great Sulayman. With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and European interest in its territory, "the sick man of Europe" became "the Eastern question" of Western diplomacy: European powers began to scheme to take advantage of fading Ottoman power.

Whether the British in India, the Dutch in the East Indies, the French (from 1830) in Algeria, the British in Egypt (from 1887 in the wake of financial collapse), European imperial inroads into Dar al-Islam, "the realm of Islam," called into radical question a fundamental principle of Muslim identity--namely, the inherent role of political power in religious faith. From the time of Muhammad and his caliphal successors in the Dawlah, or state-regime, Islam assumed the right to govern. It had a readiness to tolerate dhimmis, or non-Muslim religious elements, if they submitted politically. Muslims, however, ought always to be ruled by Muslims, seeing that, ever since the Prophet's own emigration from Mecca, power was the due accompaniment of Din, or religion.

Disruption of this order of things by Western imperialism was not only emotionally unsettling, it was religiously flagrant. Forfeiture of the principle that Muslims govern Muslims might be broadly likened to Jews being deprived of the temple and holy land that define their full identity. Muslim subjection to non-Muslim political authority, even if they still enjoyed religious rites and liberties, was inimical to their true being.

Nor was the situation eased when, after the First World War, the caliphate itself was abolished by a nascent Turkish nationalism. For the Western factor was still at work in the fragmentation of the Muslim community into Western-style nation-states, seen by purists as sundering the true Ummah, or "single Nation of Islam." These developments posed the basic question about Dar al-Islam. They had worried Indian Muslims in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian mutiny in which Muslims had participated. After bloody pacification, it had to be asked whether this entrenched British Raj constituted Dar al-Islam, authentic Islamic being. Mosques were open and Islamic rites fulfilled, but a non-Muslim queen, Victoria, reigned as empress.

Thinkers like the Indian Muslim reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1818-1897), an Anglophile, aimed to persuade a disheartened community to cease lamenting and embrace Western mores and appreciate their imperial mentors. Islam, too, was progressive and could be just religious. Half a century later, however, when the British Raj was in exodus from the subcontinent, Indian Muslim opinion in the areas where Muslims predominated favored the costly creation of Pakistan--Islamic statehood when and where it could be had--rather than continuing to live in a pluralist India in equality with non-Muslims. That development in the late 1940s marks the clearest of pointers to the mind and genius of Islam in response to the West and its legacy.

Although Western withdrawal from Muslim realms is tactically complete, it has many lingering forms in the global power equation. If, by and large, Muslims are now ruling Muslims, the dilemma of the due form of Islamic politics is far from resolved. There are, moreover, large Muslim minorities--in India, Europe, farther Asia, and Africa--in permanent lack of an Islamic statehood. There are others, notably in Africa (for example, Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan), where nationhoods are shared by other religions. In either case the Islamic debate about faith and governance is Westernized in the sense that secular criteria of law, human rights, extent of suffrage, and the forms of power clash with the classic concepts of traditional Islam.

The age-long, though much tried, caliphate has not been revived. After its demise with the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, as early as 1925 there was a lively disavowal by Egyptian writer and scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq of the caliphate's necessity to a right Islam on the grounds that its appropriateness in the aftermath of Muhammad's death and in the early centuries had been long superseded by developments in the self-perception of Islam and of law in and between nations. Islam could be happily rid of it and still fulfill itself in fully religious terms through a partial secularization of the state. The debate continues.

Experience through half a century of Pakistani constitution making and abrogating demonstrates how unresolved the issues remain for Muslim legists and leaders, civil and military--how disconcerting too for their populations. The encounter with the West that has spawned many of the issues, and certainly fevered the climate, has had a dubious relation to their solution. If Islam sees itself as having a divinely given blueprint for its society in the shari'a (sacred law), how is that consistent with democracy? The Sunni Muslim concept of consensus of the community might be, but is that consensus subject to supervision only by rigorist expertise as to Islamic quality--an expertise the masses do not possess?

There are those who would like to argue that Islam should readily accommodate a secular polity, like that of Turkey under Kemal Ataturk, on the grounds that the primary message and mission of the Prophet were essentially religious. To others, this would spell a complete betrayal. Exegesis of the Qur'an may yield categorical answers for some Muslims, but others find ground for secular readings. Encounter with the West brought Muslims a prolonged and strenuous crisis over the nature of Muslim experience and yearning for fulfillment in a polity at once authentic and modern.

