Dialogue Between Civilizations: Muslims and the West - Khalid Blankinship

the here I've written sort of an outline of what I'll talk about and that is plenty I don't know whether I can cover everything or not dialogue between civilizations Muslims in the West first of all if we're going to talk about this we have to define our terms we've kind of defined Muslims and Islam somewhat although probably not enough for this subject but we haven't defined civilization or the West and all of these concepts are somewhat problematical civilization means or relates to the Latin word for city and since ancient polities were city-states it also relates to the word citizen citizenship and so on so that has relations to these concepts and historically and Western discourse has been used to distinguish civilization from barbarism or a similar civilization from primitivism and such things so civilized is good and what is set in opposition to it usually is not and historically this was not led to bias against Islam so much as bias against primal peoples such as Indian tribes and so on because they were dude is uncivilized in pre-modern or say the early modern past the pre contemporary past and we're put down as a result and I think as I said in another lecture when you get right down to it the definition of civilization is what has writing more than any other distinguishing characteristic it's the presence of writing even though the Incas were the exception that proves the rule had no writing and are accorded the title civiles so that they make that is an exception in that case and the other accoutrements of civilization were enough that they consider its civilization especially its impressively large state that sprawled over South America from Ecuador to Chile so civilization is kind of an artificial concept to some extent and undoubtedly it should not be seen as something that's just well I mean it has been historically something that has put a kind of an opposition between primal and small-scale religions and cultures and large-scale ones and that probably should not be viewed invidiously if we want to be academically proper and correct now the West is of course a very problematic concept because it's connected with civilization then we speak of Western civilization our colleges and universities usually have Western civilization course or series of courses often mandatory as at Temple University although sometimes it is masked by using other names for it so at Temple University it's called intellectual heritage and the term Western doesn't appear in it but we know what that means basically Western civilization Alera tidge it's something ingrained in us through all our textbooks and even though ancient Iraqi and ancient Egyptian civilization for example have kind of been tacked on it generally sort of goes Greece Rome medieval Europe modern Europe and world and that is represented as a particular civilized tradition and other traditions outside of that could still be civilizational but they are separate from it and usually indifferent and it is and they are not taught except as area studies or marginal things generally and the thing about the West is that the West is a civilizational identification that is not an ethnic or a historical term but is a geographical one and to a large extent that does not fit what is said of the other areas in the world and their civilizations we talk about Indian civilization and it's only recently become more politically correct to talk about South Asian but in order to separate between the political state of modern India and the region which also includes Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Nepal and Bhutan and we've talked about Chinese civilization more than Far Eastern or East Asian although that does arise as well so the geographical terminology itself is somewhat odd because it tends to limit and locate that in some area perceived as the West Western Europe and what is west of that Canada and the United States and also perhaps by extension and affiliation the Latin American area so that you have this as the West and everything else is not the West and it provides a kind of a decisive boundary where you don't have an expression of grey areas but it's somewhat geographically defined and it tends then to deny pluralism inside that area on the other hand probably for a shorthand in teaching we need some kind of terminology and so it wouldn't be thought that this was invented with malice aforethought it was just something that arose the terming of it as the West and when you have Islam in the West or Muslims in the West you have a very odd opposition because you have one that is a religion and ideology or if it's if you say Muslims a group of people who can around versus a geographical area or region and so that sort of doesn't meet and it's somewhat inappropriate if you view it as two similar things in opposition to each other it's not appropriate on the other hand if one viewed it as the West being a fixed geographical area and Islam is some kind of a fusion of some ideology into that area from outside of it then that might be something that would be more conceivable but it still wouldn't necessarily be a proper way of viewing things persons like myself and sheikh hamza and dr. barbara because we're in use first-name basis here are all Western and Muslim at the same time and nobody I can't deny that I'm a Western person that I've grown up Western that my family is Western that nobody in my family except me as a Muslim although my father may Allah have mercy on him became a Muslim nine days before he died of cancer a little over a year ago and so being Western and Muslim at the same time naturally makes a great problem for us when we are confronted with the dialogue between civilizations or the conflict of Islam in the West or whatever I guess because we don't see any particular conflict there at least not between Islam and the West as things and of course the constructionists and post modernists will say well these are all inaccurate designations because we are reifying things that is we're making Islam into a concrete thing and it isn't that and certainly if we do that it denies the pluralism that's why the title of this lecture is Muslims and the West rather than Islam in the West and I hope you have gotten the idea from our lectures here at least that Islam has