Islam and West

1. Introduction
The relationship between Islam and the west started in the 6th year of Hijrah (628 A.D)
when the Prophet Muhammad BPUH sent his companion to the Eastern Roman
Emperor, Heraclius, with the letter quoted above. This soon turned into a confrontation
which, despite certain exceptions, has characterized his unbroken relationship which is
now more than fourteen hundred years old. This long relationship of Islam and the West
is not merely a story of unending wars, lack of mutual trust and economic exploitation.
It has also produced fruitful economic and intellectual exchange. This relationship has
influenced some of the best work of literature. But on the whole, the nature of
relationship remained confrontational to this day. There are religious as well as political
reasons for this.
Within a century after the migration from Makkah, Muslims had extended their empire
from China to France. However, these extra ordinary victories were not primarily due to
the power of the sword; the real force behind was the inherently attractive message of
Islam which the Christian West was, by far and large, unable to comprehend. During
the initial phase of relationship between Islam and the West, the West saw Muslims and
Islam as aggressors, though this perception was not as crystal clear as it became in the
subsequent centuries. It was negative image of Islam and Muslims which helped, at
least in part, to muster popular support for the crusaders in the eleventh century.
Towards the end of the first century of Islam, there arose opportunity in al-Andalus
which could have provided a chance for the Christian world to understand Islam
through shared living experiences. But unfortunately, Muslim Spain became a fertile
place for the learned Christian circles of medieval Europe to cull the most barbaric
images of Islam and its Prophet PBUH.

2. Muslims and the West in History

a. Long history of frequent tension, acute rivalry, armed conflict, military
alliances across religious lines
b. Peaceful cultural exchange
c. No fundamental differences
d. Common Abrahamic Origin
e. Holy Quran and the Bible
f. God and Nature
g. Orientalism: Its Evolution and Problems
h. Islam and Christianity attach great moral value to the alleviation of
suffering
3. Western Perception of Islam and the Muslims
On the theological plane, Islam was generally not perceived as a genuine religion by
the Christian West, just as Christianity was not accepted as a genuine religion by the
Jews. This lack of acceptance was soon mixed with a fear which arose from the rapid
expansion of the geographical boundaries of the Muslim world. Had Islam remained
confined to Arabia, the Christian West would have had little reason to worry, perhaps in
a limited circle there would have been apprehensions about its teachings. But he early
victories of the Muslim armies and the remarkable speed with which these were
accomplished, produced fear, suspicion and hatred and stamped an initial image of
Islam on the Western psyche as a religion of fire and sword, an image which has now
survived more than fourteen hundred years.

a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.

Islam continue to be the subject of ridicule and scorn by West

Sources of the problem
Historical Legacy: The Crusades
Western Writing on Islam and Muslims
Differing Views on the Role of Religions in Society
Western thoughts vs. Islamic Thought
Mutual refusal to recognize the fundamental doctrines
Distorted Image
Misconceptions
Negative Representation

4. Islamism: A
Empowerment

Designer

Ideology

for

Resistance,

Change

and

Islam with all its comprehensiveness, wholeness and balance is absent from the arena,
a stranger in its homelands, denied by its people. It is served for governance and
legislation, from guiding public life in matters of state whether political, economic or
pertaining to other internal or external relations. It has been decreed by the West that
Islam should become a replica of Christianity in its age decline, a dogma without
legislation, a form of worship without practice, a religion without a state, a Quran
without authority (Sultan).
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.

Fundamentalism: a catchall term for depicting all Muslims

West: failed to provide a model effective for Islamic societies
Economic Control of Resources to achieve industrialization
Islamist groups are focused on the spiritual goals of Islam
External efforts to utilize racial, ethnic, national and linguistic differences
among Islamic Ummah
f. Islamism: the continuing process of de-colonization
g. Islamism: a reactive not a reactionary movement
h. Islamism is a quest for empowerment, addressing political concerns and
removal of oppressive rulers

