As the arguments about Western civilisation roll on, I’m struck by the assumption, seemingly shared by both sides of this debate, that the Islam and the Islamic world aren’t part of “Western civilization”.
Islam is an Abrahamic religion, standing in essentially the same relationship to Christianity as Christianity does to Judaism. That is, Islam claims to be the completion of the prophetic mission of Christianity, just as Christianity claims to represent the fulfilment of the promise of the Messiah to the Jews. In each case, the older religion rejects this claim [1].
These disputes have occasioned persecution and bloodshed right down to the present day, between and within the religions. On the other hand, all of these religions have promoted learning and encouraged acts of charity. However you weigh up the achievements, follies and crimes of Western civilisation, it is absurd to deny that all three of its major religions have shared in these things.
Ever since Muhammad claimed power as an armed prophet in the 8th century, Islamic states and rulers have been part of the European struggle for control of the Mediterranean and the countries around it. In this context, Muslims appear sometimes as the targets of crusades or the instigators of jihad (the two words have essentially the same meaning), and sometimes in alliance with (further distant) Protestants, such as Elizabeth I, against Catholics.
A striking effect of the exclusion of Islam is that courses on “Western Civilisation” reproduce the discredited notion of a “Dark Age” between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. This period coincides almost exactly with the Islamic Golden Age, which carried the torch of Western civilisation for hundreds of years, giving us algebra, universities and much more.
fn1. In fact, Islam was long regarded by Christians as a new form of the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ, rather than as a separate religion
John Quiggin 
The role of Islam in passing on in translation much of Greek thinking & engagement in Spain with Jews & christians is also relevant here
Yeah but no. John’s general argument is correct but the whole construct ‘Western civilisation’ is confused to the point of being meaningless. Here’s a much better explanation of why than I could attempt. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture
The Dark Ages didn’t happen.
Western Europe was a backwater in the Roman empire and remained that way from the Western Roman empire’s collapse until the deep plough and the agricultural revolution of the 800s. During the alleged Dark Ages Western Europe produced the deep plough, vertical water wheels, the Book of Kells, Beowulf, the Chanson d’Orlande, any number of spectacular monasteries like Monte Cassino and Cluny, equally spectacular Romanesque cathedrals, and quite a lot of art.
If you expanded the argument to Christian countries as a whole you would have to include Hagia Sophia, the Theodosian Walls, the Church of St Vitale at Ravenna, and the whole exercise would start to look more than faintly silly.
While there undoubtedly was an Islamic Golden Age and some texts were received in translation from Islamic civilisation, many texts were received directly from Byzantium by both Christian and islamic states. One example is the Dioskourides, a medical text that was only incompletely translated. Caliph Abdul Rahman III of Córdoba asked the Emperor Romanos II for assistance with the text because many words had just been transliterated rather than translated as they were technical terms for which no Arabic equivalent existed. A delegation of monks dutifully travelled from Constantinople to Spain, made a proper translation, and trained severals Cordoban scholars in reading and writing Greek.
The Arab translation project was focused exclusively on ‘useful’ texts. They loved Aristotle but not Plato. No copy of Plato would reach Western Europe until the Council of Florence in 1431 when the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos presented the pope with a complete edition of Plato as a diplomatic gift.
In fact, Islam is a parent of Western Civilisation.
See how Westerners treat a parent.
I guess Scientology is also a part of Western Civilization. Be that as it may, both Islam and Scientology give me the willies. FGM, honor killings, jihad, Sharia law and a warlord prophet are not my cup of tea.
We can mention Arabic numerals after all. They’ve had a bit to do with Western progress. That’s, as they say, litotes or understatement.
“Arabic numerals are the ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; or numerals written using them in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (where the position of a digit indicates the power of 10 to multiply it by). It is the most common system for the symbolic representation of numbers in the world today.
The Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500 using quite different forms of the numerals. From India, the system was adopted by Arabic mathematicians in Baghdad and passed on to the Arabs farther west. The current form of the numerals developed in North Africa. It was in the North African city of Bejaia that the Italian scholar Fibonacci first encountered the numerals; his work was crucial in making them known throughout Europe. The use of Arabic numerals spread around the world through European trade, books and colonialism.” – Wikipedia.
Then there is empiricism or scientific empiricism. The idea of empiricism appears in a developed and coherent form in Francis Bacon’s work Novum Organum Scientiarum “new instrument of science”. However, it is clear that ideas of data from the senses, observations with instruments and experiments, came from earlier thinkers in a process of long development. We can note the work of the earlier Bacon, namely Roger Bacon, and his dependence in turn on Alhazen (Hasan Ibn al-Haytham) for the latter’s work on optics. Indeed, Alhazan is a key figure.
“He (Alhazen) was also an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be proved by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence—hence understanding the scientific method five centuries before Renaissance scientists.” – Wikipedia
“Hasan Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age. Sometimes called “the father of modern optics”, he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular, his most influential work being his Kitāb al-Manāẓir, written during 1011–1021, which survived in the Latin edition. A polymath, he also wrote on philosophy, theology and medicine.” – Wikipedia.
The problem with guns is that it took many scientists and technologists to create them originally (from all the contributory technologies) but it only takes one idiot to use one.
Sure, and Chinese civilisation merged with Indian civilisation largely via religion, so what?
Religions divide and delineate civilisations and populations through their co-option by rulers, schisms, convoluted nuance, culture, memes, magical thinking, power plays, and ancient unremitting grudges and struggles over turf such as, for example, between catholic and orthodox.
The Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance, all well and good, are neither the Reformation in Western Europe, nor the counter reformation. Western civilisation proper is born out of the blood and treasure spent on the struggle to reform. It’s also born of the Enlightenment and the accepted placing of religion aside as far as is possible in an appropriate room with it’s civilisational mandates contained. Western civilisation is a modern ideal, fresh and secular. Even so in the West it has often been a difficult ideal to maintain. It is not the only way to do civilisation, but it is the way it’s attempted in a western country in current times. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L.P.Hartley). And we’d be well to leave them to it.