great variety in it and there's a great deal of difference in it and in fact a considerable lack of unity that often troubles and Muslims okay so these are some of the problems of the terms and if we reinterpret the conflictual aspect of this relationship as being the anxiety of Western power elites about Islam and Muslims and we were to see that in such terms as it being kind of a power relationship then we would see that there can be a kind of opposition ISM in that sense because nobody wants to be loaded over a ruled by anybody else and yet the power structures of the world are in fact very hierarchical and that leads to a great deal of the sense of unease that pervades the American society anyway because Americans are nurtured on concepts of equality and democracy to a very large extent and many people are observant that that although it's on the books legally and constitutionally is subverted somewhat by economic power structures that such as exist in our country and so that the side one side of the coin being voting elections democracy Constitution and so on on the other hand freedom of enterprise and ownership means the ownership of some and the non ownership of others which is obviously very inegalitarian and we have huge disparities in that area especially leading to an underclass which most certainly feels very disenfranchised and that often is indicated by their quote voting with their feet unquote by not voting in the elections not participating in the political process in fact that idea of political participation is something that splits the American Muslim community right down the middle because I would say half of the American Muslim community favors it including by the way nearly all of your teachers at this conference are on that side but another side representing trends that perhaps are more typical of the underclass denounced the idea of political participation and opposed it on the grounds that it would give legitimacy to what they view as an illegitimate system so anyway there are these other kind of tensions that exist even in the American society and so if you go outside of that to the world and look at how the actual power relationships are you can see the grounds for a lot of dissatisfaction and that could create conflictual relations in the past of course there has been a stereotype of conflictual relationships and that there were various Wars of Religion and because history is loaded with event oriented descriptions rather than development oriented descriptions that is events attract the attention of historians events get written down memorize celebrated discussed analyze and development silent developments don't and so one thing is noticed and the other is not today in our news of course the things that would be noticed would be you know like some kind of bombings or so-called terrorist incidents etc whereas the fact that so many Muslim women returned to wearing the jab or head cover as indeed my wife and her sister and her mother did on their own against the opposition of all the males in their family who didn't want them to cover up the that is relatively unag Nord it's not completely unfit in any of our media but it's not emphasized although it's a much more important development that is affected a far larger number of people and that is not only because of their may be indeed some bias in the press that wants to pay the Islam a bad picture of Islam but on the other hand it's also just that events attract attention and all the history books of all countries are filled with this event oriented history verses developmental oriented history and of course in the last 50 years there has been a vast change of emphasis toward more development oriented history and that has successfully played out to some extent on the European historical area but there's still a lot of work to be done on other historical areas so if you study the history of Islam the history of India the history of China or Japan we were going to get a lot less social history than in proportion than you would get from Western history that's almost subversive for sure and the result of this is also as far as the Muslims and the West go to the extent the Muslims we're not in pre-modern times located in the West to the extent that they were a separate civilization an independent fought universe living apart from the European thought universe of course painting events usually paints bad relations and leads to this classical stereotype of war now I think that Carina was talking to you about the Muslim contribution of the Renaissance and so on and that is the other side of it which is the more developmentally oriented side because in spite of hostile relations across borders there were always friendly relations also and that is something that needs more emphasis especially if we are to cultivate the idea of pluralism in our educational system that is that there were lots of cultural contacts that went across the supposed to bounce of hostility and led to nurturing exchanges of ideas that furthered human civilization altogether and so that is something in the past that is important to observe and I will be sufficed by what Karima has told you on that and move on so I can concentrate more on the present as I'm speaking to you today so at the present there are several different levels of interaction that we might examine discreetly or separately starting with the political one because that is the one that is the most obvious the most emphasized in the media and the most conflictual even though it too is not entirely conflictual and I could indeed spend the rest of the time lecturing about the recent history and political system of the world in a way which is the way that I view it from what I have studied of history and it is very revisionist compared to what most people would probably conceive up from their history books and social studies books but nevertheless it's what I think is correct so I will have to state it and that is that often history books in there especially in their use of maps which is a very interesting part of history books and their studies historical atlases and so on they're viewed as nice because you have the thing graphically portrayed geographically and you and often students knowledge of geography is very poor and so if one can cultivate that it's it really helps to get a better grasp of history