5. 21st century: Islam and the West

European and American academics labouring hard to invent and present a new
imaginary global enemy to take the place of the fallen Communist foe. They have close
ties to policymakers in the West and since policymakers welcome reasons not to
change the bipolar paradigm of the past fifty years. The propagation of
misunderstanding and misinformation and the distortion of the image of Islam and he
Muslims, is today taking place at the hands of the Western media and on an
unprecedented scale. Most representatives of the western media and those consulted
by them as experts on Islam seem to have inherited and perfected the hostile role of
the authors, who popularized the absurd and ugly image of Muslims in earlier times.
a. Relations after Cold War
b. Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations between the West on the one side,
and Islamic world (and Confucian states) on the other
c. New world order
d. Democracy: Islamic and Western Perception
e. Neo colonialism
f. War on terror or War against Muslims?
g. Oil politics

h. Muslims Entangled by Economic Policies of West

i. Backwardness of the Muslim World in Science and Technology
j. CNN-ization of the world (concern over death of Christians and Jews but
not at all over Muslims)
k. Imbalanced and inaccurate portrayal of Islam and the Muslims by the
Western Media
l. Exaggeration of Muslim actions as extremist or terrorist acts

6. How to Remove Ambiguities between Islam and the West?

With the United States assumption of the leadership of the Western world and its rise
as a superpower after the Second Word War, a new disruptive element has shadowed
the Wests relations with the Muslims. This has been the United States passionate
attachment to Israel. This State was imposed on the Muslim world by force in a
process that resulted not only in the loss of life, but also in the homelessness,
oppression, misery and loss of the basic human rights of millions of Palestinians.
There are the cases of, for instance, the Palestinians, the Kashmiris, the Filipino,
Bosnian, Chechen, Kosovan and Myanmar Muslims who have suffered untold atrocities.
Muslims ask, Had the majority of these people been Christian or Jews, would the West
not have rushed to their defense? Are the rights of Muslims seen as less worthy of
concern than those of Western Christians?
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.

End of Israels blind support by the West

Genuine coexistence and cooperation
The Future: Prospects and Challenges
Dynamic Islamic cultural revival
Partnership and Harmony for the good of Muslims and the West and the rest of
humankind
Lesson from the past: avoid repeating mistakes
Cooperation not confrontation
Improving Muslim-Christian relations by dialogue
Redress for wrong done to Muslim Ummah
Widening personal contacts between Muslims and Westerners
Peaceful solution of the issues of Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine etc
Mutual respect, safeguarded rights, Justicesocial, economic and political
Wests selective, hypocritical and biased support, based on self interest and
ancient animosity should by ended
Shedding Conventional Prejudices

7. Conclusion

History and World of Politics

Like religion and culture, the political and military histories of the Islamic and Western
worlds are deeply intertwined. Islam's encounter with the Byzantine Empire was a
watershed event in both Islamic and European history. It was no secret that the first
Muslim community clearly favored the Byzantine Empire over its arch rival the Sassanid
Empire because the former was Christian and its Christian king Heraclius was held in
high esteem in early Islamic scholarship. Given the development of Europe as we know
it, Henri Pirenne's thesis in his Mohammed and Charlemagne (English translation,
1939) still merits consideration. If the Islamic conquests of the eighth and ninth

centuries had a decisive impact on the formation of Europe, one cannot study the
history of the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Baltic regions, and Western Europe
without studying the northward and westward expansion of various Muslim empires.
One case in point is the history of Umayyads in Andalusia, and another is the long
military and political engagement of the Ottoman Empire in Europe where all sorts of
apocalyptic expectations and stories about the "terrible Turk" were widely circulated, as
evidenced in Martin Luther's letters "against the Turks."

Political history is always more than the history of rulers and commanders. In 1458,
only five years after the fall of Constantinople (one of the forsaken jewels of medieval
Christendom), Pope Pius II extended an unprecedented invitation to the Ottoman Sultan
Mehmet II Fatih to convert to Christianity in order to bring all Christendom under his
rule. The Pope's proposal was to make the Ottoman sultan the "emperor of East and
West." If he heard it at all, Fatih must have smiled at the Pope's suggestion that his
westward march depended on accepting a "small amount of water" in which to be
baptized.