Svante:
You say “Western civilisation proper is born out of the blood and treasure spent on the struggle to reform.”
You do realise don’t you that a lot of that blood and treasure came from foreign climes? Or have you forgotten the plundering of the New World, the theft of two continents there, the plundering of Africa, the plundering of the Middle East and India and China and S.E. Asia, all the colonial empires, the theft of the Australian continent and the murdering of millions of people in the process.? Western Civilization is not the only civilization to plunder and murder, of course. Even so, we would do well to remember how much of that we actually did and not to become arrogant and proud. If you try to stand higher than others, remember you are standing on bones.
JQ you “tener muchos cojones”.
– you have a lot of bottle.
As with racism and many other topics, your concise OP’s are a good dose of sunlight.
I appreciate particularly the direct comparison of crusade and jihad. Both bloody & stupid.
“The Way of Liberation.”
“For example, one of the gimmicks in Sanskrit, upaya used to quiet the thinking mind and its compulsive chattering is known as mantra – the chanting of sounds for the sake of sound rather than meaning. Therefore begin to “float” a single tone on the long, easy outbreath at whatever pitch is most comfortable. Hindus and Buddhists use for this practice such syllables as OM, AH, HUM i.e. HUNG}, and Christians might prefer AMEN or ALLELUIA, Muslims ALLAH, HOO, and Jews ADONAI: it really makes no difference, since what is important is simply and solely the sound. Like Zen Buddhists, you could use just the syllable MOOO. Dig that, and let your consciousness sink down, down, down into the sound for as long as there is no sense of strain.” https://consciouspanda.com/the-practice-of-meditation-by-alan-watts/amp/
The key pivot seems to me to be the Enlightenment. Islam has been influenced by both Athens and Jeruslam – often cited as the founding influences for “Western Civilisation” – as much as Western Europe. Jews and Christians are People of the Book – their scriptures are part of the sacred canon of Islam ( subject to different interpretation, of course, but with no more variation that other groups such as Mormons who are considered Christian). Mohammed is considered just to have finished the job started by Abraham. Similarly, Aristotle was embraced by Muslim theologians well before he was taken up in Western Europe, and natural science flourished in Islam for a long time. Theology was adapted to fit, as it was in Europe. The pivot seems to me to be the Enlightenment and European colonialism. By that time Islam was dominated by the Ottomans – a regime that Enlightenment Europe considered it’s ‘despotic other’. Subsequently, modern Islamic conservative theology has been shaped as a reaction to colonialism (and the espoused values it carried) as much as anything. This includes hostility to Jews – which is relatively recent in Islamic history. However, given that the liberal Enlightenment in Europe was largely a reaction to or outcome of intra-Christian religious conflict, it makes me wonder why the Sunni-Shiite dispute never resulted in any kind of political accommodation that stressed civic religious tolerance (the founding value of secular liberalism). That seems to me to be an interesting question. So in that sense, when people talk of Islam not being part of “Western Civilisation”, they actually mean something more like “Modernity”. Islam could be said to be the branch of Western Civilisation that (largely) rejected the political values of the Enlightenment. Understanding why would seem to be be important.
In purely theological terms, it would seem to me to have something to do with the fact that Islam has always defined itself theologically as much as a unified political community as much as a faith community (even though it has never been entirely clear on the precise institutional arrangements that should give effect to this understanding). Christian political thinkers have never really had to face this limitation: faith could be defined as a ‘private’, rather than ‘public’ matter, allowing first for for toleration, and subsequently, a separation of Church and State. For Islam, faith has always been a public matter. That doesn’t mean that tolerance is impossible in an Islamic State. Indonesian Pancasila is a good example. But it does suggests that issues of religious toleration may be far more sensitive to the strategic political considerations of those who lead the faithful. And those considerations aren’t always driven by theology. On the contrary.
Before deciding on your favourite crusade…
“The Way of Liberation.”
“For example, one of the gimmicks in Sanskrit, upaya used to quiet the thinking mind and its compulsive chattering is known as mantra – the chanting of sounds for the sake of sound rather than meaning. Therefore begin to “float” a single tone on the long, easy outbreath at whatever pitch is most comfortable. Hindus and Buddhists use for this practice such syllables as OM, AH, HUM i.e. HUNG}, and Christians might prefer AMEN or ALLELUIA, Muslims ALLAH, HOO, and Jews ADONAI: it really makes no difference, since what is important is simply and solely the sound. Like Zen Buddhists, you could use just the syllable MOOO.”
https://consciouspanda.com/the-practice-of-meditation-by-alan-watts/amp/
Mooo…
Ikonoclast, sure there were guns, germs, and steel. Today there’s dysfunctional globalisation market ideology, a huge killer. The point though is that in the first place the Reformation was a reform struggle in Western Europe on which vast amounts of blood and treasure were spent/invested/thrown/wasted until exhaustion set in on all sides leading to a lasting accommodation through force of common circumstance with no warring religionist side winning other than that from it came a win for the masses of all sides, an altered civilisation, a new way of running things, a new type of peace, and, secondly, the blessed Enlightenment. Hindus and Buddhists, for example, have each had various reformations resulting in one religionist side winning with no equivalent to the Enlightenment. Islam hasn’t even got to first base and, frankly, looks as if it never shall due to extrinsic and intrinsic factors in any time period worth contemplating.
Western civilisation, new as it is, an ideal based on Enlightenment values destined for continual development, has proved able to learn from past errors. It is held to account by its masses of heirs, and that is allowed, indeed it is required! It endeavours to improve and clean up its act, and importantly it allows/requires structures for doing so. Again, it is a difficult ideal to maintain, yet when it has wobbled it has come back improved, strengthened, and more valued.