a cultivate geography and geographical relationships but another aspect of map his maps lie there's a demonstration in the hall about that on that equal-area projection which has at the bottom some Mercator projections and show us how grossly inaccurate the Mercator projection is and really very terribly distorting geographical facts well the historical map distortions consists of several aspects one of them being that empires are always shown at their maximum extent one of the things as an ancient historian that always drives me up the wall is these maps that show the Roman Empire under Trajan which shows Iraq and Armenia as part of the Roman Empire and they were never part of the Roman Empire Trajan marched in and for all of two years occupied those areas and then when he died Hadrian withdrew the troops and that was that now I ask you if was a two-year military occupation of an area is sufficient to regard that as part of an empire if that's the case we ought to portray the United States at its greatest extent showing Haiti in the Dominican Republic Nicaragua Honduras and Panama as part of the United States when those countries were occupied by American troops and yet that's never the way we view it see so there's a very great inaccuracy in that that exaggerated s' the size of the Roman Empire somewhat and fortunately other maps exist that don't do that but nevertheless that's a very clear case now another case is you have the Egyptian Empire in ancient pharaonic Egypt say under the 18th dynasty about 3500 years ago or a little bit less occupying Egypt the northern Sudan and Syria Palestine up to the Euphrates River and this is portrayed as a map so with our modern mentality we think of map European countries or United States and States on map effective government Singh governmental system unitary state and of course such an Egyptian Empire never existed Egyptian Garrison's and governors were never placed in Syria the Egyptian army simply marched up to the Euphrates and the famous 17 campaigns of tahat miss the 3rd and marched back the kings of the area fearing that the Egyptians would come back for retribution sent tribute so they retribute Ares States to the Empire of the Metropole that is Egypt itself but they were not part of an empire in the sense of a modern state and that is not conveyed by the map at all and it's a terrible distortion that that is the case because Egypt never as an organized Kingdom extended beyond the territory between Aswan and the Mediterranean that was it it was the kingdom of Egypt for all of its historical period because it was like an island and it couldn't extend its power anywhere beyond that effectively now this has relevance in the modern world because if we think of modern of ancient empires now even the Roman Empire which was very highly developed bureaucratically for an ancient empire where there were actually Roman governors and Roman officials in the various provinces and places there was effective taxation and so forth so you could consider it a proto modern state in those respects yet it was far less effective far less intrusive in private lives than a modern state yes and consequently again portraying the Roman Empire on the map has a little bit of element of doubtfulness when you compare that with a modern state because this two are just simply not cognates of each other not exactly so that brings up the question of the modern political arrangements in the world and how they have evolved in recent times our portrayal of modern history which is based on Europe Europeans as actors and all other people in the world as either inert or obstinate obstacles to progress or innocent victims of imperialism these are the two theories which are both two sides of the same coin that is in either case the colonized peoples are denied their role as actors in the world so we have a situation where the Europeans are basically actors and if one just looks at a political map of the world it's very difficult to say anything else about it in a period like the 19th century when the European countries were going conquering everywhere else and imposing their colonial rule on the other in various places it's hard to conceive of the other people as actors in that sense anyway maybe even in their own local histories to this day the European intrusion is a very big important theme in the world's history of those times but generally the idea is that the first spark of freedom and indeed according to one of the writers about the subject political scientists the first spark of nationalism is the revolutions of Latin America against the Spanish and Portuguese rulers and the independence of the Latin American countries and that kind of food serves as a model for the much much later post-world War to Independence of the African and Asian countries so we have this idea of independence and we have in the United Nations the idea of the theoretical equality of all the members of the United Nations one country one vote which admittedly is a concession from the large states to the smaller after all if the Seychelles Islands or whatever have no Singapore has a vote equivalent to the United States of America which has hundreds of times as many people and so forth then that is a concession by the major powers to the the minor states perhaps something the Lions of the US Senate where states like Vermont and Wyoming and Alaska have two senators like California which has not a hundred times as many people but close to it it would have you know something on the order of what seventy times as many people as Wyoming and so that's kind of it might be a kind of concession on that order but still there's some idea of equality and that each national flag flies in alphabetical order in front of the United Nations building and so on and some nativist nationalists in the United States resent that because they think all the United Nations are just a waste of money all right you know the United States has hardly any influence if why should it foot a quarter of the bill you know anti UN type of thing and the idea nevertheless that each country is an independent sovereignty and that its independence means that it has a kind of equivalence of the political freedom that individual humans have in the United States under its Constitution is a prevalent idea and at one time there was more sense to regarding things