From the battle of Lepanto (1571) to the second siege of Vienna (1683), Ottoman
military power weakened and gave way to European powers as the new forces of global
dominance. The rapid expansion of the European colonial system shook the Muslim
world from West Africa to the Philippines. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
large parts of the Muslim world were under direct European control. The most dramatic
shock, however, came with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. In contrast to the loss
of the "peripheries" of the Muslim world, the heartland of Islam was now under French
occupation. Napoleon's famous edict in Alexandria and the response he got from the
Egyptian historian Abd al-Ramn al-Jabart in his Ajib al-athr f al-tarjim wa-alakhbr makes for one of the fascinating encounters between Islam and the West at the
end of the eighteenth century. Napoleon's mission civilisatrice was countered by alJabart's utter rejection of everything French and European. Not only were the French
ruler's armies abhorrent, al-Jabart wrote, but his praise of Islam, its Prophet, and the
Ottoman Sultan was deceitful. There was one way left for al-Jabart and his generation
of Muslims to fight the domineering armies of the French Republic, and that was to take
refuge in their unshakable belief in Islam.

The legacy of colonialism continues to make a profound impact on Islam-West relations

today. Many Muslim countries fought wars of liberation against European powers but
after independence found themselves dependent upon their former colonizers. The
current distribution of global power, once wielded by Europe and now by the United
States, fuels a sense of alienation, frustration, and mistrust in the Muslim world. In
addition to pressing policy issues, Samuel Huntington's implicit claim in his Clash of
Civilizations (1996) that there is a collision between the fundamental values of Islamic
and Western worlds and that "Islam has bloody borders" was viewed as epitomizing a
point of view that justifies the current global power imbalance to the detriment of nonWestern cultures and societies. The events of September 11th and the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq have further increased tensions between various Muslim and
Western groups. Many in Europe and the U.S. see extremist groups in the Muslim world
as a threat to the existence of international security and to the future of Western
civilization. Many in the Muslim world see the "war on terror" as a war on Islam and
Muslims. As Esposito and Mogahed show in Who Speaks for Islam (2008), the

overwhelming majority of Muslims subscribe to the universal principles of human

rights, rule of law, and democracy, which are also Western values. But they also want
the West to respect Islamic culture, religion, and tradition. This entails a more reasoned
and balanced discussion of Islam-West relations than equating Islam and Muslims
stereotypically with terrorism, violence, irrationalism, oppression, or cultural
backwardness. In this regard, Islamophobia, the unfounded fear of Islam and Muslims,
and the hatred arising from that fear are a major source of tension.

Relations between Islam and the West are constantly changing. A new element in this
long and varied history is the rise of Muslim communities living in the West. While
seeking to be active participants in their societies, the Muslim communities of the West
are also struggling with issues of integration, discrimination, and minority rights. As
their negotiation of a space within Western societies is a process that concerns both
worlds, their potential to play the role of bridge-builders is increasing. Tariq Ramadan's
To Be A European Muslim (1999), for instance, invites Muslims living in the West to call
Europe and the U.S. their cultural and political "home." Like many of his counterparts,
Ramadan's plea is for Muslims to salvage Islam from being a phenomenon of
immigration and for Muslim communities to claim a vital place for themselves in the
Western world.

The Cultural Divide

Culture is another contested area in the history of Islam-West relations. The influence of
Islamic culture and civilization on medieval Europe was decisive and largely irresistible.
Medieval Europeans hated Islam as a religion but admired it as a culture and
civilization. The works of Muslim philosophers, theologians, scientists, belletrists, poets,
storytellers, artists, and mystics penetrated the European cultural landscape from the
ninth to the sixteenth century. St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest Christian
thinker of the Middle Ages, spent much of his intellectual career refuting what he
considered the heresies of (Latin) Averroism, a much-contested school of thought
founded by the European followers of the Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd,
known in the West as Averroes (d. 1193). While the ideas of Ibn Rushd were officially
banned by the order of Bishop Tempier in 1277, other areas of the world including the
Andalusian cities of Cardoba, Granada, Toledo, and Seville enjoyed a culture of
tolerance and critical inquiry in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim seekers of
knowledge studied in the same schools, conducted research in the same libraries, and
studied the heavens from the same observatories. It was in Toledo that many Arabic
works including the Qurn were translated into Latin, leading eventually to what
Charles Haskins has called the "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century."
Even the Crusaders, who were among the first European Christians to set foot in the
lands of Islam, could not help but admire the advanced, vibrant, and clean cities of the
Muslim east. The captivating stories and descriptions of Usmah ibn Munqidh's Kitb alItibr are as much a testimony to the Muslim views of the Crusaders as the European
perceptions of Muslims in the twelfth century. As early as the ninth century, a Spaniard
named Alvaros was voicing a heightened sense of cultural insecurity:
Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of
Mohammedan theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire
a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can one find a layman who reads the
Latin commentaries on Holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the

