Meetings Of Minds: In the great trading cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, Islamic civilisation florished for close to 300 years. How did a culture once synonymous with tolerance and learning become so closely associated with violence and fanaticism?
THERE WAS A TIME when tolerance, compassion and the search for enlightenment were the singular virtues of Islam. When the peoples of Christendom still bent their knees to brutal mounted warriors, and the Papacy was little more than a trophy for the corrupt inheritors of Rome’s decaying grandeur, Islamic civilisation was the wonder of the world.
In the space of barely three centuries the followers of the
Prophet Mohammed blended the best of the classical era’s legacy with the strict
moral discipline and judicious social organisation of the Islamic faith.
In the Muslim Caliphate, which stretched from the Euphrates
River to the Rock of Gilbraltar, Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in
relative harmony. In return for a modest tax, the adherents of non-Islamic
faiths were allowed to live in peace. In this tolerant environment scholars and
craftsmen were encouraged to extend the boundaries of knowledge and technology.
The resulting cultural flowering, subsidised by the immense wealth of the
Caliphate’s trading centres, ushered in a golden age. Islamic merchants and
traders dominated the exchange of the raw products of Europe and Africa for the
finished goods of China and India.
Indeed, it might almost be said that the military and
economic success of Islamic civilisation was the goad that drove Christendom to
embark on its epic voyages of exploration, its exploitation of Africa and the
Americas, and the rapid development of the mercantile and industrial expertise
which ultimately permitted the peoples of Europe to dominate the planet.
Westerners all-too-easily forget that when Christopher
Columbus set sail from Palos de la Fonterra on 3 August 1492, the Eurasian
landmass was dominated by two vast super-powers: the Ottoman and Chinese
empires. The kingdoms and principalities of Christendom were bit-players.
The beliefs and institutions we prize most highly: the
essential equality and “inalienable rights” of all human-beings; the primacy of
reason and the scientific method over religious faith and “primitive”
superstition; our democratic system of government, within which, alone, human
equality and individual liberty, especially the freedom of expression, can hope
to survive; all are the product of the West’s relatively brief (300 years)
sojourn as global hegemon.
But all around us are signs that the era of Western hegemony
is waning. Islam has become the vector of its decline – and we have no one to
blame but ourselves.
From the First Crusade of 1096-99 to the Sykes-Picot
“Agreement” of 1916, Westerners have disposed of the lands of Muslim peoples
with breath-taking arrogance. The latter’s singular misfortune to live on top
of the world’s most productive oil fields has only whetted the West’s appetite
for domination. A resource which could have led to the flowering of a new
golden age of Islamic civilisation has been sequestered for the United States
and its allies by a vicious congeries of kleptomaniacal kings, sultans, emirs
and military strongmen – all watched over by the garrison state of Israel.
Are we truly surprised that the West’s history of invasion,
occupation and exploitation in Muslim lands has armed the most regressive and
murderous interpreters of Mohammed’s message? What chance had moderation in the
face of Western imperialism? Who else but the Wahabbists, Salafists and Jihadis
were likely to benefit from the depredations of the Western powers?
While these extremists batter at the gates of the West:
pronouncing fatwas on novelists, murdering artists and, as we have seen over
the past fortnight, attacking US embassies and clamouring for the head of the
film-maker responsible for the risible Innocence
of Muslims; the cultural confidence of the West, its adherence to
Enlightenment values, has already given way. Post-imperial guilt has given
birth to the pernicious cultural relativism of post-modernism, and transformed
the intellectual guardians of the West’s egalitarian and libertarian traditions
into militant Islam’s fifth column.
Within the space of twenty years, the world will likely
witness the ratification of a United Nations’ international convention,
sponsored by the United States and its allies, outlawing the defamation and/or
scandalising of the world’s faith communities. Once adopted by national
legislatures, it will be a crime to write a novel like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or make a film like
Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of
Christ.
Let this paraphrase of W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming be Freedom of Expression’s epitaph:
The best lacked all
conviction, while the worst
Were full of
passionate intensity.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 September 2012.
