Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  RETHINKING

  ISLAM & THE WEST

  A New Narrative

  for the Age of Crises

  Ahmed Paul Keeler

  EQUILIBRA

  © 2019 Ahmed Paul Keeler

  Equilibra Press

  Cambridge

  United Kingdom

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any manner without the express written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations with full and accurate citations in critical articles or reviews.

  Enquiries:

  info@equilibrapress.com

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  SOVEREIGNTY

  2

  CIVILISATION

  3

  KNOWLEDGE

  4

  COMMERCE

  5

  ART & THE ENVIRONMENT

  6

  CONQUEST & EXPANSION

  7

  THE AGE OF CRISES

  CONCLUSION

  GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

  PREFACE

  IT IS LATE MARCH, the blackbirds are singing and the cherry trees are in bloom. In this season of renewal, I am putting the finishing touches to a book I began seven years ago. On reaching the age of seventy, I was encouraged to commit to paper ideas and reflections I had shared with friends and colleagues over many years. I was reluctant to write this book, but having been invited by the Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University to become a Visiting Fellow, I was able to test the ideas in lectures and seminars with students and faculty, and this has stimulated me to complete the task.

  I grew up under the shadow of the atom bomb. I remember the terror this invoked. We were the first generation to live in the knowledge that we could destroy ourselves and all life on earth. This new power separates our generation from all previous generations. Since the creation of the atom bomb, many other ways of total destruction have been developed. We are now enveloped in an environmental crisis, and the warnings from the scientists of the dangers we face are becoming ever more strident. The impact upon nature of what we have now produced is so great that we are changing the climate. Global warming is an ever-present reminder that something is fundamentally wrong and we are heading towards catastrophe.

  But the environmental crisis is not alone. The explosion in the population, financial crises, social and political instability, the growth of mental illness amongst the young, and a host of other problems beset us. Humanity seems to have lost its way. But we are all in this together, we all share this beautiful blue globe which we first saw when its picture was taken from the moon, and its destruction touches each and every one of us.

  In our interconnected world whatever happens is instantly known everywhere. We witness the growing tensions and outbreaks of violence between and within different communities and nations as they unfold. In the UK, we are being riven by our separation from the European Community, which has divided our nation and poisoned our politics. A few days ago, fifty worshippers were gunned down when they were at Friday prayer in two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. At the time the massacre was taking place, thousands of children filled the main square of the city. They were demonstrating as part of a world-wide movement against global warming in which the children are castigating the adults for not taking climate change seriously and endangering their future. In England the day after the massacre, the windows of five mosques were smashed, and in Utrecht a Muslim gunned down five people in a tram. The cycle of terror is escalating fuelled by fear, hatred and revenge.

  But how different it was some forty years ago! In 1976, a festival celebrating the civilisation of Islam took place in London. The World of Islam Festival, as it was called, included a dozen exhibitions coordinated by the Arts Council of Great Britain and was inaugurated by Her Majesty the Queen. At the time, little was known about Islam and the response to the Festival was overwhelming. The beauty, humanity and intelligence of a civilisation that dominated Afro-Eurasia for more than a thousand years was a revelation, and was warmly received by a public keen to learn about an unfamiliar world. Yet this promising opening was soon eclipsed. Not even three years had passed before a very different image of Islam commanded the public sphere with the Iranian Revolution. This was the beginning of a polarisation between an increasingly distorted image of Islam and the West, that culminated in 9/11 and the War on Terror.

  Central to my book is the idea that we are now living in the ‘Age of Crises’, and have been since the creation of the atom bomb. The ever-present reality that we can destroy ourselves and all life on earth in multiple ways hovers over our existence. In the following pages, the attempt is made to understand how we have arrived in this Age of Crises, and to untangle the confusion and hostility that now exists between Islam and the West.

  In order to do this, I am proposing a change of perspective, a different narrative and set of criteria. The narrative which powers the modern world is that of progress and it has gathered up all of history in its wake. Islam and pre-modern cultures and civilisations are viewed through this prism. However, the modern idea of progress belongs uniquely to the West. It makes little sense when applied to Islam and premodern societies. I propose in the following pages to replace the criterion of progress with that of balance, a central principle in Islamic civilisation, and indeed an essential precondition for the sustainability of any culture or civilisation. Our Age of Crises can be seen as a result of the loss of balance that has taken place in our modern way of life; the balance between the material and the spiritual, and between ourselves and the environment in which we live.

