In Search of Wise Words
Abdullah Iskandar Al-Hayat - 26/03/08//
There seems to be a deep crisis between Islam and the Christian West. This crisis will apparently worsen, partly in light of the events taking place in the Islamic world mostly as a result of Western intervention, and partly in light of the mounting tension in the West and the tighter regulations that restrict freedoms in response to terrorist threats issued by radical Islamists.
On the surface, this crisis seems to focus on the cartoons and articles that offend Islam as a religion, most of which are published or will be published in the West, and on the ensuing violent reactions in Islamic countries. This preliminary assessment tends to address normal and casual events as deep expressions of the image of Islam in the West and of the image of the West in Islamic countries. This results in a mess in which the lines between the fleeting aspect and the historic core of religion become blurred.
This messy mix becomes more significant in societies in crisis where the battle is led by the most vigorous activist groups pursuing political objectives that are mostly domestic in nature. Moreover, just as radical right-wing groups with fascist orientations reduce their national crisis to the presence of Muslims on their soil, political Islam groups attack the Christian West. In this context, limiting the image of the West to a campaign against the veil is equivalent to reducing Islam to radical terrorism.
Such expressions, though irrelevant to the relationship between the East and West, strengthen as domestic crises deepen. For the time of crises is often the right time to subdue rationality and allow easy and oft-mythical interpretations to prevail. Such times are also convenient to disable the historic dimension in human relations and focus on fleeting slogans that stimulate irrational responses among societies in crisis.
The loudest responses to the offensive caricatures and articles came from the most turbulent Islamic societies, while the calmest responses came from stable countries. Moreover, complaints about offenses against Islam are noted in Western countries going through difficult periods of restructuring their internal balance following political misrepresentation. Meanwhile, the calls to refrain from confusing Islam with terrorism or faith with individual actions are seen in countries confident about their stability.
In all case, to end the confusion between the political and religious dimensions, we must first take this issue out of the hands of those fueling and exploiting it. In the Islamic world, these are led by all forms of political Islam movements. They first condemn the conspiracies against Islam in the Christian West and then slam the Muslim rulers who tolerate the Western assaults on Islam. In other words, these radical movements address a problem that is supposed to be external in nature to achieve domestic objectives, namely undermining the credibility of domestic authorities to arrive at political goals.
In fact, these groups may even exaggerate casual and regular events and define them as landmarks in the relationship between the West and Muslims. Hence, they often deliberately confuse the obligations of the state of law and political and social liberties with assumed rights that contradict these obligations. They also resort to unfair interpretations of many events and link them to regional conflicts. This is seen, for example, in concluding that the conspiracy against Islam is expressed in the Danish caricatures, the Dutch movie, the lay off of a French employee who breached the confidentiality required by his job, as well as in anti-terrorist security measures in Britain.
In other words, the signs of crisis between Islam and other monolithic religions will continue as long as the loudest voices expressing and addressing these signs come from radical movements in such a manner that overwhelms any rational efforts to put the issue in an appropriate framework and to set the stage for wise words.
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