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Essay on the Role of Islam in International Relations

Updated September 13, 2022
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Essay on the Role of Islam in International Relations essay

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Islam has been a source of great contestations, criticisms, curiosity and fear since almost the second half of the first millennium, when the Umayyad dynasty, Abbasid Caliphate and then the Spanish Umayyad Caliphate were established (Kumar HM, 2015). For the first time in history, a crusade had to be waged in 11th century in the name of Christianity, since the emergence of Islam was seen as a threat to the same. The emergence of Islam and the revelation-based politics considerably transformed the geopolitical turf for the Christian world. The Roman empire had declined and the Hellenistic culture was on its way to a complete decline. The Persian and the Sassanid empires were turning Islamic and a major turn in Islamic history comes after the annexation of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1457.

By the 15th century, East Europe had turned Islamic. The broad idea of a Christian Europe, in reality, had become very limited. Europe-west-Christianity became synonymous to each other and Islam had become an antonym to them. Since the 1960s, there has been a Zionistic bias against Islam and the Arab world. Millions of Muslims were murdered and exiled from the Balkans, the Caucasus and India. Muslim hatred of the nations behind these atrocities is regional. The odium stirred by smaller Zionist abuses is pan-Islamic. A considerable faction of right-wing Zionists, of the sort who have long dominated pro-Israel politics, are often linked to organized Islamophobia promotion. Islam is seen as antithetical to Zionism.

The west has become Islamophobic and Islam has become synonymous with threats, conflicts and war. It was looking at Islam with the same orientalist bias as the colonizers were looking at the colonies. They saw the colonized as someone or something to be transformed from uncivilized to civilized, from good to evil, from ugly to beautiful and the west had become the self-proclaimed torchbearer of inciting this change. Someone also needed to be demonized or villainized in order for the West to show themselves as superiors and the bearers of everything good and as a result of this, the Arab world and Islam became antithesis to the West.

In the second half of the 1990s, American political analyst and writer, Samuel P. Huntington wrote the book The Clash of Civilizations: and the Remaking of the World Order in which he argued that the Christian West would now be challenged by the Islamic East. The clash would now be not between two religions, but two civilizations. Just five years later, his prediction comes true (according to the west) in the form of what has been termed as “the biggest attack on American soil”, the 9/11. This phrase ‘clash of civilizations’ was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, and most popularly by Bernard Lewis in an article in September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. Huntington’s book was a continuation of almost fifteen hundred years of Islamophobia in IR, which accelerated in 1970s after the Iranian revolution.

Edward Said in his work Covering Islam (1981) notes how the western media is guided by ontological bias against Islam and Islamic countries (Said, 1981). Though, contemporary studies aimed at understanding of Islam have attempted to know the diverse categories within what is visibly a broad concept. The understandings and explanations have ranged from Sufi Mystiques to Worldwide devotional movements such as Tablighi Jamaat and the Deoband and even the radical Islamic movements such as the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. In academic circles, in most of the world now, it is acknowledged that Islam is diverse and multifarious. Unfortunately, when it comes to the political and the international arena, the understanding becomes narrow. Islam becomes a monolithic phenomenon, reflecting a parochial, prejudiced and a confused interpretation.

This parochialism intensified after 9/11 and generated a view of Islam based on 3 assumptions: First, that intermingling of religion and politics is unique to Islam. Second, that political Islam, like Islam itself is monolithic, and third, that political Islam is inherently violent. These assumptions led to the construction of holy terror thesis, with its fascination with Islam, and as something which reflects a political antipathy and a cultural antipathy towards Islam. In writing about Islam and its interface with violence, an inevitable generalization with threat was engendered (Kumar HM, 2015).

Edward Said in Orientalism argued that the modern-day occidental reactions to Islam have been dominated by a type of thinking that may still be called Orientalist. The general basis of orientalist thought is an imaginative geography dividing the world into two unequal parts, the large and the “different world called the orient, the other…. called the occident or the west. Such divisions always take place when one society or culture thinks about another culture as different from it, but it is interesting that even when the orient has been considered an inferior part of the world, it has always been endowed both with greater size and with greater potential for power than the west. In so far as it has always been seen as belonging to the orient, its particular fate within the general structure of orientalism has to be looked at with very special hostility and fear.” “….so far as the west is concerned, Islam represents not only a formidable competitor but also a late-coming challenge to Christianity.” (Said, 1980)

On the other hand, almost a century before Said, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, a political activist and ideologist was travelling throughout the Muslim world, attempting to reform Islam. On account of his grounding in the tradition of Persian Islamic philosophy, which was open to innovation and new ideas, it emboldened his revisionist Islam. Throughout his life, he spoke of reform and change and reconciling revealed religion with traditional Islam. Owing to his time, he was most deeply concerned with the exigencies of anti-imperialist strategizing and amplified more eloquently, than anyone of his time, the manifold threats posed by the west to the civilization built by Islam. This prediction comes true during and after his lifetime. Afghani argued for the rational nature of Islam, while still maintaining its cultural identity. He recognized the threats posed by western orientation of modern development and the threat this orientation posed to cultural authenticity in the Muslim world. He believed that social and political change could only be brought if Muslims had a firm sense of the civilization to which Islam had given birth. By civilization Afghani meant the intellectual and moral achievements that contributed to the unity and greatness of a people.