Mind and Spirit

Questions of caliphate and state, of power and law, of religion and polity reach into mind and spirit. Napoleon's incursion into Egypt was militarily brief, but the scholars, Egyptologists, and pundits he brought with him had a more subtle effect. Muhammad Ali was enamored of military imports and made famous use of them, but they could not be isolated from a ferment of ideas and the desires they provoked. Later, the Suez Canal and developing Western-style economic efficiencies quickened the attitudes and the pace of thought. Later still, exploitation of oil in the Persian Gulf region and its trappings disturbed static assumptions and required anxious reflection on new perspectives of how theocracy might combine with human competence and Islamic authority with the spread of change.

Islam, with its deeply rooted theism, was not likely to succumb to that recession in the sense of God that occurred in the West in response to a perceived human self-sufficiency. But how was rationality, so seemingly convincing in science and its fruits, to be reconciled with the Qur'an as revelation, with dogma as God given? Where suspicion spread that even revelation, as given in the Qur'an, might for good or ill be susceptible to scholarly inquiry, the burden of religious loyalty became the more acute. The few who acknowledged the issue were burdened with anxiety about its implications for the authority of Scripture.

Education, especially higher education, was the most important proving ground, for the school had long been the pride of Muslim culture, and calligraphy of the Qur'an, its most cherished art. Preserving the firm structures of belief and piety had to reckon with new and exacting tests of such continuity. Some naively thought that the new sciences could be avidly absorbed for their techniques without the mind-set that produced them--a mind-set that would not spare sacrosanct religious claims but would put them to the same empirical scrutiny that the pious fear.

Indian Muslim and North African intellectuals showed themselves ready to acknowledge and undertake the tasks of criticism and scholarship concerning dogma and tradition, but they were often either too cautious or too erudite to carry others with them. Taha Husain (1889-1973), a blind Cairo scholar and a pioneer reaching far into Western academia (he attained his doctorate in France at the Sorbonne), published The Future of Education in Egypt in 1938, insisting that the spiritual and intellectual destiny of Egypt was toward Europe. Egyptians were heirs of the Mediterranean and Alexandria, its great cultural center, and intellectually were Westerners.

Such confident Europeanism, however, was resisted by those Muslims for whom Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was representative. Revered leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb rejected an early Western-style literary interest for a defense of traditional faith. He wrote an influential commentary on the Qur'an and paralleled in Egyptian Islam the role of Sayyid Abu al-Ala Mawdudi, who founded the Islamic Party (Jama'at-i Islami) in India in 1941. Never losing sight of the role of political action and the risks of being subversive, such conservators of a rigorous Islam have tended to place their hope in a discipline of devout practice and social action. By and large, academic scholarship across Islam stays cautious and tentative in its approach in terms of Western norms of investigative theology and textual study of religious sources--or those who have adopted such critical procedures have found themselves exiles in the West. But there is no doubt that a growing number of Muslims are recognizing the need for critical inquiry.

There is, however, a large problem around what might be called the politics of scholarship. Proud cultures resent what they see as Eurocentrism or Westernism somehow claiming a universal writ. At times, from inside Western academia come voices protesting distorted portrayals of the East and of Islam, such as Palestinian scholar Edward Said's Orientalism (1979). It is true that the West has romanticized its vision, seen what it wanted to see. It is also true that some oriental scholarship has been funded by vested interests and been corrupted accordingly. Yet it remains possible that, in all this indicting, there is an occidentalism in reverse.

One Muslim response to perceptions of arrogance or falsity in Western treatment of Islam is to cultivate a total intellectual self-suYciency within Islam. It is expounded, for example, in Isma'il al-Faruqi's Cultural Atlas of Islam (1986) and his proposal for an Islamicization of all knowledge. Western sciences, especially psychology and sociology, tend to relativize all truth and so undermine Muslim loyalty to Islamic finality. It is therefore argued that all these disciplines must be brought inside Islamic norms, thus resuming the former, splendid Islamic hegemony of arts and sciences and also immunizing Muslim youth against the corrosive influence of secularized scientism and sciences. The ambition is understandable in the psyche but hardly feasible in the context of growing secularization.

