‘The fault lines between
civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the
Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed’, Huntington proclaimed. ‘The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe
politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron
Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural
division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox
Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing
line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern
boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500.’
Huntington suggested that
the conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilisations had
been going on for 1300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish
surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. The balance between
Christianity and Islam see-sawed across Europe to the Middle East until the
Western powers established control over the Middle East, Northern Africa and
the Balkans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After World War
II, the West began to retreat; ‘the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab
nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves’ while the
West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the
oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to,
weapons-rich.
Thus, Huntington reckoned,
the ‘centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam’ was
unlikely to decline: rather it could become more virulent. We were set for ‘no
less than a clash of civilizations — the perhaps irrational but surely historic
reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular
present, and the worldwide expansion of both’.
On the face of it,
Huntington’s hypothesis might seem to have been prescient. The Iraq wars, the
shock of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the
long and drawn out war against al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan all might seem to fit within Huntington’s frame.
The truth, of
course, is more multi-textured and complicated.
For one thing, as George W
Bush declared at the beginning of the War on Terror after September 11:
‘Ours …is not a war against Islam’. Political leaders, intellectuals and analysts
struggled against the flawed idea that violence against the established order
in the West, or in Asia, derived from ‘Muslim rage’ or ‘clash of civilisations’
and sought to maintain a proper distinction between the Muslim faith
and some of its radicalised followers. For another, it was plain for
all to see that Muslim states or states with dominant Muslim populations, from
Indonesia to Pakistan and Egypt, were threatened by the same radical violence.
But such complex lines of
battle were bound to be difficult to maintain with clarity.
Now, as James Piscatori
argues in this week’s lead essay,
there is a danger of succumbing to the darker prospect. ‘In the face of the
frontal attacks on free speech in Paris and Copenhagen, horrific videos from
the Islamic State, and the mass kidnappings and murders of Nigeria’s Boku
Haram, nuance has seemed to evaporate’, writes Piscatori. ‘The rise of PEGIDA
in Germany, opposed to what they see as the Islamisation of Europe, and arson
attacks on mosques in famously tolerant Sweden indicate that Islamophobia has
found new life’. The threat of ‘Islamic radicalism’ morphs each term with
‘unintended consequences’. The Islamic terrorist too easily becomes ‘so
pervasive a figure of fear that it has given a kind of back-door permission for
bigots to see fifth-columnists where there are none and for governments to
smear domestic enemies as jihadists’.
Islamophobia, of course, had
never gone away. And sometimes those same leaders, who try to make the right
distinctions, stumble in accidental accusation where none is called for. In
Australia, leaders of the Muslim community were outraged when Prime Minister
Abbott let slip: ‘I’ve often heard Western leaders describe Islam as a
‘religion of peace’. I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and
mean it.’ Australian Muslim leaders and scholars have, of course, spoken out
against jihadist violence and the head of Australia’s security agency
acknowledged the centrality of support of the Muslim community in the campaign
against violence and extremism.
The fear of Islamic
radicalisation, says Piscatori, is clearly a fact of life throughout Asia, even
of course in states with Muslim majorities. He reports polls from Pew that
show that 66 per cent of people in Bangladesh and 42 per cent of people in
Pakistan held unfavourable views of al-Qaeda. In Southeast Asia, the allegiance
of groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah to the ‘Islamic State’has
claimed attention. Broader public attitudes matter more. In
Indonesia, in fact, 56 per cent of those polled viewed al-Qaeda
unfavourably, and in Malaysia, only 18 per cent of people had a favourable view
of it.
Piscatori points out that
the threat that has been constructed in policymaking circles in
countries where Muslims are in a minority has abetted two kinds of
Islamophobia — reactive and state Islamophobia. Reactive Islamophopia is now
widespread in Europe. In Myanmar the Rohingya Muslims have been subjected to
systematic repression. The picture in China is more variegated.
As Piscatori concludes,
‘Islamic State, with its confronting ideology, enigmatic caliphate, and brutal
tactics, has virtually single-handedly undone the positive work on attitudes
towards Muslims and Islam that has been done since the beginning of the
millennium’. But, as he says, the War on Terror has also played its
insidious if inadvertent part, with its exclusive focus on security and the
pretext it provides for both reactive and state-sponsored anti-Muslim sentiment
and actions.
Political leaders in our
region might help to check the conflation of Islam with violence and
radicalisation if they took the opportunity, at an East Asian Summit
say, to join in common cause with a plurality of states (some
with Muslim majority populations and others with Muslim minority
populations) against radical violence and in favour of religious
tolerance and mutual respect.
Peter Drysdale is Editor of
the East Asia Forum.
No comments:
Post a Comment