Afghani viewed Islamic civilization, the foundation of pan-Islamism, as a common cultural stream that fed the national political aspirations of such distinct countries as India, Persia and Egypt. His idea of reformist Islam is in direct contradiction to the kind of view propagated on Islam in contemporary IR. He kept himself up-to-date with European knowledge and the scientific discoveries of the west, but did not believe in the blind imitation of the west. He wanted Muslims to foster their own Islamic civilizational identity which combined both the rationality of the west and the teaching of the traditional Islam. This makes it quite clear that Islam has always been a multifarious conception than what is perceived by the west today (Mishra, 2012).

Afghani’s life revolved around two tasks: the reformation of Islam for which he likened himself to Martin Luther King and the unification of the Islamic world. Afghani caught the substratum of politics (because a consequence of Islamic theory is a political theory), ‘which is philosophical rather than theological in nature and immediately becomes suspect to the orthodox and Afghani declares so long as the humanity exists, the struggle will not cease between dogma and free investigation, between religion and philosophy: ‘a desperate struggle in which I fear the triumph will not be of free thought’ (Unsar, 2011). This seemed like a reference to the kind of narrow view attributed to Islam in contemporary times.

Afghani’s thought also reflects the universality of knowledge. He claimed that there is no end or limit to science and it is science that ruled, rules and will rule the world. The profoundness of his thought is introduced with his argument that ‘men must be related to science, not science to men’, since by asserting that science cannot and should not be divided into Muslim science and European science, he referred to the universality of science (Unsar, 2011). He also insisted that rationalism and science were not western imports but traditional elements of Islamic culture (Kohn, 2009). Europe had claimed universality of knowledge discourses without acknowledging the other side of the world. Enlightenment was not a concept that originated in Europe after Martin Luther King and spread throughout the world. Islam already had its own brand of Enlightenment and Afghani in 19th century was already critiquing the European enlightenment. Quran already had concepts such as Liberty, freedom, rights and so on.

A recurrent theme in Afghani’s thought is Education. In his writings and speeches, he asserted the nature and purpose of education with precision and certainty and points out that ‘education if it is good produces perfection from imperfection and nobility from baseness. If it is not good, it changes the basic state of nature and becomes the cause of decline and decadence’ (Unsar, 2011). This is perfectly in consonance with the modern narrow knowledge on Islam. Modern western knowledge either brackets Islam into a unidimensional religion or considers it synonymous with violence. Afghani’s purpose was to show Islam as a civilization, a world power potentially and only incidentally a faith. His thought had a clear demarcation between faith and religion. (Unsar, 2011)

In Covering Islam, Said points out that even Bacon, whose ‘Advancement of Learning’ is considered to have inaugurated modern western thought in its most enthusiastic, self-encouraging modes, in effect expresses all sorts of doubts that the various impediments to knowledge can ever really be removed. Bacon’s disciple Vico said explicitly that human knowledge is only what human beings have made; external reality, then is no more than the “modification of the human mind”. The prospect for objective knowledge of what is distant and alien diminish further after Nietzsche (Said, 1981).

Like Afghani, Said also considers how western ‘science’, ‘the relatively detached instruments of scientific quasi-objective representation’ can be used to misrepresent a ‘distant and alien society’ such as Islam. ‘Anything written about Islam by a professional scholar is within the sphere of influence of corporations, the media, the govt, all of which in turn play a very large role in making interpretations of Islam, and subsequently, knowledge of it, desirable and ‘in national interest’. In other words, knowledge and coverage of the Islamic world are defined in the US by geopolitics and economic interests. The idea that Islam is ‘medieval and dangerous as well as hostile and a threat’ has acquired the status of a canon.

In opposition to this long history of hostile coverage of Islam, Said calls for a new knowledge which he calls ‘antithetical knowledge’. He defines an antithetical knowledge as a kind of knowledge produced by people who quite consciously consider themselves to be writing in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Here, the ‘methodological silence of orientalism is replaced by the political meanings of scholarship. In antithetical scholarship, Islam does not become ‘reductive and monochromatic’. More importantly an antithetical scholar puts intellect not at service of power but at the service of criticism, community, dialogue and moral sense. (Farooqi, 1997)

References

  1. Kumar HM, S. (2015). Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World: Deconstructing the Cliche of Islamophobia and the Genealogies of Islamic Extremism. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42(4), 579-598.
  2. Said, E. W. (1998, January 2). Islam Through Western Eyes. Retrieved March 16, 2020, from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/islam-through-western-eyes/
  3. Unsar, S. (2011). On Jamal Ad-din Al-Afghani and the 19th Century Islamic political thought. Gazi University İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi, 13(3), 79-96.
  4. Kohn, M. (2009). Afghānī on Empire, Islam, and Civilization. Political Theory, 37(3), 398-422. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/25655487
  5. Said, E. W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. New York: Vintage Books
  6. Mishra, P. (2012). From the ruins of empire: The revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia. London: Allen Lane
  7. Farooqi, A. (1997). Book review: Edward Said, Covering Islam. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from http://www.anveshi.org.in/broadsheet-on-contemporary-politics/archives/broadsheet-on-contemporary-politics-vol-2-no-1011/book-review-edward-said-covering-islam/
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