that way now if we look at arnold toynbee z' scheme of history and how a civilization a discrete civilization in its development starts out as a constellation of city-states or of small states in the case of europe of territorial kingdoms say in the early modern period which once they had gotten rid of feudal lords and had formed national states they were competing states that were fighting each other and war with each other until according to twin be one of them delivers the knockout blow and then at that point establishes a universal empire that rules over lords over and controls everything effectively and in the case of the chinese states there was the period of contending States before the Han Empire was founded where the Qin the state ruled the first emperor which was a marginal Geographic state at the frontier fringes of China went back into the center conquered the center and established the Chinese Empire in the unified state which is not ceased to be a unified state - till this point or in the Greek or Roman world the constellation of Greek city-states and then Hellenistic kingdoms was replaced by at least in the Mediterranean area a universal Roman Empire that controlled and dominated everything so by towing these model one would expect European history to follow the same path and I think now in the year 2000 it is secure to say that it has done so yes the United States is the first is a shining example of powerful countries which could have imposed local control over much of the earth and armies marched out of the countries that we liberated during World War two as opposed to the Soviets who kept control of their countries I mean is one thing but people still have their own rulers there with me look ancient Athens which is held up as the epitome of democracy in spite of the ancient lack of political rights for women and slaves and also for foreigners and Athens unwillingness to naturalize any foreigners of citizens after the law of about 454 BC carried through by the brilliant Democrat Pericles which stated that no person could have Athenian citizenship unless they had both parents Athenians not just one a foreign mother denied you citizenship and you came into the metaclass there and except by an act of Parliament that is the Assembly of all adult males of Athens could citizenship and if you thought that would be difficult it was it was very difficult so an extremely exclusivist citizenship law nevertheless in the period of the Athenian Empire the Peloponnesian War which is described in the extreme lurid detailed by Thucydides and his continued a terse antiphon you observed that the Athenians went around overthrowing oligarchies and imposing democracies on city states around the Aegean and when their enemies the Spartans who favored the oligarchical party would come they would come and throw overthrow the Democrats and restore the oligarchy and the illustration of this is very clear if you take the Athenian Ally of course IRA and the Civil War at Coursera and for 27 BC you can see with great clarity there that there was a local party of Democrats that they were encouraged and supported by the Athenians but the Athenians weren't occupying the country and weren't literally imposing their own government on the place but nevertheless coast coursera was aligned with the Athenian Empire and so you know I maybe I'm saying that my way of making some concession to what you just said nevertheless you were going to get something else and it would work like this that Europe thought of itself as the central place the United States was marginal although some farsighted European politicians saw the resources of the United States and its great territorial extent in the 19th century already as a possible future power that could threaten the dominance of the Europeans nevertheless by 1914 very few people regarded the United States as being the paramount power in the world and even if it had a paramount C in the sense that it was it had an edge on any other particular place it was most certainly not lording it over European countries not in 1914 it had been very recent of memory that there had been a huge amount of English capital investment in the itíd states that it made the United States somewhat of an economic colony of Europe but that was shifting and changing by 1914 after all it was a sign of the times that the famous ill-fated Titanic of the British White Star Line the pride of the British ocean liners was actually owned by JP Morgan who was an American and that showed the way the wind was blowing economically at that time already and indeed the facts were that the United States by 1914 had already eclipsed Germany and Britain as superior power but it hadn't come out yet the American Navy wasn't yet as big as the British and the American army except in wartime was non-existent and so on and in World War one the European powers just destroyed each other and the total dominance of the United States over the earth was plenty evident by 1918 now the results of World War one or the destruction of austria-hungary which was not a real contender for a paramountcy in the world the isolation of Russia under the Soviet system where it seemed to go into a very backward defeated State the destruction of the Ottoman Empire which had not been in any case considered a contender as it had actually been colonized and previously Spain had been removed from any possible remains of thinking of last glory by the spanish-american war and Italy was shown up also to be pretty much of a paper tiger and so on but Britain and France the victors - they were bled white as evidenced by their almost complete unwillingness to face Hitler even when he had inferior forces in 1936 and 1938 and so on and also the credit relationship changed because Britain and France became totally indebted to the United States so the United States something on the model of Rome in 3rd century BC if integrated these countries into an American system gradually but an inter war period not officially it was unofficially through economic ties but after the interwar period and the post-world War two period officially in the NATO alliance which resembles the Romans assimilation of Italians into a system of city-states where some of them had Roman rites and some of them had Latin rites and so forth and the interwar period is very interesting because it there is