Svante,
I think that’s an account which historically is grossly over-simplified and at the same time over-idealising and self-serving. It is indeed Western triumphalism with a superiority complex. Yes, with my biases I would prefer to live in a Western scientific humanist society as per certain enlightenment values. However I don’t. I live in a Western society run according the precepts of Capitalist Fundamentalism.
Given what we do and how we do it, we have no right to call ourselves enlightened. I can say this without idealising or exonerating other cultures. Our first duty is to look to ourselves and correct ourselves, not to judge others. There is much which needs fixing in Western culture. As Westerners this is our primary business. The rest is not our primary business. We only cause harm when we interfere in other cultures which we understand even less than our own.
If you start with the Enlightenment, you pretty much wipe out the idea of a specifically Western civilisation. The Enlightenment (as the name implies) was a universalist reaction against religion. It posed universal human rights against the idea that rights were specific to particular cultures and history.
A gem of a comment.
First, the separation of church and state in Europe is more an ideal than a practice. Britain defined itself as Protestant well into the 19th century, and the churches were extremely influential well into the 20th. There were explicitly confessional parties in most European states – still are in many – and we had the DLP. Religious disabilities were mostly legislated away in the late 19th century, not in the Enlightenment era. And then there’s the US.
A second point is that Islam has had a range of reactions to modernism – Ahmadiya, Bahai, the Nakshbandi movement, a great deal of debate in the Shi’a community. The most visible ones externally are reactions comparable to US evangelicalism, but there are a lot of others which don’t get much attention but are as influential. It’s very much an ongoing discussion. Islam is neither monolithic nor static.
Ikonoclast –
“I think that’s an account which historically is grossly over-simplified” – I wasn’t writing a book, or volumes covering the subject.
You’d prefer to live in a society as per certain Enlightenment values, you say? Me too.
But it’s run “according the precepts of Capitalist Fundamentalism” – I largely agree that it currently is, and wrote as much.
“we have no right to call ourselves enlightened.” – name another civilizational paradigm, past or present, that has anywhere near as much right to do so.
“Our first duty is to look to ourselves and correct ourselves,” – Again, I wrote as much.
“There is much which needs fixing in Western culture. As Westerners this is our primary business.” – Ditto.
A ‘yes and no’ from me to your last sentence dependent on the particularity under consideration. There are many.
You write that my account was “over-idealising and self-serving. It is indeed Western triumphalism with a superiority complex” – is this subliminal de rigueur virtue signalling, conflicted thought, or an artifact of brevity or terminology, for you do then go on to more or less write mostly in agreement as I’ve outlined above.
I’m sorry but this definition of Western civilisation reeks of virtue signaling. All you have done is demonstrate that adjacent civilisations are not cocooned from each other, which is unsuprising in a Captain Obvious kind of way. You might as well argue that India is a part of Western civilisation because of gypsies, yoga, curry and Hare Krishnas.
I surmise that if you applied for a professorial visa to Saudi Arabia or Iran in order to educate the locals about your plan to appropriate their civilisations Western civilisation you’d be given the bum’s rush before the ink dried on your applications.
Another rascal term that is currently in vogue is Judeo-Christian. As I understand it, this term was only gained currency a couple decades ago. The term is absurd and borderline ofensive given the West’s horrific treatment of Jews until approx the end of World War Two.
I also note that you did define what you mean by Western civilisation, which should have been your starting point.
ps sorry about my terse tone. I am finger pecking this response on the phone which is infuriatingly difficult
Prof Quiggin –
“If you start with the Enlightenment, you pretty much wipe out the idea of a specifically Western civilisation. The Enlightenment (as the name implies) was a universalist reaction against religion.”
Was not the project begun in Western Europe and subsequently propagated and developed mainly there and abroad in societies predominantly of Western European complexion? [1]
Pedro of PNG wrote above: “when people talk of Islam not being part of “Western Civilisation”, they actually mean something more like “Modernity”.”
Pedro draws attention to the possible equivalence and tensions existing between some terms in use, the ambiguity, and, these aside, the general imprecision. I like ‘modernity’, but feel it does not readily solve the terminology problem due to significant overlaps with tech, fashion, lifestyle, global consumerism…
‘Western values’ might be another substitute term, but also carries a lot of baggage. ‘Enlightenment values’ carries a sense of being fixed in time. I think then it must remain something like ‘Western civilisation born of an ongoing Enlightenment’, or ‘Western civilisation borne on Enlightenment ongoing’. Both too long, I know. How about ‘Enlightenment civilisation’? Lose the capitals? Yet ikonoclasts may still find fault on grounds of the term being “over-simplified and at the same time over-idealising and self-serving”.
[1] second sense: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/complexion
I stand to be corrected, but western “civilisation” never allowed the preaching of Islam within its borders. The only faith it tolerated was “Judaism” (when it was not flat-out persecuting Jews).
As regards Muhammed claiming power as an armed prophet in the 8th century (you mean, the 7th), there is now considerable scholarly controversy about whether Muhammed actually exist.
One group of scholars, for instance, think the early references to “Muhammed” were actually references to “Jesus” and Islam was a Christian anti-nestorian sect. I am in no position to judge their work, of course, but it is quite fascinating and matches my general cynicism about religion.
https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-karl-heinz-ohlig-muhammad-as-a-christological-honorific-title
@Hugo I make it a rule to stop reading the moment I see the phrase “virtue signalling”. It’s a strong indication that the writer knows they are defending the indefensible.
Hugo, not so sure about the much-vaunted superiority of western civilisation after the NSW results.
