Complexities of the divide

A few weeks back, when I ran into neat piles of the Koran at the U-Store's "Understanding Terrorism" table, I thought this semester had reached its nadir of craziness. Alas, John Fleming's recent columns on Islam - noting the superiority of something called 'the West' to something called 'Islamic civilization' - suggest that we may yet have to plumb further depths. The U-Store, in response to complaints, removed the books from its 'terror table;' professor Fleming, by contrast, responded to reasonable criticism of his initial column with a still more rebarbative column. According to Fleming, two facts stand out in the aftermath of Sept. 11: "The contemporary West is superior to the Islamic world," and the recent terrorist acts "actually have something to do with Islam." These are serious assertions: The first needs refuting, and the second makes little sense without substantial qualification.

Islam is a religion, not a country or even a culture. Spread across thousands of miles, dozens of states and hundreds of millions of people, this religion manifests itself in many different forms. Apart from the distinctions between Sunni and Shia Islam, Islamic law is interpreted very differently in the various countries where it underpins the legal code -such as Iran or Saudi Arabia - and it plays a more tangential role (or no role whatsoever) in many other states whose populations are predominantly Muslim (such as Indonesia or Turkey). Of course, 'the West' is equally complex and heterogeneous, if not more so; moreover, many Muslims are citizens of Western countries and help to shape contemporary Western cultures.

Even if it made sense to talk about an 'Islamic world' in terms of nation states - perhaps loosely mapped onto the Middle East, where there are many countries with majority-Muslim populations - Fleming's argument that this 'world' is inferior to ours is dazzlingly insensitive of both the realities of recent history and the substantial Western involvement in the Middle East. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European explorers and settlers brought smallpox to America, then marveled at the weakness of the natives and the providential superiority of 'civilized' Europeans to American 'savages.' In the 20th century, meanwhile, the United States and Britain intervened serially and decisively to install and perpetuate Middle Eastern regimes that regularly oppressed their own people but guaranteed Western access to cheap oil. With all the documentation available to us on this seedy and tragic process (ongoing in many countries), can we blithely cast an eye on the 'Islamic world' and declare that its lagging GNP or diminished per-capita income demonstrates its civilizational inferiority? Once again, where Fleming looks to divide 'us' from 'them,' we need instead to consider the many ways in which Western governments (particularly the United States) have been entangled in the political struggles and oppression that have defined the modern Middle East.

Professor Fleming is right to argue that this conflict involves religion; however, we need to recognize again that there is no essential Islam. Rather, there are many variants of religious and political belief, each dependent on specific historical and political circumstances. We also need to recognize that political Islam - the recent revival of interest in binding states to Islamic teachings or laws - has not developed in a vacuum but is a response to corrupt and oppressive (and often 'secular') governments in the Middle East, another phenomenon with which the United States is closely associated. Moreover, political expression in the Middle East has been inflected through Islam largely because oppressive regimes have undermined or destroyed virtually all other sites of political opposition; with the rest of civil society (the democratic process, freedom of the press, civil liberties) in ruins, the mosque endures as a potential rallying point for protest. When Saudi radicals reject their undemocratic, pro-Western government and call for an Islamic state, their challenge is at least as political as it is theological, and we need to think very carefully about whether our steadfast support for the House of Saud - or for Hosni Mubarak and other tyrants - really constitutes the best argument we can make for supposedly Western values of tolerance, democracy or secularism.

Of course it's important that every effort be made to identify and indict those responsible for the devastation of Sept. 11. However, we need also to recognize, pace the columns of professor Fleming, that this wasn't a sneak attack on the United States by an alien 'civilization,' but only the latest chapter in a narrative of political oppression and rage written by Western governments as well as Islamic radicals. Our mission at this University should not be to rank civilizations - to teach the Bible in HUM 217 and consign the Koran to the 'terror table' - but to make sense of the many and troubling ways in which Western economic interests, Middle Eastern political oppression and Islamic revivalism are inextricably linked. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.