  The book begins with an introduction which sets out the arguments for a new narrative and outlines the criteria of balance that underlie the thesis. The main part of the book comprises seven chapters, six of which encompass themes which are applied firstly to Islam and then to the West. These themes are what we might call key components in the formation and historical development of the two worlds. The final chapter addresses the Age of Crises, and a brief conclusion summarises how Islam and the West are viewed from the perspective of balance. Also included is a glossary of terms and principles that have arisen out of the study, some of which have been newly coined.

  My hope is that this comparative analysis makes sense of our Age of Crises, illuminates our understanding of the modern world, and enables us to see Islam and Islamic civilisation in a truer light.

  This book has come out of my life experience, and in that journey, so many people have opened my eyes and contributed to my understanding. I want to thank all of them and especially those who have supported, encouraged and engaged in the research, editing and production of this work over the last seven years. Any mistakes or misjudgements are entirely my own.

  Cambridge, March 2019

  INTRODUCTION

  THE POWER OF THE PRESENT NARRATIVE

  ISLAM AND THE WEST have been neighbours for 1400 years. The West grew up under the shadow of Islam, and then after the Renaissance, in a dramatic reversal of roles, the West became world conquerors and subdued all other cultures and civilisations, including Islam. This transformation ushered in the modern world, a world unlike any that had existed before. A key development in this transformation took place when, during the Enlightenment, a narrative was produced which introduced the idea of human progress. This was a revolutionary concept that would replace the Christian narrative of salvation.

  This new narrative saw the Christian millen
nium as a dark age of ignorance and superstition. It became known as the Medieval or Middle Ages, a period between the illumination of the ancients and the light of the modern world. Later, Islam was introduced into this narrative by giving it a ‘golden age’ during Europe’s Dark Ages, a time when it kept alight the torch of Greek and Roman knowledge. It was said that, having passed the torch to the Europeans, who then accelerated into their dynamic arc of progress, the Muslims went into a deep decline and stagnation. The world of Islam is now part of a developing world that is having to catch up with the West. In brief, the narrative tells of the triumph of the West and how the rest were left behind, including Islam.

  The philosophers and thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries who were responsible for developing the modern idea of progress, approached its unfolding in very different ways. Immanuel Kant saw progress as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.’ For Hegel, the constant convulsions and revolutions in modern European history entail that it is the European alone who embodies freedom and progress. According to his view, when a political and social state of affairs (thesis) is rocked by conflict and opposition (antithesis), revolution brings about human freedom and greater societal progress (synthesis). Hegel believed that periods of happiness are empty pages in history, times when the antithesis is missing, with the result that ‘the history of China has shown no development. China and India, as it were, lie outside the course of world history.’ Karl Marx believed that on their road to progress, human societies must pass through primitive communism, slave societies, feudalism, capitalism and socialism before culminating in fully-fledged communism. August Comte taught that the scientific method was the only guarantor of knowledge and had replaced metaphysics in man’s social evolution. In his law of human progress, Comte taught that human societies must pass through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive or scientific. Herbert Spencer, following in the steps of Darwin, believed that progress was not an accident, but a necessity; humanity must evolve to become perfect. This perfection, however, was only available to Europeans, since the physical characteristics typical of progress are ‘stronger in the European than in the savage’. It was not Darwin but Spencer, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’.

  The narrative of progress is deeply embedded in our consciousness. It informs our language, has moulded the way we think, and is the global narrative which powers the modern world. In our contemporary culture, there is a sharp demarcation between positive words such as ‘innovation’, ‘development’, ‘change’, ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘cutting-edge’, and those that carry a negative connotation, like ‘Dark Ages’, ‘medieval’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘backward-looking’.

  What would appear to be the indisputable achievement of modernity is clearly articulated by the Australian economist Wolfgang Kasper:

  Against the experience of long-term stagnation and misery, the record of growing prosperity over the past two centuries and, in particular, the last fifty years, is astounding.

  Anthony Burton in The Rise and Fall of King Cotton makes the case that the Industrial Revolution rescued humanity from a past of hardship and starvation:

  The old world was one that was primarily concerned with keeping alive. It was an agricultural society, forever balanced on the edge of subsistence which marks off comfort from starvation. The new world is dynamic, geared to the notion of continuous economic growth. Very few would argue that starvation is preferable to comfort, nor could they argue that the change from one condition to the other would have been possible without industrialisation. So, it should logically follow that industrialisation is an essential stage through which man must pass if he is to enjoy a decent life.

  The unquestioning belief in human progress informs politics across the world, from the late Senator John McCain’s statement, ‘America’s greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress’, to that of the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, ‘Change calls for innovation, and innovation leads to progress.’