I understand there is agreement about the religious relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the Abrahamic religions. A reliable source told me Free Masons require members to belief in one God and therefore Jews, Christians and Muslems are potential members of a Lodge, provided they are male and have a profession of some kind. In the more recent history, a female version of the Lodge has been created. Gender separation is upheld as it is in the traditional places of worship of the said religions. (I venture to hypothesise it will be either to unite these three religions than to achieve gender equality.)
But religion is only one element of civilisation. I surely don’t know what the experts would include in the description of this term but I am sure agriculture, architecture, art, customs, dress, food, laws, traditions, … technologies of various kinds belong to it and more than one of these elements is influenced by the geographical location of people.
The term Western civilisation has a pretty clear meaning from the perspective of any European country due to the prior terminology of Orient and Occident; Istanbul can be taken as a geographical separation point. Any location to the North-West is Occident and any location the the South-East is Orient. But where does this leave Australia?
Earlier on, the eastern coast of Italy was considered to be the border of the Occident until, it appears, someone remembered the Greeks and their philosophers.
JQ juxtaposes science with religion to put the cat among the pigeons (or for some other reason). Then as now science is universal although its advances are unequal geographically.at any time interval.
Western civilisation without science?
Every Islamic country without exception is a sh1thole, which is why anyone with any sense leaves those countries. Even relatively moderate Indonesia persecutes athiests and
Maybe Prof Quiggin can point us in the direction of the Muslim scholars who agree with his claim that the Islamic world is a part of Western civilisation.
Please, don’t disappoint your fellow contributors, Hugo.
It is not just the Islamic world that is a (bombed out) sh-thole.
Everywhere western imperialism and colonialism and their supremacist, exceptionalist alibis have left their (greedy) fingerprints there is dependency and strife through what has occurred over the last few centuries, starting with the Spanish in South America.
Africa and much of non-muslim Asia also and Africa, worst of all, have been smashed as potentially viable places through the worst of colonialist policies operative for the few wealthy in Europe and later America.
I’d really love you to bone up on some basic historical reading before you fire from the lip as you did with that last comment.
If the the headline statement refers to Islam as we know it today, particularly in majority Muslim countries, it doesn’t reflect reality. Some contemporary commentators like to make a big deal about the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ as if the West produced no science, mathematics, medicine or fine arts, or as if the latter were derivative of some superior wonder of medieval Islamic scholasticism of which the West was incapable.
But it’s pretty clear that the Islamic golden age was just like the golden period of any other successful empire: it created a cocoon with central sponsorship and protection for scientists, linguists, and other people of learning to pursue their interests, chief among them to obtain and preserve some of the cultural and scientific output of the classical period, itself produced during the golden ages of Rome, Athens etc (by that time gone or in disarray).
However, all empires and other major polities fade to senescence (it seems humanity still has not worked out how to maintain institutions over the long term), and the Islamic one was no different. It gave up on a rationalist and interpretive mode of Qur’anic exegesis expounded by the Muʿtazila school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muʿtazila) by about 1000AD (by 850AD, the Abbasids were torturing and killing Muʿtazila proponents).
Islam seen historically is pretty clearly a political-juridical system expressed in religious form. True, it is an Abrahamic faith – it could hardly be anything else given its historical and geographical origin – but it’s the political-ideological aspect that is the more defining characteristic.
It’s also a real stretch to say that the (Western) Enlightenment wasn’t a Western Civilisation thing: being philosophically universalist in its outlook was precisely possible _because_ of the point Western civilisation had reached by that time, such that irrational views of the church simply could not stand against the weight of ongoing scientific discovery and analytical thought.
Maybe you want to say that core Enlightenment ideas – freedom of thought and body, equal rights for all humans regardless of innate characteristics or unchosen affiliations etc – were not inventions of a superior West but universal ideas waiting to be discovered. I ccould agree with that, but the fact remains that it was the West that finally codified and committed to them (as documented in great detail by Voltaire and others post 1750), including in its legal systems (imperfectly, and slowly, to be sure) while the main streams of Islam reject them to this day. Even the most apologetic of apologia (e.g. Tariq Ramadan’s Islam: The Essentials) doesn’t commit to anything interesting, it mainly tries to explain away the many attitudes and arguably some myths (e.g. the real meaning of apostasy) the civilised West finds most repellent.
The strength and articulacy of the many Muslim reformist movements in the West are testament to the gulf between mainstream Islam and the Western Enlightenment ideals.
Oman is a great country. Cuba is a great country too. Bhutan is a great country as well. People who disagree no doubt have not been to any of these places. AAAANNDDDD if they have been to any of these places and they still do no think that any of these countries is great it is no doubt because the standards that they are judging these countries by are flawed standards.
I am only trained in the economic history for the period after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. In that period of history, right up until the present day, so called Western Europe has invaded Islamic countries to increase their national wealth. Only in Spain do we see this reversed for any significant period of time. The followers of Islam, so ill named “Moors” from William Shakespeare’s Othello, actually invaded and occupied southern Spain. Even today that Islamic culture mixes with the Western Christian culture of medieval times, to produce the hybrid culture that dominates parts of Spain. As for the rest of Western Europe, there is now an influx of African refugees brining in their Islamic culture. Added to the war refugees from Syria, there are now substantial Islamic enclaves all over Western Europe.
As for any course that tries to teach about some unique “western civilization”; I only know that the economic history of Western Europe does not support any proposition that there is a uniqueness to such a culture as to be labeled it “western European”.
For the first three hundred years after 1066 most of Europe was under feudalism. Only the rise of mercantilism in Italy began to enrich certain parts of Western Europe, First Italy, then Portugal, developed large surpluses of wealth. But the Islamic countries were being constantly looted by the crusaders at this time. So how much this wealth creation was due to any unique culture is problematic. Only the rise of France as a power on that continent brought any unique cultural change to Western Europe. Again this was largely due to conquest and pillage of places like Egypt. After this it was left to the Spanish (again), the Dutch and the British to pick at the bones of what was left to pillage in the Islamic countries.
