In a class I teach in Maryland on Islam and Globalisation, one issue I discuss at length is about the controversial theory of Professor Samuel Huntington. He had said in his famous (or infamous) book Clash of Civilisations published in 1996 that in the new world order that was emerging, where seven civilisations were competing, the clash would be between the West and Islam and the winner would dominate the new world order.
Disproving the theory is easy. One has to wonder how a great Professor like Samuel Huntington could come out with a theory that could be so easily destroyed. Of course, after his book was published, many scholars, led by Edward Said, have shredded the theory comprehensively. Anyone who thinks like the Professor that there is an Islamic civilisation arming itself to fight the West would need to look at the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and not beyond to know how absurd the concept on a monolith Islamic civilisation is. At the OIC, 57 Muslim countries cannot even agree on one minor issue let alone agreeing to fight the West. There are many other issues that also easily destroy Professor Huntington's theory.
A look at the Muslims worldwide reveals that instead of getting together to fight the West, Muslims have been and are busy fighting one another worldwide for the last few decades. In 1971, Muslim Pakistan committed genocide on fellow Muslims in Bangladesh killing hundreds of thousands. The core teaching of Islam for which it spread like wildfire within a few years of the death of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) in 632 AD is the message of universal brotherhood. Unfortunately, the Muslims in the Middle East who employ some seven million Bangladeshi Muslims call and look down upon them as "miskins" (beggars) where the cultural differences between the Arabs and Bangladeshis come out much stronger than the bond of Islam.
Professor Huntington also overlooked the asymmetry between the Islamic world and the West. For example, the 57 OIC members have a combined GDP (gross domestic product) of US $ 2 trillion while the GDP of USA alone is US$ 14 trillion. In 2005 Harvard University produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. A look at Nobel Prize and Muslims is also utterly disappointing. Jews whom Muslims outnumber 100 to one have won 193 Noble Prizes against 11 by Muslims of which seven are in peace. When Samuel Huntington wrote his book, only two Muslims had won the Prize!
Professor Huntington (April 18, 1927-December 24, 2008) was a brilliant analyst of political and historical events. Therefore he must have found something in Islam that he did not explain satisfactorily in the book that had encouraged him to conclude that the asymmetry, the lack of unity among the Muslim countries, etc. notwithstanding, Islam would in the end emerge as a threat to the West. His apprehension now appears to be right but not the way he expected or prophesised, a monolith "Islamic civilisation" emerging to fight the West.
After almost a decade of the war on terror through which President Bush had put Islam on the dock for the crimes of some 20 Saudi and Egyptian terrorists, Islam has come out of the ordeal unscathed and stronger. Even after the fact that between Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly half a million innocent Muslim men, women and children have been killed in the war, the spirit of Muslims worldwide has not been diminished at all.
According to the PEW Research Centre in the United States, Islam is today the fastest growing religion in the world and by 2070, 34.9 per cent of world's population would be Muslims making Islam the religion with the largest following. Millions of Muslims, 20 per cent of its total following, now live in non-Muslim countries with seven million in the USA alone where they are, after the Jews, the most prosperous community. These days, the US authorities are recognising the positive influence of Islam in the USA where there are now over 2500 mosques. These Muslims are exposing to the Americans the positive face of Islam and together with the authorities, weeding out the bad apples in the Muslim community.
The seven million American Muslims are related in one way or the other to hundreds of millions of more Muslims living in Muslim countries all over the world. They know about America to the extent that would surprise most Americans. If they know that in the United States, their relatives or Muslims were being treated well, that would have tremendous positive effect in tackling what is now the problem for the Muslims themselves. This would also help the process of globalisation that the West, since the end of the Cold War, is pursuing as the emerging new world order through integration of all civilisations in a global village against Professor Huntington's theory of clash of the West and Islam.
There are no two opinions that political Islam is a major problem for an integrated global system. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jihadists today dominate West's concerns about Islam. Unfortunately, the West does not acknowledge its own role in the rise of political Islam that a look at history of Islam would underline to even a casual reader. Muslim rulers had governed from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in the west to the Pacific in the east between the 7th and the 17th century when Europe was in its Dark Age. Under Muslim rules of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans and the Delhi Sultans in India, non-Muslims lived and prospered because Islam does not believe in forceful conversion. Thus India, a fundamentally Hindu country, remained fundamentally so even after 800 years of Muslim rule and the Iberian Peninsula remained Christian after similar period of Muslim rule.
Muslims, in contrast, were treated badly when they fell from being rulers to subjects in the West. Almost all the Muslim countries were either Western colonies or their trust territories by the beginning of the last century. The colonial rulers deliberately sowed the seeds that today are the real causes of political or radical Islam like creating Israel on Palestinian land, truncating Iraq, supporting the very Muslim countries that uphold what they consider the worst aspects of Islam like rule by Shariah law or dictatorship, etc.
In contrast, the inspiration that radical Islamic groups take from Islam are distortions of the religion. When Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) had ruled Medina under the Medina Charter that he drafted and crafted with all other citizens of the city-state, half of whom were Jews who loved and respected him and trusted him with their lives and properties, it was the Koran's message of peace and equality that was the message for community living. Radical Islam and West's critics of the religion ironically take inspiration from a few passages in Koran on violence in denial of scores of references all over the Holy Book where the undeniable message in it over and over again is peace and respect for human lives. In one passage, the Koran equates the unjust killing of a single person to killing of all humankind.
Professor Samuel Huntington's theory is having less and less takers. This is good for globalisation and for Islam. The Muslims worldwide are now aware of reform in their religion as well as the need to check the rise of political Islam. The West, on its part, must acknowledge its past mistakes and also acknowledge the role of Muslims as the first globalisers where Islam as the religion of the rulers, instead of being an obstacle, helped them rule over multi-cultural, multi-religious societies on a global perspective in the mutual benefit of all.
The West came out of its Dark Age through reform of Christianity and through democracy. So must the Muslim countries where the lack of the latter as much as the West's historical injustices on Muslims are the primary causes for growth of political or radical Islam and not any fundamental problem with the religion itself. Now that Islam is set to become world's number one religion, it is up to the West to interact positively with Muslims worldwide for its own sake. The ball is in West's court.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