Prophets, the Apostles? Alas! The young Christians who are most conspicuous for their
talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic; they read and
study with avidity Arabic books; they amass whole libraries of them at a vast cost, and
they everywhere sing the praises of Arab lore.
Despite such warnings, medieval Europe maintained its love-hate relationship with
Islamic culture. Dante's Divine Comedy contained references to prominent figures of
Islam from the Prophet Muammad and Ibn Sn to Ibn Rushd and Saladin (al al-Dn
al-Ayyb). Saladin, hailed as a chivalrous commander and just ruler, was romanticized
in Walter Scott's The Talisman (1825) and treated favorably in Ridley Scott's movie The
Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Dante's interest in Islamic themes, however, went beyond
populating his Hell with Muslim figures. The Spanish scholar Miguel Asn Palacios traced
the influence of Islamic themes in Dante's work in his Islam and the Divine Comedy and
claimed that the main plot of the Divine Comedy was in fact inspired by the mirj
tradition of the nocturnal journey of the Prophet Muammad into heaven and hell.
The cultural relations between Islam and the West took a drastically new turn when
Europe arose as the dominant and unchallenged force of the modern era. From politics
and education to science and art, modern European culture changed Islam-West
relations once and for all. Combining a Judeo-Christian past with a secular present,
Western culture has created a rift between Westernized elites and traditional
communities in the Muslim world.
The Muslim world has, over the last two centuries, adopted four major positions with
regard to the rise of Western modernity. The first is a total adaptation of Western
culture as the culmination and common heritage of human history. Mustafa Kemal
Atatrk in Turkey and Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran sought to modernize their countries by
adopting Western culture and institutions. The second position is outright rejection and
denouncement of Western culture as cultural imperialism. This attitude is generally
couched in the language of conservative Islamism as in the case of modern Wahhb
and Salaf movements. But it is equally a statement of identity politics which sees the
West as a selfish and materialistic culture.
The third position is critical engagement with Western cultural values and institutions
advocated by reformist Muslim thinkers. From the Ottoman intellectuals Namik Kemal
and Mehmed kif Ersoy to their colleagues the Iranian Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn and the
Egyptian Muammad Abduh, the reformists sought to unlink the Western value system
from the material achievements of Western civilization, that is, science, technology,
democracy, and constitutionalism. Their assumption was based on a clear distinction
between an objective material civilization, which was represented by the modern West,
and spiritual values, which the Muslim world did not need to borrow from the West.
While this view is still widely held in the Muslim world, extreme modernization and
globalization have made such distinctions impossible.
The fourth position can be described as traditional Islam in which the majority of
traditional ulam as well as ordinary Muslims believe that a more elevated ethical and
spiritual dialogue with the West (and the rest of the world) is possible while maintaining
one's cultural tradition. In the case of Alija Izetbegovi, the Muslim philosopherpresident of Bosnia, this means placing Islam outside the categories of East and West.
As his Islam Between East and West seeks to show, even though the Muslim sense of
time and space differs from that of the West, the Islamic and Western worlds can to a
certain extent be brought together. In his Traditional Islam in the Modern World, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr argues that while the Western and Muslim worlds have different historical
experiences and cultural traditions, they can trace their religious history to a shared
spirituality. But all of these call for a reformulation of contemporary Islamic thought

which has been shaped by its encounter with the modern secular West. The Muslim
world is confronted today with the steady invasion of Western culture and shares with
the rest of the world a sense of cultural loss and disempowerment.

