Islam and the West Yesterday and Today

Abstract

When discussing this most important and timely issue, before anything
else and beyond all current passions and prejudices, one must pause and ask
what we mean by the two terms Islam and the West. Which Islam and
which West are we considering? Is it traditional Islam as practiced by the
majority of Muslims, the Islam of pious men and women who seek to live
in the light of God‘s teachings as revealed in the Qur’an and in surrender to
His will? Or is it modernist interpretations that seek to interpret the Islamic
tradition in view of currently prevalent Western ideas and fashions of
thought? Or yet, is it the extreme forms of politically active Islam that, in
exasperation, before dominance by non-Islamic forces both outside and
inside the borders of most Islamic countries, takes recourse in ideas and
methods of certain strands of recent Western political history, including, in
some cases, terrorism, which is against Islamic law and which was not
invented by them?
Nor is the reality of the West in any way homogeneous. In fact, practically
the only political unity observed in the West these days appears in
its hatred of Islam, as shown in the case of Bosnia and Chechnya, where
one has observed, with very few exceptions, the uniformity of silence,
indifference, and inaction by various voices in the West in the face of the
worst kind of human atrocities. Otherwise, the opposition of forces and
diversity of what is usually called the West is so blatant as to hardly need
mention. But since it is ignored in many quarters that speak of global order
based on what they call Western values, it must be asked if the West is
characterized by Trappist and Carthusian monks or European and
American agnostic or atheistic “intellectuals” on university campuses or in
the media. One wonders if the Westerners are those who still make pilgrimage
to hurdes in the thousands, or those who journey, also in the
thousands, to Las Vegas or the birthplace of Elvis Presley. This diversity
and even confrontation within the West is of the greatest importance not
only for those in Europe and the United States who speak of confrontation
with the Islamic world on the basis of the idea that there is an at least relatively
unified West, but also for the Muslims, at least some of whom are
in general fully aware of deep divisions not likely to be integrated into
unity soon but which are in fact on the verge of creating disorder and chaos
within the very fabric of Western societies ...