If you doubt my thesis go to the British Museum in London. I like to go there with two lists. One is headed “Looted from Islamic countries” the other more simply as “stolen”. This center of culture is filled up with items of cultural wealth taken away from countries lucky (or unlucky depending on where you lived) enough to be former English colonies/protectorates/ temporary allies of the British over two centuries of capitalistic imperialism (thanks to Karl Marx for that great term).
I think it is moire accurate to say Islam was part of Western civilisation.
Gregory J. McKenzie,
You perhaps have forgotten events like the Battle of Mohács,1526, and the siege of Vienna, 1529. Though you did write “Only in Spain do we see this (Western invading of Islamic countries to take wealth) reversed for any significant period of time.”
The Ottoman Empire lost the Seige of Vienna but had won the Battle of Mohács which resulted in a partitioning of Hungary. The Ottoman Empire had annexed or incorporated (choose a term) what are now modern Greece, Albania, the Balkans and about 1/3 of what is now modern Hungary, I think.
Then there was the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 when “a fleet of the Holy League, of which the Venetian Empire and the Spanish Empire were the main powers, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras”.
In my view it is not a matter of blaming one side or the other for the ebb and flow of conflict and looting. We can say that all significant kingdoms and empires at that time, in Europe, Asia Minor, Middle East and North Africa generally, became at times engaged in mutual conflicts over territories and wealth.
A little known historical fact (perhaps) is this.
“For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa, based mainly in the ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Their number included not only North Africans but also English and Dutch privateers. Their aim was to capture slaves for the Arab slave markets in North Africa.
The Barbary pirates attacked and plundered not only those countries bordering the Mediterranean but as far north as the English Channel, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, with the western coast of England almost being raided at will.” – Barbary Pirates and English Slaves by Ben Johnson.
Again this is not to criticise Arabs, Berbers etc. differentially. In precious posts I mentioned the rapacious behaviours of Spain in the new world and Britain all over the world.
We should idealise neither ourselves nor others. A realistic view all around is far better. One thing we can see is that humans at their worst can be very adept at justifying self-interest along with cruelty to others. Religions scarcely seem to make any difference in that regard. I mean the theocratic traditions. As I have said before, my bias is to put hope in democracy, non-theistic humanism and science.
Paul, your so-called histiography is whinging and special pleading that sounds like something Chomsky might say. Africa, the Islamic world etc are not a mess because of Western colonisation. If colonisation and war were so important long term, Germany (devastated by war) and France, Belguim, Denmark etc (occupied by the Nazis) should still be Sh1tholes.
The Islamic world is a cesspit due to internal not external factors.
You also shoot yourself in the foot by citing south america. north america was similarly colonised and is doing very well thank you very much.
Anyway, few would have thought Europe would have been as peaceful and prosperous as it is now during the darkest days of world war two. I am optimistic that the Islamic world etc will likewise come good in its own sweet time. But in order to do that religion will have to take a back seat, as it has done in the West.
As if North America being colonised as well is an answer. It only confirms my point concerning colonisation as destructive for indigenous “others”. What is the pathology?
You observed elsewhere the lack of concern for aboriginal people in our own country, over two hundred years, I’m redressing a brief summary by now including the Australian experience as well.
Fancy clothes and words do not alone a civilisation make.
I believe we are rudely but once the anaesthetic of consumerism with its beads and mirrors wears off, we will be coming out of a Dream time of our own, aggressively colonised and dispossessed by neoliberalism…time will tell, if the example of the dislocated from reality standard of debate over Australian politics is any indication.
Colonialism, like many other things, is a mixed bag, Paul. Some of the old French speakers I met in Vietnam in the 1980s were quite nostalgic about the French occupation.
However hunter gatherers like indig Australians, the Inuit etc have had their spirits crushed by colonisation.
Western Europe got zero from ‘Eastern Civilisation’ and all the other Arabic numerals too.
@ wolandscat
“If the the headline statement refers to Islam as we know it today, particularly in majority Muslim countries, it doesn’t reflect reality. ” Why? What is the insistance at looking exclusively at the negative aspects of this religion due to? Why of the unvillingness to go deeper, beyond the headline news?
A friend of my who recieves catholic newspaper showed me an add in this publication for children’s crusader costume. Have you listened to american evangelists? Should Australia and the USA be judged by these and other exreme cases?
What about the majority of muslim people on the ground, for whom islam provides comfort (the way christianity does to some people), who would not hurt a fly, who are themselves the victims of both the fundamentalists at home and the “west” who dispises them.
You are hurting their feelings in simple words, telling them that they are nothing, definitely inferior to you. In any other context this would be seen as bullying.
@AleD “Why? What is the insistance at looking exclusively at the negative aspects of this religion due to? Why of the unvillingness to go deeper, beyond the headline news?”
a) Who says I don’t go beyond the ‘headline news’ (which BTW is mostly nonsense)? I’ve been reading on the topic for 20 years.
b) Who said anything about Muslims? I make no judgments about Muslims other than based on demonstrated acts. The discussion is about Islam, not Muslims.
c) I have not said any ‘hurting’ or ‘bullying’ things. First, you probably need a dictionary (you don’t seem to know what those words mean), and second you should read what I wrote and think critically not emotionally.
Muslim people are not different to christian (or any other) people. They simply lack the sophistication of their western counterparts. It is easy to dismiss their claims expressed in broken english, them in their ‘strange’ clothes and houses. Poverty is not what we aim for. It is so much easier to look at the rich westerners and aim for their values, the value of ill gotten wealth (as hinted above by some others), with charity often performed as a distraction (I for one am greatful for that charity, but without it they may have trouble justifying their position). If that is what constitutes a superior civilisation, then no wonder at the state of any that is inferior.