The Religious Challenge

As a monotheistic religion, Islam defines itself as the last of the three great Abrahamic
faith traditions. The Qurn and adth (the two canonical sources of Islam) and the
later scholarly traditions reveal an acute awareness of Judaism and Christianity. The
two sources contain numerous references to Jewish and Christian themes, calling upon
Jews and Christians to unite in a robust monotheism against Meccan polytheism and its
profligacy. Born into a multi-religious and multicultural environment, early Muslims
were in contact with the various Jewish and Christian communities of the East in the
eighth and ninth centuries.
The polemical works of Byzantine theologians were as much theological in nature as
cultural and political. As the lands once under Byzantine rule rapidly became part of
dr al-Islm (the abode of Islam where Muslims lived as a majority), Islamic theology
posed a set of religious challenges. While Jews and Christians were recognized as the
People of the Book (ahl al-kitb) and were granted some religious freedoma license
no other religion has ever grantedthey were invited to a serious theological dialogue,
"a common word between us and you" (Qurn, l Imrn 3:64). The fact that Jesus
Christ and the Virgin Mary, among other Biblical figures, were given a prominent place
in the Qurn and the adth became a source of consternation for many Christian
theologians in the East and later in Europe.
The medieval Christian theologians interpreted the themes common to Islam and the
Biblical tradition not as a matter of "creative borrowing," as nineteenth-century
Orientalists would call it, but as a sign of outright heresy. St. John of Damascus, known
in Arabic as Yann al-Dimashq (d. 749), called Islam the "heresy of the Ishmaelites,"
referring to Arab Muslims as descendants of Abraham's son Ishmael, and called the
Prophet of Islam an "impostor." The Christian apocryphal literature on the Prophet
Muammad was more than polemical. If Embrico of Mainz's (d. 1077) Vita Mahumeti
and Walter of Compigne's Otia de Machomete a century later are any indication, it
was also an elaborate means of constructing a religious "other" for medieval
Christendom. The refusal to speak to Muslims on their own terms continued throughout
the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. A section of Pascal's Penses called "Contre
Mahomet" pits Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad against one another as
embodiments of two contradictory qualities: the former utterly godly and merciful, the
latter completely of this world and ruthless. The famous British Orientalist and later
Rector of the University of Edinburgh, William Muir (d. 1905), went so far in his weighty
Life of Mahomet as to call the Prophet Muammad a "psychopath." More recent
epithets include "terrorist" (Jerry Falwell) and "demon-possessed pedophile" (Jerry
Vines).
There were, however, attempts at what we call today interfaith dialogue. Following the
tradition of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Ramon Llull (d. 1315), John of
Segovia (d. 1458), the so-called "first missionary to Muslims," believed that the only
way to counter the menace of Islam was not to build up armies, which the Europe of
the time was in any case unable to do, but to convince Muslims to accept Christianity.
He thus proposed a most unexpected meeting, a contraferentia, as he called it, of
Christian and Muslim scholars to discuss theology. John's meeting never took place, but
it was taken up by Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) in De Pace Fidei, in which he imagined a

meeting of a Jew, an Arab, an Indian, a Persian, a Syrian, a Turk, a Tatar, and an

Armenian, each in the end acknowledging the Christian truth.
While Nicholas of Cusa's interfaith conference did not lead to a movement of interfaith
dialogue, it did represent a new and creative point of view. Today, Muslim-Christian
relations are an important part of Islam-West relations. Numerous interfaith initiatives
and dialogue programs are taking place at different levels and between different
communities. Ever since the declaration of the historic Nostra tate , the Catholic
Church has been engaged in various dialogue initiatives with Muslims. The most recent
and prominent meeting took place November 46, 2008, at the Vatican when a
delegation of Muslim scholars attended a meeting with Catholic scholars and met Pope
Benedict XVI. Numerous other interreligious initiatives are under way between Muslims,
and Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox Christians, as well as with Jewish communities
in Muslim-majority countries and in Europe and the United States.