Free World by Timothy Garton Ash

Author:Timothy Garton Ash [Ash, Timothy Garton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307276971
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

NEAR EAST

In the beginning, none of the places we call the East thought of themselves as the East. All versions of the East—whether European, Communist, Near, Middle, or Far—were originally coined by people living in the West. The label was sometimes then accepted by some of the people living in these places, but often not. From the late 1940s until 1989, we talked of Eastern Europe, the East bloc, and East–West relations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that East has gone; older ones have reemerged. Young men and women who in the 1950s would have learned Russian now queue up to study Arabic, in courses still quaintly called Oriental Studies. But what is the unity or bloc they should study?

One popular answer is “Islam.” This term is confusing, since it refers both to a religion and to the history and culture of the peoples who profess that religion—as if we had only one word for both “Christianity” and “Christendom.” Yet the claim of the Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” school is precisely that political effects can be predicted from the fact that a group of people, whether in a state, a nation, or a subnational group, profess the Islamic faith. In fact, Huntington took the very phrase “clash of civilizations” from a discussion of “Muslim Rage” by one of the West’s most influential orientalists, Bernard Lewis.29

Two contrasting interpretations have received wide currency since the 9/11 attacks. One, favored by secular Europeans as well as Huntingtonians, sees the heart of the problem in the Islamic religion itself. Islam, it is said, needs to have “its Reformation,” by which secular Europeans often really mean its Enlightenment—and preferably its outright European-style secularization. The other interpretation is that these attacks are the result of a specific history of particular people, many of whom had been radicalized and battle-hardened while fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan, with American support. The holy men of Islam should no more be held responsible for the fact that Osama bin Laden attacked the twin towers in the name of Allah than the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury should be blamed if a madman murders in the name of Christ.

For obvious reasons, Western leaders like Tony Blair and, after one unfortunate early use of the word “crusade,” George W. Bush, have publicly given Islam the benefit of the doubt. Both Western and Islamic analysts support this in two ways. First, they show how the Koran, and its acknowledged interpreters, condemn the killing of innocent civilians and, in important passages, call for tolerance, pluralism, justice, and good government. To be sure, these passages and interpretations are contradicted by others; like all religions, Islam is multivocal. Second, they point out that roughly half the world’s Muslims live in electoral democracies. However, many of them do so as minorities in states of another majority culture. The second largest Muslim population in the world is in India.

Among countries with a Muslim majority, the record of democracy is thinner. Nonetheless, at this writing,

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