@wolandscat
Are you talking of Islam as an abstract constract, or Islam as a religion practiced by Muslim people (after all you mention Muslim countries)?
As an abstract concept it bears no effect on any Muslim country. It becomes relevant only when practiced by people, through the actions of these people. So I don’t see how you intend to separate it from the people.
@wolandscat Just one last thing. If someone is hurt, they are hurt. It is of no help, nor is it fair, to tell them that they are not (or that they are emotional). Suggesting they get a dictionary is also offensive.
Hugo – “The Islamic world is a cesspit due to internal not external factors. … I am optimistic that the Islamic world etc will likewise come good in its own sweet time. But in order to do that religion will have to take a back seat, as it has done in the West.”
Tom (still kicking!) Holland, it would seem, shares similar guarded hope against hope below.
“”Liberalism is essentially Christianity-lite, and you can include atheism and secularism in that bracket too—these are basically Christian heresies. The ethics involved are really New Testament ones,” and adding later, when asked about resistance to his views on Islam, that “when I write about Islam my anxiety, and the reason I always pull my punches, isn’t that I’m afraid I’ll be killed, it’s that I’m afraid to be drummed out of the liberal club.”[24]” https ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Holland_(author)#Islam
That wikipedia Quadrapheme reference pasted below in case of trouble loading this archive.org page (It promptly redirects. I found that after returning or refreshing on immediate sight of the page clicking the browser stop function prevented the redirect.. at least it did for my browser settings.)
“Henry Hopwood-Phillips 17-06-15
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE? An Interview with Tom Holland
The classical and mediaeval historian discusses Islam, reformation and “radical chic”.
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter@byzantinepower
Fresh from a controversial speech at the Hay Festival, Tom Holland explains to Henry Hopwood-Phillips why he’s challenging the inconsistencies at the heart of the national conversation about radical Islam, and how he hopes that the Middle East is incubating a “great Arabic Voltaire”.
HP: How would you summarise your talk at the Hay Festival this year?
TH: That we should not ignore the influence of Islamic scripture on aspects of Islamic behaviour we find reprehensible.
HP: Why do you think non-Muslims choose to ignore this influence?
TH: Largely because they do not want to provoke hostility towards a vulnerable minority in Europe. But there’s also a strong element of fear—a fear that if you question the way in which a figure like Mohammad is interpreted, you are liable to get killed. His mythos lies at the core of what is pernicious in the goings-on of IS [Islamic State] and other radicals. It is obvious that he provides the model for their behaviour. So there is a need to look at Mohammad and at how he is understood. There are aspects of his mythos that are problematic.
HP: Problematic because you’d have to relativise a ‘prophet’—Mohammad?
TH: Absolutely.
HP: Why has there not been a liberal constituency within Islam pushing for what you’ve outlined in any meaningful sense?
TH: Liberalism is essentially Christianity-lite, and you can include atheism and secularism in that bracket too—these are basically Christian heresies. The ethics involved are really New Testament ones. Islam has its own DNA and is obedient to it.
Over the last two hundred years the West has had a significant impact on Islam but the influence it’s had on understanding the life of Mohammad has been to flatten it, “there is a need to look at Mohammad and at how he is understood”to fashion him into the ‘Great Man’ of Thomas Carlyle. He is the last outpost of this. In the West Goebbels gave Hitler Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great in the bunker and that really marked the end of that way of understanding history in the West. In Islam Mohammad is still seen as the great social reformer, the man who broke eggs to make an omelette.
HP: Is there a stage in Christian or Jewish history that Islam could be compared to right now?
TH: It would be reductive and wrong to imagine that Christianity is normative and that therefore the evolution that Christianity has gone through provides the template for Islam. Having said that, because we have large quantities of Muslims in our society, the choice is that either we become more Muslim or Muslims become more Western or we arrive at some compromise, and clearly there’s a need to do that.
HP: I ask because the word ‘Reformation’ is often bandied about.
TH: Islam is hitting a period related to the Reformation in two obvious ways. One is that the Christians at the time of the Reformation wanted to get back to the primary sources, to live life as the Apostles did, to strip away the padding of Catholic ideology—this essentially is also the Salafist agenda.
There’s also the effect that the printing press had on the Reformation. It suddenly meant tinkers and tailors could read it. Now the Qur’an and the Hadiths are all available online—lots of it without context—and are being used to justify atrocities. You no longer need to have been at Al-Azhar or have some forty years of compendious study of Islamic law behind you to claim authority.
HP: Is there a Christian trait you believe Islam is missing?
TH: I’d like to see Islam become more Pauline. Paul is the most significant Christian figure who is not in the Qur’an.
HP: Indeed some Islamic traditions go as far as to call him a man of deception, an evil king and so forth. How might a ‘Pauline’ tradition be of benefit to Islam?
TH: As you point out, the Qur’an emerges from a corpus of traditions and texts that reflect a Judeo-Christian milieu in which Paul is demonised. The salient fact is that the Qur’an re-enshrines the fact of Divine Law that Paul had abolished. Paul says that the law of God is written on the heart—he protects the role of conscience as law. This Islamic idea of Divine Law, however, has meant that the Qur’an has made Mohammad the ideal for human behaviour for all time. This means you can’t really evolve beyond him.
HP: Historically Islam has had quite open periods—it’s ultimately why references to the gates of ijtihad being closed are meaningful—surely if it has had periods like this once, it can do so again?
TH: Sure, but the core has been closed and for what you describe to happen, that core needs to be opened up. This would mean historicising Islam. It’s a project of relativisation which would ultimately lead to an appreciation of the symbolic over the literal.
HP: Do you see green shoots anywhere?
TH: Not now. I think Islam is going through an existential crisis. The current debacle will probably have an effect similar to that of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in Christendom. It will corrode the moral absolutism that had previously governed it, though I have no idea how many Muslims in the West believe in the ideas disseminated by ISIS and how many will fight against it.