a lopsided view of history that emerges from concentrating on only one theme of Nazi Germany which is its anti-semitism and although that theme is important and could even be viewed as central to Nazi Germany yet it ignores the fact that for most of the German people and the other people living in Europe that the the most salient facts were the normal political facts of the existence of Germany at that time and I am talking here about the Germany's adoption of fascist state policies preceded by Mussolini's Italy in 1922 but what is usually ignored is that all of the countries of Eastern Europe adopted the same system go through them not quite all if you considered Finland to be Eastern Europe it didn't do it and Czechoslovakia didn't do it Czechoslovakia remain democratic but otherwise every other country established a fascist dictatorship Estonia Latvia Lithuania Poland Hungary Austria Yugoslavia Romania Bulgaria Albania Greece Turkey Iran Afghanistan Japan all the independent countries established fascist systems at the same time now they didn't all have the anti-semitic element which seems to be peculiarly associated with the German state mainly and where it manifested itself in Romania for example it seems to be usually connected with German influence or in Italy after the pact of Steel between Mussolini in Hitler in 1938 but these states all established this and the Soviet Union now I was willing to say what no the Soviet Union that was communist socialist it wasn't fascist wasn't Hitler National Socialist I mean the thing was that in each case the Soviet state resembled the Nazi state very much except only in the detail that since there were only half Russians in it they couldn't emphasize Russian nationality so they said all of the Soviet nationalities are good so it was communism was simply a vehicle for being multinational that's all whereas in Germany it was homogeneous enough they could say German German German and I would get away with that so you have the Soviet system exactly resembling all these others and every one of these states in its fascist dictatorial form established a central state system controls on contacts with foreigners discouraged tourism was suspicious of that had secret police to enforce the authoritarianism of the state lest there be any cracks or chinks in the wall established central control over trade foreign trade and all of them had non-convertible non hard currencies and so they had to establish currency controls prohibited the export of their currencies and did did not allow individuals as individual citizens to barter with other countries but rather they carried through trade and their own and often through barter agreements with other like States since they had no hard currency in other words the Western countries which did have convertible currencies and were all in the system together the United States Britain France Holland Belgium Luxembourg Switzerland Norway Sweden and Denmark all of these countries that had the convertible currencies and were of a system together with each other they in effect were a thesis which called for the fascist antithesis and fascism can than they'd seen as a defensive attempt to protect the independence of the state the small state by sacrificing the rights of the individual for the sake of the group well the independent ISM was something that the states of the world tried to establish because any political system will try to resist outside domination and the results of World War two were that Germany Italy and Japan were crushed and remained filled with American military bases to this day the other fascist states that existed all disappeared even Turkey which was neutral in the war associated itself with a NATO alliance in 1950 and what it has to do with this question is that yes there is an American domination of the world and that's very plainly clear and it is that it is not something that involves American governors sitting and dictating to the rulers of places although the American ambassador is very often influential into various places but it does involve a considerable power intrusion into the politics of other places and it is out of the question to say that there is any threat to this domination that exists now except for one which is the fact that atomic weapons exist and that those would destroy civilization and several of those do not exist in kind of exist in countries other than those that are part of the American system and that includes in particular China most most significantly and also Russia which oddly has not been incorporated in the system even though it would probably love to join it and so when you yes but you know the dominance of American civilization I see the world as above has having evolved now into a trade class I see the trade bloc's as being much more or perhaps as important as national country flies in other words we are in this fierce competition with the European Common Market it's not we are not dominating them in a free market economy when they get together their companies have advantage they get that they get the yeah I'm just I think it's enormous ly unfair and inaccurate to equate American civilization with our armies placed in foreign countries with something like the Roman Empire where those those armies would be used to suppress the local people well but they may have not always been viewed so in the Roman Empire the Roman Empire was characterized on the whole by very few local revolts and in fact many of the provinces in the Roman Empire that consisted of non Latin speaking people had no troops in them like for example they densely populated province of Asia and Western Asia Minor where Ephesus was located there were no Roman troops there other than local police who probably were recruited from the local population it shouldn't be imagined that the presence of American troops in a place is just value neutral it's not and if you think that I am observing this and I am you know off the wall well okay but the way that that is observed by people outside is something that one might well ought to consider now going to the relevance of the topic for this so if we have any political difference between Muslims in the West it would fall into these realms given that as the background which I hope is not irrelevant and that is that the Muslims are fragmented into 50 little tiny states there