Meddeb Abdelwahab - Islam and the Challenge of Civilization

Islam and the Challenge of Civilization

Copyright 2013 Fordham University Press

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This work was originally published in French as Pari de civilisation , ditions du Seuil, 2009.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meddeb, Abdelwahab.

Islam and the challenge of civilization / Abdelwahab Meddeb ; translated by Jane Kuntz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Islam21st century. 2. Islamic civilization. 3. MuslimsNon-Muslim countries. 4. Islamic renewal. I. Kuntz, Jane. II. Title.

BP161.3.M43 2013

297.2'709051dc23

2012050168

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Contents

Appendixes

A.

B.

All is not well with Islam. In fact, it is seriously ailing. I have ventured to diagnose this ailment and to prescribe the cure in four previous books written since the horrendous attacks of September 11, 2001. This new work is an extension of the scrutiny undertaken in those earlier ones. I open with a reminder that this ailment can be best summed up as the use of violence in the name of God. I will pursue this point of inquiry, asking whether it is somehow a fate peculiar to Islam, or whether we are dealing here with a structural feature shared by religious constructions in general.

I posit from the outset that violence produced by belief is not unique to Islam but finds virulent expression even among beliefs issuing from the Indian subcontinent, a region stereotypically associated with a spirituality grounded in the miracle of nonviolence. Thus, an apparent predisposition to violence is in evidence beyond the sphere of monotheisms, whose internal conflict, need I point out, is itself fratricidal by nature.

One has only to survey monotheisms over space and time to note that wars fought in the name of the Lord were biblical before they were Koranic. One typical illustration would be the massacre ordered by an angry Moses upon discovering that his people had lapsed into paganism. As a result of the Golden Calf episode, the Levites carried out the orders of their prophet and slaughtered three thousand people in one day (Exodus 32:28). Joshua, successor to the founder, was no exception. If readers need convincing, I would urge them to reread the passage relating to the massacre he perpetrated after the fall of Jericho, where he spared neither man, woman, nor child, nor even animals (Joshua 6:21). Today, certain fanatical Jewish literalists are seeking to universalize and contemporize what they call the Judgment of Amalek, which refers to the chief of the Amalekites, whom the Hebrews had to combat, because they were preventing the Hebrews from getting to the Promised Land (Exodus 17:815).

Thus, when it comes to violence, the Prophet of Islam is a direct descendant of the Old Testament. The much-discussed Verse of the Sword ordaining that pagans be killed and the War Verse calling for a fight to the death against Christians and Jews both have a biblical ring (Koran 9:5, 29). Yet it is these verses that feed the murderous fanaticism of fundamentalist Muslims.

If the exercise of violence seems consistent with revealed scripture, nevertheless an important matter of degree distinguishes Judaism from Islam, which is that the latter universalizes what the former particularizes. Where Judaism wages the Lords war for the Holy Land only, Islam sets its sights on the entire world. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalists did not invent jihd , the driving force that propelled the expansion of Islam from the start. As an eleventh-century Chinese chronicler, Ou-Yang Hsui, attests, Muslim troops hurled themselves into the thick of battle, hoping for martyrdom, after their chief had galvanized them with promises of paradise for those who die in combat for the holy cause.

Though it is true that the Gospels move away from this violence, Christians have nonetheless resorted to surprising extremes of violence over the course of history. I see in this a betrayal of Christianitys founding message. Admittedly, Augustine theorized the just war to defend the city against barbarian invasion. He was not talking about a call to war in the name of the faith, but the Doctor of Hippo had to legitimize that call even though he knew it conflicted with the spirit of the Gospels. The notion of a just war has often been contested in Christian circles, where it is considered to be in direct contradiction with Christs teachings. Hence, to justify the use of violence, the notion of necessary war was introduced. Yet it took nearly a millennium and the launching of the Crusades for Christianity to arrive at a notion equivalent to jihd , perhaps to counter its effects using the same weapons.

These reminders are not intended to mitigate the malady that is afflicting Islam, but to show that believers often take their founding scriptures a step further, or even move beyond them altogether. If, throughout history, Christianity has not always honored the Gospels message of peace, Islam today should still strive to find a way to foil those clauses of the Koranic text that call for war. This book works toward that goal by waging what I call the war of interpretations, while placing special emphasis on the context in which the holy text itself was issued and received.

This check on violence via the return to context is absolutely crucial, with regard not only to the question of violence but also to the many anthropological anachronisms carried forward by the law that issues from the spirit and the letter of the founding text (here, of course, I am thinking of the Koran-inspired shara ).

Again, with regard to violence, states founded in Islam will need to realize that it is their duty to counteract the notion of holy war, of jihd , for it flagrantly contradicts both their participation in the concert of nations and the march toward the Kantian utopia of perpetual peace that has remained an aspiration of the times, despite the persistence of war and the hegemonic effects of the powerful, with their urge to rule the world. Indeed, an ever more diverse sample of humanity is trending toward hegemony by force of arms or economic clout. Is this not the aim of emerging nations such as China, India, and the Arab oil states alongside Europe and the United States?

Islamic countries must wake up to the fact that times have changed, that the world is a different place. When it comes to religious identity, Islam continues to perceive Christianity as if it were still its medieval antagonist, despite modern notions of nation and peoples that have circumscribed the influence of religion. And now that the whole issue of state has become postnational, the factor of religion is receding even further. In Europe, for example, religion necessarily cedes priority to the all-important prime notion of citizenship, one that involves a wholly different set of laws designed outside the kind of religious prescription that belongs to another age.