HP: You don’t seem to harbour that much hope for Islam?
TH: Well I don’t. It’s a little like the fable where Christianity is the tree that blows with the wind but ultimately bounces back and Islam is the oak that nevertheless will one day crack and crash. It’s the best answer I can come up with. Obviously I like to remember that intellectuals are always prone to overestimate the effects of intellectuals. But, having said that, it is the role of ideas to start as contemptible and then one day, like a depth charge, just go off.
HP: In the long term there must be hope?
TH: I would imagine that the Middle East is incubating a great Arabic Voltaire. I can’t believe that it’s not.
HP: There will always be numerous interpretations of Islam, surely those that flourish are those that are most in demand, so why is the liberal school so miniscule?
TH: At the moment it must be inchoate. So far the internet has fostered jihadism but it must also advance its opposite, scepticism. The threat of violence ensures that much of the scepticism remains underground but it’s surely building. As with all revolutions it’s not until critical mass is obtained that everybody suddenly gets on board.
HP: Has it been hard coming to these conclusions? Has there been resistance?
TH: When I write about Islam my anxiety, and the reason I always pull my punches, isn’t that I’m afraid I’ll be killed, it’s that I’m afraid to be drummed out of the liberal club.
HP: Is identity politics, and the posturing involved, overtaking the real issues at stake here?
TH: Yes, we’re getting sucked into a vision of Islam that’s all ‘radical chic.’ The sex, the violence, the misogyny and all the rest of it is being glamourised. We sit on a moral Möbius strip because in the cause of anti-racism we can end up backing people promoting genocide. That’s insane.
HP: Do you think the perpetrators are aware of this?
TH: I think there’s a moral blindness there. I think there’s also a belief that to assert your moral independence you simply cannot be seen to be agreeing with anything that may be promoted by Western ideology; there’s a sense that you have to stand outside it, against it, and by doing so you stand with the Third World, with Noam Chomsky, with Martin Luther King, you’re on the side of the angels. But how can that side be backing those who practice genocide, and we’re talking genocide against Muslims here. They want to kill all the Shia. That’s their aim.” –
https ://web.archive.org/web/20150623080742/http://www.quadrapheme.com/mission-impossible-an-interview-with-tom-holland/
Islam – The Untold Story [documentary film](Tom Holland) https://vimeo.com/49401495
#1 Tom Holland: Islam – The Untold Story [debate – Part 1] https ://vimeo.com/79051466
#2 Tom Holland: Islam – The Untold Story [debate – Part 2] https ://vimeo.com/79053193
The Secrets of the Ancient World: Tom Holland (Adelaide Festival intro) https://vimeo.com/51031430
Tom Holland interview (short edit) on the origins of Islam https ://vimeo.com/44979845
Tom Holland interview (long edit) on Vimeo https ://vimeo.com/44953110
Holland draws from the Revisionist school of Islamic studies from the work of: Gerd R. Puin, Markus Groß, Volker Popp, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Gerd R. Puin, Sven Kalisch, Christoph Luxenberg, John Wansbrough and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Robert G. Hoyland, Martin Hinds, Nasr Abu Zayd, Fred Donner, Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren… et al.
paul walter says: March 24, 2019 at 6:05 pm
“Hugo, not so sure about the much-vaunted superiority of western civilisation after the NSW results.”
It’s more the dominance of neoliberalism here in control of everything including immigration rates. You’ve refered at least in significant part to Western Sydney. I’m not sure how it has anything to do with “superiority of western civilisation” as, for example, China Inc. also pretty much runs on neoliberalism.
Elections are numbers games, ie., 50% + 1. The Australian population is composed of relative late comers now beyond 50% + 1. The previous domestic western base, a prior essence of the place, an identity more or less shared, loses out (per Daley) to other identities’ attachments, world views, and dreaming. Voting muscles have been flexed, this time in western Sydney. They will be flexed again there, and increasingly elsewhere. It’s just the reliability of numbers representing the rapidly changing proportionate weight of differing opinion holders. Welcome to the future. It’s here.
@AleD my comment re: getting a dictionary was not meant to be offensive, and if you are non-mother tongue English speaker, apologies, it was not meant in that sense (I speak some other languages well and badly enough to know what it is like to make a lot of errors). However I made the comment because a) there is no ‘bullying’ going on here, but people love to make instant accusations of such and b) everybody apparently wants to feel ‘hurt’ these days – but this blog is pretty clearly an adult discussion forum; the post is talking about aspects of civilisation and religion – it’s not a place to be taking offence; discussing these topics means being objective about them, and also airing evidence-based or well-argued theoretical opinions.
For example there is a kind of discourse that takes down Western civilisation, white people etc, as the purveyors of all evil in the history of the world (the target of critiques like for example Pascal Bruckner’s Les sanglots de l’homme blanc). I am white and Western, but I take no personal offence, even though such arguments mostly quite wrong. Such matters are there to be debated in a civilised manner.
Peter Harrison should be running the Ramsey Centre. He is currently an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland.
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/an-eccentric-tradition-the-paradox-of-western-values/10095044
The link is to an edited version of an IASH Public Lecture, he first delivered on 30 August, 2017 at the University of Queensland.
He says that it is a paradox that;
“The phrase “Western values” calls to mind a long moral tradition dating back to classical antiquity – the thought of the ancient Greeks, the traditions of Roman law, New Testament moral ideals.
“But the idea that there are such things as “Western values” cannot be found in any of these traditions… no one ever thought there was such a thing as “Western values” until the middle decades of the last century.
“Second, and turning to the other component of our dual expression, the idea of “the West” – in the sense that Western values evokes – is also historically recent……….for much of its history Europe sought to define its identity by drawing upon cultural norms and traditions that lay beyond its own geographical boundaries.”