Muslim Society and the West

When Napoleon brought guns and savants, power and politics, into Egypt, the world was not what it would become. The Suez Canal, not to say Zionism and Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, oil and nuclear fission, independence and diasporas, were far below the horizon. The Napoleon who troubled the Muslim and Coptic scene had no intimations of the Ottoman demise, no European vistas of the Versailles treaty that ended World War I nor of Adolf Hitler and his legacy. Interreligion was there in 1798, but since then it has greatly enlarged and quickened. Minority communities of Muslims extend across Europe; Western tourism reaches into the remotest confines of Islam; and technicians disconcert traditional Muslims wishing to defend their faith against secular challenges. Races, nationalities, and cultures have mingled together in a ferment that takes Muslims beyond their own self-sufficiency.

Growth of population, the duty of a present generation to the next and of that prospectively to the next again, the burden of technology on the environment, majority-minority relationships in lands where different groups mix, the chronic imbalance in the exploitation and distribution of the wealth of nations--all these create the necessary intermingling of cultures yet challenge their sense of exclusiveness and assurance and vex their souls.

In this context the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran was of the utmost significance. It stemmed from a sense of being swamped by Western norms, Western goods, and Western mores, with the ruling shah their evil accomplice. Antagonism proved capable of rallying decisively behind a determined Ayatollah Khomeini who was able, even from exile in France, to muster a popular uprising. So doing, his clerical protest movement could carry all before it in a dramatic dethroning of state power ironically equipped with all the instruments of Western expertise and sustained by the endless generosity of oil wealth.

Iran provides a classic example of the strength of reaction produced by the encounter with the West. Such a reaction had been anticipated in a powerful pamphlet circulated during the shah's final years, entitled Gharhzadegi, which might be translated as "plagued by Westitis"--Westitis being a deplorably endemic and destructive disease. The author, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, unloaded pent-up resentment of invasive, deleterious Western culture with its Pepsicolonization, its films and brazen styles, corrupting the precious heritage of Persian pride and poetry. He excoriated the vulgarity of the commodity culture that the West was promoting in Iran, a culture that ignored the beauties of a landscape and a poesy and an architecture it would not, or could not, comprehend.

The indictment no doubt ignored generations of scholars and other Westerners in authentic love with Persia, but even so it struck a resounding chord in political Iran. More intellectually perceptive and--at long range--representative were the writings of Iranian thinker Ali Shari'ati (1933- 1977). He sensed what he called "alienation from ourselves" in listless piety and drew perceptively on the writings of Franz Fanon, penman of the Algerian revolution. From the Qur'an's words about Allah as "the God of the people" (Surah 114.3), he read Muhammad's leadership after the hijra as essentially a Marxist-style mission to the masses. Shari'ati, however, perceived the dangers of clerical exploitation of mass emotion, decrying the vested professional interest that motivated the clerics. His laicization of the Islamic mind--if it may be so described--and his quest for an integrated intellectualism underlined a widespread debate throughout Arab and Indian Islam about whether the public mind of Muslims needed, or did not need, the sanction of free inquiry unburdened by concern with the minutiae of exegesis and jurisprudence.

The opening of the gate of ijtihad, of free inquiry, was crucial to an Islam setting itself abreast of the ever multiplying ethical and social perplexities ensuing from nuclear power, genetic engineering, the birth control pill, drug culture, and the rest. It was through the likes of Shari'ati that something of the feel of liberation theology in its Latin American context could make some way into Muslim thought. In the 1930s Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), the patron saint of Pakistan, had stirred a new assurance, a European-style vitalism in Muslim thinking, drawing alike on the Qur'an and on Western mentors, philosophical and sociological. It was problematic to reconcile French social theorist Emile Durkheim's thesis about religion as a societal device--a theory that called in radical question divine sanction of a revealed order in a holy shari'a--with the basics of Islam, which Iqbal tried to do. But the sense of the positive societal tasks of religion had to militate against the kind of static conservatism that had hardly noted there were any.

What comes into existence after doubt, anxiety, and agitation has value: belief after unbelief. The prophets came essentially to produce controversy, to plant, as Shari'ati said, contradiction and conflict in a stagnant people--a sentiment that could be both suspect and reprehensible only if the words were Western meant for the East. Coming from Islamic minds, it may be some measure of what the encounter with the West has produced. Such an encounter must be reciprocal and open ended.

See also Ahmad Khan, Sir Sayyid; Durkheim, Emile; Egypt; Fundamentalism; Iqbal, Muhammad; Iran; Islam; Khomeini, Ruholla; Mawdudi, Sayyid Abu al-Ala; Muhammad; Qutb, Sayyid; Turkey.

Author: Kenneth Cragg

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