is not any plausible movement to unify those states politically at all in fact you will go and look all kinds of sources and you will go to the countries themselves and visit them and look in vain for any efforts to politically unify the Muslim world apart from some completely fantasizing fringe groups like the Islamic liberation party in England you will find no support in the ground for that why because in a system where America and/or the West is dominant one Muslim country will not put itself under the rule of another and the attempt that was done to do that the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961 led to the Syrians resentment against larger Egypt ruling it this year at Syria revolted and it failed and that failure was so big that it wasn't even tried again apart after that and you saw that Saddam Hussein's bullheaded and bludgeoning attempt to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq with in Kuwait being one's in your city I'll be at a very important one with all its oil that that simply didn't succeed at all and so given that kind of extreme political fragmentation there is certainly no Muslim country that is a convincing enemy or opponent to the West I mean Nazi Germany and Japan fought in World War two you know in the war that the Americans considered the good war my father fought in it because at that time it couldn't be seen for sure quite what the outcome might be and after all look at how much territory Germany and Japan ran over and it looked like a very credible serious threat even though it was turned back and defeated and it might have turned out differently to had Hitler made nuclear weapons first I mean the consequences would have been horrible but to imagine that now that Muslim country could do anything whatsoever against you a state that is far removed from the realm of reality and furthermore is a fact which the Muslim populations are thoroughly completely aware of and so that leads to it so-called political terrorism which comes out of a limited fringe groups which are very limited geographically is it fair to pillory the whole Muslim population say is it fair to pillory the people of Bangladesh not one of whom has ever been engaged in a terrorist act and who constitute 10% of the Muslim population in the world by denouncing all of Islam for terrorist actions is it to be assumed that the 10% of the Muslims who are in Bangladesh or the 16% were in Indonesia welcomed actions by Muslims that are connected with other geographically specific things especially the palestinian-israeli struggle which has produced the lion's share of such things but apart from that there was also the Israeli Lebanese struggle there is with Iran and Afghanistan which has gone through a horrible 23 years civil war that is not resolved even to this day did anything though emerge out of most of the other Muslim countries and did those movements or those acts by freelance individuals actually involve the populations of those places certainly not now of course there has been some allegations that there were certain state support for some things and those might be plausible particularly in the case of Iran of revolutionary Iran in the case of other ones I'm not very convinced and you would have to put the burden of proof would be on you to show in other cases that state supported something else outside of those areas but it is generally about that and then of course the Muslims it's themselves are aligned more or less completely with the United States and those that are not aligned because the United States has taken umbrage at some of their past behavior such as Libya Syria Iran Iraq Yemen and the Sudan mostly would like to be aligned or would prefer to be aligned with the United States hence the attempts of Iran to have some approachment with the United States albeit not just on any terms there are negotiations that are going on there similarly with Libya there are negotiations going on now similarly with Syria there are negotiations going on because on the whole all of these states would prefer to be integrated into the world system and not stand apart from it and the governments of the states generally prefer that - of course there is the problem that the governments of these states lack legitimacy and that is a very serious problem indeed the political one which I won't delve into further unless you ask me some leading questions about it but it is a difficult problem because Islam does not easily confer legitimacy on a state a state can only achieve a kind of ad-hoc legitimacy it cannot have any ultimate legitimacy so ultimate legitimacy comes from God and went from God to the Prophet from the Prophet to the righteous caliphs but after that it was cut off so there was not any further political legitimacy and even if someone claimed well the Caliphate continued flourishing for some centuries thereafter while not now no caliphate it's gone so there isn't that and the possibility of restoring it probably doesn't exist because any attempt at restoration would not gain the assent of either most of the Muslims or even the large minority of the Muslims in fact any more than a tiny fringe group it actually becomes rather open because they're safer the state's legitimacy is only ad-hoc there has to be a state there because there has to be a state to hold things back so a state must exist but it doesn't derive any religious legitimacy you know it's only legitimate to the extent which it upholds justice there has always been an effective separation of church and state in Islam because the fact is see the caliphs early on irrigated to themselves church and state but that didn't stick and it didn't work and the caliphs own religious authority was emptied of its religiosity and spirituality and spiritual value by the very exercise of political authority only honorees and codesys and regional coalition's or that I mean what do you see this in actual work that was satisfied well I think what would satisfy the Muslim community would be that there be a freedom for the Muslims to organize themselves according to Islamic law in their own communities and that would satisfy the Muslim community I would say if the Muslims can organize themselves under their law which is the center of their religion in their own communities that would be satisfactory in other words if pluralism was allowed that