“The West” is not an idea that those now regarded as instantiating it ever had about themselves.
“The expression “Western values” does not appear in English until the middle of the twentieth century.
“Its entrance signals, at least partly, a significant soul-searching in the wake of the two World Wars that shattered any complacency about the moral superiority of Europe and the success of the Enlightenment project.”
“Its twin concept, “Judeo-Christian” values, has a similar trajectory, although its origins lie earlier in the nineteenth-century German “Tubingen School” of Protestant theology. The idea of a Jewish-Christian combination was subsequently adopted by nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900,) who deployed the descriptor “judenchristlich” to denigrate what he regarded as an undesirable “Jewish-Christian” form of morality.
“The negative valence of this amalgam was to change following World War II with the sober realization that a virulent and deadly anti-Semitism had been nurtured in the bosom of a supposedly civilized West.
So, “like the idea of “Western values,” the notion of “Judeo-Christian values” has enjoyed an increasing currency, and for much the same reason as the more generic expression.”
So originally the term Judeo-Christian was coined to be inclusive of Jews and now it is used to exclude Muslims.
thanks for making me aware of Tom Holland, Svante.
@Svante @hugo
I read the interview by Tom Holland and have difficulty understanding what exactly he’s saying. That Islam needs to be reformed? Which one? In which country? Why? To what end? Why not reform western countries to mind their own business? To take care of their poor instead of pointing the finger, letting the poor see the imigrant as the enemy?
Is it beacuse some fanatics chose to use Islam for political reasons, to recruit peopele to fight for their cause, (As popes did during crusades; as when the ‘west’ used its ‘values’ perhaps to deem the invasion of Iraq necessary), people who have experienced injustice on the hands of the ‘west’, because of the constant interference by the west, by constant lecturing by well meaning or otherwise, patronising individuals in the west who often think that knowing is being able to cite or point out to someone else’s analysis that rings true.
What is your direct involvment with the question of Islam and the connected suffering of people? You have no
I doubt thst you have experienced finding yourselves on the street out of blue, becoming a refugee, having all your family killed. You likely don’t even personally know such people. Would you talk to them, ask them questions if you met them on the street, to learn something from them, to see how they are doing? Or would you cite Tom Holland to them?
Would you prefer if islamic militants were not islamic militants, but justified their insanity in some other way, by saying that they are simply fighting for their values (no prophet needs to be mentioned, nothing would change) and if they did this fighting in a cleaner, less ‘religious’ way. People kill because they are capable of killing, and if they need they will find a variety of ways to justify it.
Have you read the Koran, Have you spoken to the scholars that interpret it (othor than those that make news)?
Hugo – This time around I thought I’d seek out a handle on Tom Holland’s then handle on the St Pauls discriminator on religionist law authority. It seems pertinent given the significance in the Quadraphene interview. Pertinent also in light of argument as to whether indeed since the sixth century, say, we, the west and others, inherited Paulinity rather than Xty?
A short Guardian piece. St Paul, the radical – Tom Holland
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/27/st-paul-religion
The supreme paradox about Paul is that the same apparently post-Christian values which have rendered him such a figure of suspicion to liberals are no less definitively informed by his teachings than are the harrumphings of anti-feminists and homophobes…
Remove that discriminator? Without all the Pauls, with much if not all the tension of multiple voiced perplexity removed I’m reminded we have, for example, Jefferson’s Bible submission post Reformation via the Enlightenment. A capitalised “Submission” to the literal Word thence required perhaps? As in Islam.
https ://americanhistory.si.edu/jeffersonbible/
https ://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-religious-beliefs
http ://web.archive.org/web/20080929061224/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefJesu.html
Gotta give Savante a nod for putting up the Holland posting. It is only a skerrick of a much wider deeper debate, and I wonder at the Wests much vaunted objectivity when in a society like ours almost every attempt at examination of the issues raised by Holland and others and picked up by Savante is stubbornly avoided for Telegraph blather.
I have to say it stands as an important historical shard like those rare pieces picked up giving the real ideas behind the legends about ancient philosophers.
I stand by my comment that my understanding that our society remains paralysed as to a dispassionate universal or media-driven examination.expose based on objectivity as the only criteria, of Islam, when even supposedly better shows like ABC’s Drum can only spew out Islamophobia and I wonder at who really runs the ABCm btw.
The key para to me came with Holland’s raising of Pauline theology and its relation to Islamic reaction (as Holland sees it). I suspect it is a key point but suspect Islamists themselves would dispute the point and this is where we need the full book rather than the fragment or precis.
Would some sort of thought comparing unitarianism vers trinitarianism or even the Reformation schism give us a better view of where Islam stands on different things?
On another issue is also, I also stand by my comment re the NSW elections. If the voting public can’t discriminate between obvious real (stadiums)and fake *Daley beat-up) issues, even if propaganda somehow engendered by flaws in western civilisation is an issue, we would do well to question western civilisation also…the result in NSW equals epic failure when folk en masse can’t put one and one together after a month’s campaigning
Although the unitarian v trinitarian debate is an interesting theological one (the notion of the Trinity is surely an invention from the council of Nicea, not an ontological truth, even for those whose ontologies include a divine creator), the far more interesting question re: Islam is the availability of freedom to interpret at all. In Muslim majority countries (barring a few exceptions in Persia and Egypt as far as I can see), there is no such freedom to even contemplate questions based on alternative interpretations of the Qur’an or hadith. There appear to be ‘interpretations’ in the West among Muslim scholars, but none published in any systematic way, presumably due to fear of the consequences. Thus, no Muslims can claim adherence to a different interpretation. All they can do is claim to have ‘their own’ personal understanding. Back to Holland there…
@ Julie Thomas
“Peter Harrison should be running the Ramsey Centre. He is currently an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland.”
Yes, that would be great Julie! Thank you for sharing the link to the ABC article