| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
| How Should the West View Islam’s Political Aspirations? |
02 |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
In order to gain a better understanding of Islam a process of deconstructing the existing language about Islam is prerequisite. This is because the language used to discuss Islam has been subverted by such a rich use of metaphor that the words Muslims would like to use in describing their way of life have been hijacked and given unwelcome new associations. The problem of finding truth in language rich in metaphor has been discussed before; German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: 'what, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and theoretically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.' Nietzsche's outlook on language was bleak, but even if there are no easy guarantees of conveying truths through language free of illusion, we should at least try to subject our language to enough scrutiny to allow meaningful debate about Islam and its relation with the west.
The first step is to question why western writers and politicians should want to distinguish between Islam and militant Islam. The key word here is 'want' because there is a prevailing suspicion that there is a conflict of values between the western and Islamic world and this suggests the possibility of physical conflict between Islam and the west. That western and Islamic values diverge at many places is undeniable, but if this divergence could be a matter of personal choice alone, rather than a political matter, this would seem to guarantee, in the eyes of many western writers, peaceful coexistence with Muslims.
To admit the possibility of a state of conflict with a religion as a whole is problematic for the west in a way that conflict with another ideology, such as communism, never was. This is because secularism's claim to success is that it allows full religious expression in the realm of both individual and social activity without conceding any political authority to religion. The fruit of this success in the west is that Catholics and Protestants, after religious wars had plagued Europe for centuries, generally came to accept this secular arrangement and live in peace with each other. The collapse of the former communist block, which had crudely tried, and failed, to obliterate religion entirely, further added to the sense of moral ascendancy in the west on account of western liberal secular democracy. The strength, therefore, of the west lay in neither affirming nor denying religious faith: to do so would be an unpalatable contradiction. For this reason there is a motive to deny that a popular religion, with over a billion adherents, could pose a sustainable ideological and political challenge to western political philosophy.
How does the common usage of the word militant bear upon this motive? Leaving aside the question of whether a challenge to the existing western political systems is a bad thing, or might even be a positive thing, we should look at the dichotomy between the terms 'militant Islam' and 'Islam', so that our thinking is not constrained inappropriately by the language we are accustomed to using. The word militant can simply mean 'activist', but most of its meanings are more violent: belligerent, warring or fighting. If there is any ideological conflict between the west and Islam it is more comforting to construe perceived Islamic opposition to western political philosophy as coming from a militant fringe of Islam rather than from Islam proper.
Will Hutton seems on the other hand, unusually, to come very close to targeting Islam directly in his article, mentioned above, about the challenge of 'radical Islam': 'While there are broader strains within Islam that do offer a pluralist moral code, which in turn offers hope for the future, it is also at the moment predominantly sexist and pre-Enlightenment - and that is the core of the problem both within the Islamic world and in its relationship with the West.' While accusing Islam itself, rather than 'militant' or 'radical' Islam, he nevertheless puts this within a context of 'hope' in 'broader strains' that are closer to western pluralistic philosophy. Islamic opposition, whether ideological or political (or indeed military as the word 'militant' implies in popular imagination) is, therefore, collectively constructed by many modern western writers as the work of a fringe element: an illegitimate national, political or militant offshoot from an otherwise peaceful religion. Opposition to western political philosophy is seen not as the work of a religion as such, but the result of 'pre-enlightenment' interpretations of a religion that is thankfully capable, possibly, of making the transition as evidenced by Hutton's assertion that, 'already only a minority of European Muslims regularly attend mosques'. Liberal secularism cannot easily, therefore, openly oppose a religion without first reconstructing the religious opposition in a false light: one that does not threaten the image of secularism's universal appeal and its ability to accommodate Islam as it accommodated Christian sects before. The definitions and categorisations of Islam by secular writers should thus be viewed with caution: at best they may be disingenuous and at worst downright dangerous. If the distinction between Islam and militant Islam is false, would that make Islam, as a political phenomenon and the antithesis of liberal secularism, cause for concern in the west?
| |
| |
| |
| |
< 1 2 3 4 >
Page 2 of 4 pages
| |
|
|