would be fine and it remains to be seen whether it's going to be allowed now as Jim was saying the United States hasn't been imposing its lot nor if we change that to a consortium of Western countries like the big seven or whatever haven't been imposing their law on the Muslim countries directly that is a Muslim country has theoretically the choice to choose between whether to apply the Islamic law or not and as a result the Muslim personal status law is still applied in the majority of the Muslim countries in some form or other often not in the classical Orthodox form but in some form it exists and so the desire of the Muslims would be first of all that that be allowed to continue and that there not be some kind of mandated homogenizing decrees that come down that force every country in every place to be like every other place because that would then be exactly what you're saying has not happened would then would then have happened and the political rights also though will need to be addressed because the other half of the equation is the need for justice and that is lacking in the political governments of many of the Muslim countries so the Muslims there would desire an acknowledgment that democratic parliamentarian government and is welcome for Muslim countries as well as non-muslim ones and that was not very evident when the FIS won the elections in Algeria and then because that area was conceded sort of as a bailiwick to France by the Western powers the United States remains silent about it and France supported the eradicators who are the military dictators that refused to recognize the results of the election in utter contrast to the way that Eastern Europe was treated and part of the motivation for that could be that if the Muslim countries were democratic they would be less amenable rather than more amenable to you know giving up rights so to speak to to have their own systems pluralistic Li CE if Iraq was governed by a democratic government or should a democratic government arise in Iraq now or after Saddam Hussein at any time that will certainly the government will through inquiries open the the file of the Gulf War and examine that and the Iraqis will be saying things about the Gulf War from their point of view and those things will not just all be thank you for raining down bombs on Saddam Hussein you know it's going to be another different type of inquiry than that and also if Iraq were a democratic country there couldn't be a sanctions regime against it well if a democratic Iraq did what Saddam Hussein did it could be perhaps but it wouldn't do that because Saddam Hussein did that out of his own mccallum mania and the pressures he felt on himself as a very threatened ruler and so yes we actually support a kind of Islamic democracy we support Islamic parties Muslim political participation Islamic democracy which would mean a parliamentary regime that is not identified with the religion and is it's somewhat separated from it but it wouldn't necessarily be a carbon copy of a European parliamentary model either because you would have to work out in the Islamic law exactly what the relationships would be between the rulers and the ruled and in particular what the nature of judicial authority would be because judicial authority is always passive negative critical you know that type of thing versus the active intrusive authority of the executive power of the state saying so there would still be you know some room for the use of Islamic law in the legal system and so forth in such a state and indeed if a majority of the people wish to enact that kind of law why should they not have the right to do so that is the point and of course as you've seen also from Chicanos presentations the Islamic law is very varied and there are lots of problems and disagreements in it and I have stated some of them also as for example the difference of opinion about the permissibility of abortion which is 180 degrees that one side says you know through 120 days you can do it and the other side says no you can't so you know and then various shadings in the middle that you could if there were certain circumstances but not in other circumstances so one ought to you know the the Muslims should be led to work out the political Arrangements themselves somehow and those arrangements ought to take a democratic direction that would be what I would say okay and the state should not be endowed with an air of sanctity that is a very bad idea the state is the realm of compromise of political infighting of disagreement and most certainly of a lack of perfect and everyone I think will acknowledge that and I think no one will imagine that either the state we are living in nor any other state has ever been actually perfect and it shouldn't be invested with with an aura of religiosity that would be a very bad idea the social arrangements of the Muslims in the modern times are conflictual partly because the Muslim societies are less modernized than the society is here and so to some extent we are experiencing what could be described as Orwellian conditions where we have a society that is more evolved through modernism than Muslim societies are you have seen from our presentations that we see a lot of good in traditionalism in societies and it would be desirable from our point of view to institute some of that among ourselves and so one of the desiderata for the american muslims is to try to establish an Islamic law Islamic court system and which would probably not be called that but an Islamic court system would be completely legitimate here the ultra-orthodox Jews have their own courts and they are acknowledged by the universal arbitration act of the United States Congress which is that if two parties in a case sign off to have an arbitrator arbitrate that decision is binding on them if they sign a binding arbitration that becomes binding and the American Court will enforce the decision of the arbitrator in fact in the state of Pennsylvania the arbitrator can subpoena witnesses and evidence that's not the case in every state as it varies on a state-by-state basis and that would be also something desirable and it comes from the idea of kind of political and social pluralism then that would be implied by that now religious and ideological discussions are amongst the most difficult and here I have for you something that I've prepared which