  However, cracks in this supremely powerful edifice are now appearing. Whilst the theory of human progress has been challenged by philosophers and thinkers for more than a hundred years, unease concerning it is now reaching the multitude. The endless reliving of the terrible world wars of the 20th century in books, TV documentaries and Hollywood films, in an attempt to understand the horrors that were committed, undermines the very idea of human progress. The cosmologist, Lawrence M Krauss tried to counter the terrifying views of the future presented in films like Mad Max, Blade Runner and The Matrix when he stated:

  Often, too often, it seems to me, in science fiction there’s a dystopic view of the future, that science makes the world a worse place. Science has made the world a much better place. People live much happier lives, much healthier lives on the whole and much longer because of science.

  Meanwhile, capitalism, the bastion of progress, is under siege in the media and on the streets. The present British Prime Minister Theresa May recently stated in its defence:

  A free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. It was this new combination which led societies out of darkness and stagnation into the light of the modern age.

  In this statement, Theresa May could not have more clearly articulated the false premise that underpins the theory of progress, namely, the great modern fallacy that humanity has been rescued from a past of misery, stagnation and poverty and brought into the light of the modern age. The modern narrative tells the story of how the Industrial Revolution took place in England because of particular social, economic and material advantages that England enjoyed. England took the leap forward into a world of plenty and improvement, leaving behind the struggle for survival; Europe followed and now the rest of the world is in the process of catching up.

  The truth is rather that a world of many cultures and civilisations that had accumulated vast knowledge of how to live sustainably and in balance with the natural world, was destroyed and re-ordered to serve the industrial system. This was a world of bio-diversity and cultural-diversity, whose societies were organised for the benefit of their people, had developed highly sophisticated arts and sciences to support their ways of life, and were devoted to their various religious practices. The impoverishment which took place during the 19th Century, with its plantations, mines and sweatshops, was the creation of the Europeans, and it was out of this destruction of living cultures and civilisations that the Industrial Revolution was born and the modern world came into being.

  Fortunately, the Europeans gathered together in their libraries and museums all the evidence required to piece together what actually happened, and living remnants of those worlds are still with us. The true horror of what occurred through the building, maintaining and dissolution of the European empires is only now coming to light. The generations born after they came to an end are not trapped in the myths that were woven into the narratives of empire, and are fast unravelling them. To see the film The Four Feathers, set during the 19th century British colonial war in the Sudan and released in 1938, is to witness a completely different mentality from that of today. The film presents the British as men of boundless honour, loyalty and courage, and the Sudanese warriors are there simply to be mown down by superior weaponry, as were the ‘Red Indians’ in cowboy films that were so popular in the 1940s and 50s.

  Scholars and journalists, who often witness first-hand the sufferings and dislocation of the post-colonial world we live in, are producing well-researched studies of every aspect of the past that can be accessed through the meticulous records that the Europeans maintained. At the same time, in the post-colonial world, young scholars, trained in the Western academic system of forensic research, are trawling through the records, trying to piece together what actually happened during the period of the European empires.

&nbs
p; So many myths are being exploded. One, in which we British pride ourselves, is the abolition of slavery. The general understanding is that slavery was abolished through the heroic efforts of William Wilberforce in 1807. In fact, in that year only the trade was abolished. It was not until 1834 that slavery itself was abolished. There is no doubt that William Wilberforce and others laboured in a noble cause. However, a team of scholars from University College London have discovered evidence that has cast a very different light on the matter. They came across hundreds of albums containing the records of compensation paid to the slave owners for the release of their slaves. The government paid out what in today’s money would be around £17 billion to 46,000 people who had shares in the ownership of 800,000 slaves in the West Indies. The slaves were not released immediately but had to work a further transition period. Everything was done for the benefit of the slave owners; the slaves received nothing and were mostly re-employed as cheap labour.

  However, those working in the sugar plantations, which were death traps, left as soon as they were able. The author of Coolie Odyssey, David Dabydeen, whose ancestors ended up in the West Indies as indentured labourers, takes up the story of what happened next. With the loss of their slaves, the sugar plantation owners petitioned the British government to pass a law to allow indentured labour. This was vigorously opposed by the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, who saw it as slavery under another guise, but the law was passed owing to the powerful lobbying of the plantation owners. There followed 80 years of a system, little better than slavery, in which one and a half million Indians, impoverished by British policies regarding their rural environment, were shipped to different parts of the Empire to toil in British-owned plantations and mines. The infamous practice only came to an end in 1917 when Gandhi led a campaign for its abolition whilst he was practising as a lawyer in South Africa.