Islamo-Christian Civilization

by Richard Bulliet

Released: 18 Nov 2004

Polls indicate that somewhere around 15 percent of the population in most Muslim countries desire a religiously oriented government that will impose their religious code of behavior on all citizens. After the recent American election, can anyone doubt that at least 15 percent of the American electorate shares an identical desire? As evangelical leader Bob Jones III put it in a letter to President Bush: “In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn’t deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.”

Popular slogans like “clash of civilizations” and “what went wrong?” drive wedges between Muslims and non-Muslims by teaching that Islamic belief and practice are incompatible with the modern world. In fact, Islam and the West belong historically, theologically, and emotionally to a single Islamo-Christian civilization. Their current hostility toward one another is not unlike the hostility that kept Protestants and Catholics at one another’s throats for centuries. But in the end, Protestants and Catholics learned tolerance; and in the end, Muslims and the non-Muslims of the West will live together.

What binds Christians and Jews in a Judeo-Christian civilization is not just a shared belief in God and a shared scripture. It is a history of conflict and compromise, horrors and heroes, a history that ends in mutual respect and recognition of common values. What binds Islam and Western Christendom, along with the modern secular West that western Christendom gave rise to, is the same god and the same scriptural tradition, along with periods of warfare interspersed with periods of cultural borrowing.

Muslims often observe that the West willfully denies the Islamic heritage of science and philosophy that formed the foundations of its modernity. This is a fair accusation. However, it is equally true that the borrowings of science and philosophy have gone the other way over the past two centuries.

Cultural borrowing also takes place on the mundane level. The soap you showered with this morning was borrowed from the Islamic world, as were the coffee and orange juice you drank for breakfast, the sugar you put in the coffee, the colorful glaze on the coffee cup, and the clear glass you sipped the juice from. The newspaper you read was a further product of cultural borrowing, both the paper itself and the idea of printing.

When Europe was deeply immersed in this cultural borrowing, it was talking incessantly of crusades and warfare. Now that the Islamic world is on the borrowing end of the relationship, we hear warlike words and denunciations of Western culture from the other side. No one likes to think of themselves as in need of someone else’s culture.

The preachers of confrontation nevertheless tell us that Islam is incompatible with democracy and dedicated to war without end. And they observe that even if we do have a few fanatics on our side -- Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma bombing fame, for one -- our culture does not produce international conspiracies that fly airliners into skyscrapers.

These tired claims about democracy and endless war are belied daily by the hundreds of Muslim thinkers currently writing and talking about evolving Islamic thought in a peaceful twenty-first century context.

The question of terrorism requires more serious consideration. If a secular American president used police powers to suppress all religious voices in the American political arena and threw into concentration camps all preachers and lay leaders who openly disagreed with his views, evangelical America would take up arms. The same would happen if an evangelical president similarly oppressed secular Americans who tried to oppose him politically. Americans don’t fly airplanes into skyscrapers not because they are all reasonable people, but because they have a free and open political system that guarantees their right to express their views and seek governmental change through elections.

The problem of the Muslim world, and the root of Muslim religious discontent, is lack of freedom, not hatred of modernity or of the West. However, when Western governments show political and military support for tyranny, as they have done in many countries for decades and are still doing today, they become targets for Muslim anger.

The road out of our mutual dilemma lies with political liberalization, not with war. Everyone knows this. But liberalization is difficult to achieve because the autocratic regimes have so much to lose. Not only is war easier, but it encourages dictatorial rulers in their belief that America will never abandon its “friends,” no matter how brutally they suppress dissent.

This situation must change. No one on any side should be dying to perpetuate tyranny. The challenge to the West is how to back away from support of oppression. The challenge to the oppressors is to find ways of liberalizing that do not lead to chaos. The challenge to the vast population of Muslims who want for themselves and their children a share in choosing the governments they live under is to show their openness to political pluralism. The test of all these challenges is free elections with Muslim political parties participating on a level of equality with all other political forces.

In the meantime, the sooner people in the West acknowledge their religious roots, and admit to the role of religious bigotry in their suspicions of Muslims, the more we can hope for a reduction in tensions. And the sooner Muslims gain enough confidence in the prospects for liberalization to reject the jihadists in their midst, the more the West can reject pleas of support from dictatorial friends.

Islamo-Christian civilization has been a reality for centuries, though no one on either side has ever seen a good reason to admit it. Living physically separated by seas and armed frontiers, both sides felt free to indulge in warlike bombast. But we are no longer living apart. Today’s world cannot afford yesterday’s militancy, or the extension of that militancy into the indefinite future through a bombastic “war on terror.”

Jews and Christians began to experiment with mutual tolerance in the nineteenth century. It didn’t work very well; but when the worst horrors were past, people on both sides embraced the novel idea that they all belonged to a Judeo-Christian civilization. Let us hope that the Muslim and Western nations can realize their common roots and their common destiny in an Islamo-Christian civilization without going through a century of similar catastrophe.

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Islam: A View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (September 2004).

Copyright © 2004 Richard Bulliet

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Released: 19 November 2004
Word Count: 998 words
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Topics:

Afghanistan

Africa

Arab World

China

Europe

Iran

Iraq