is a description of Christianity and Christians as portrayed in the Quran and the Sunnah so let me talk a little bit about Christianity and Islam because this is the no-holds-barred or it's an all basis for the division or any kind of argument that might exist as a kind of dialogue it does seem evident that one of the biggest threats that must be overcome in the world is that there is a considerable difference - between Christianity and Islam and that ecumenism in religion while apparently being all about peace and unity could if it only went so far produce the opposite result that is it could unify the ranks of the Christians and the Muslims and then they might clash so that might not be a beneficial effect that could even come out there although most of the proponents of ecumenism are very broad-minded individuals who presumably wouldn't feel that way the points here are mostly for your view and I've put in the the Quranic verses dealing with this and I do believe you will in any case find this useful because it has in it pretty much everything that deals with this particular question now and then there are some things which are and some things which are bad on this kind of dialogic argument that might exist but i guess the bottom line is this an inter-religious dialogue there are various forms of inter-religious dialogue one of which is pursued by a professor in my department who has the rural dialogue project and it is viewed by myself as well as my non-muslim colleagues as being a hegemonic project because his method of dialogue is ok here we are we put our beliefs on the table now what will you put on the table as if religious belief is something that you can bargain over and going beyond that he has made a list of world ethics universal ethics and he says I am going to take this to the United Nations so the United Nations can vote this into effect and impose it on every place and that is simply a kind of intrusive penetrating hegemonic imperialism of thought that will not work because it will provoke the other and it may be that sometimes we do provoke the other when we talk but if we were to get acquainted across the divisions of religion and ideology and I include ideology if someone has a idea well I don't belong to a religion and I don't believe in a religion so I'm combining both a dominant kind of thinking that rules your own life which could be religion it might be a traditional religion could be a private religion of your own or it could be some kind of ideological commitment and some people will say well I have no idea logical commitments and I'm a complete agnostic I don't believe in anything and so on but actually that's not true everyone has some kind of past that has formed them and leads them to have certain types of commitments and a person is being more realistic with themselves if they recognize that they have some kind of pre commitments or other and those could be very reasonable pre commitments it's not anything arguing against but the whole point here of the dialogue would be that instead of following my colleagues hegemonic or shall I put it in maybe fair phrasing homogenizing version of inter-religious dialogue instead of following that and trying to homogenize everything to minimize differences and say they don't exist and ignore them and pretend there are none and so on it's far more realistic to engage in a real exchange of ideas even if your ears are wounded by the discourse of the other and you hear what you do not like now of course that requires a great deal of tact and coolness and salons and not fly off the handle and everyone cannot handle that but it is necessary the first thing is to not recognize the legitimate basis of the other and that means that the other has their own construction of their religion and the whole belief system and social system that comes out of that the other has their own construction of that and that has to be honored what the other says about themselves that is what how you have to go with and Muslims have been and still are just as prone to error on this point as anyone else in the world because Muslims will go and say well Judaism is bla bla bla and Christianity is bla bla bla and so on making invidious comparisons and using that to validate their own religion and ideology that has historically always been the way that people have worked but it is only fair and right that people be more accurate about this an accuracy is achieved by allowing the other to represent itself now the role of Technology and science here is that unlike the independent fought universes of the asked where each civilization exists that sort of hermetically sealed and often had rules to enforce that for example the pre-modern Chinese rule which as far as I know it prevailed until the opium war of 1839 to 1842 that no foreigner was allowed to ever learn Chinese it was prohibited for foreigners to learn Chinese obviously if foreigners cannot learn the language of 99 percent of your population they cannot reach that population and so that's isolation for you and there were many Hermit kingdoms that is kingdoms that refused at first to be quote opened by the west unquote not only Japan when Perry went there but China similarly when Lord Macaulay went to Beijing in 1793 and his mission utterly failed and he was totally rejected by the Chinese emperor Burma which fought Wars to keep itself separated off from the West and so but the world we live in now isn't that world anymore that world is dead and anyone who thinks that we can go back to that world it's it's over it's finished and maybe that's unfortunate and is something that one could bemoan although others will not be monitor to have a unified world where anyone can go anywhere clearly though we're at the stage of the world where anyone can go anywhere even Burma has lightened up recently is it used to prohibit tourism right into our own lifetime as a remnant of that hermit Kingdom type of policy and obviously now we have internet and we have international distribution of this that and the other thing and this is a problem we have to deal with because we don't know exactly always how to react to that and I can't provide solutions but on the biological aspect of it I can certainly say certain principles that we must operate if we are to live in a peaceful pluralistic world so one of them is to recognize and honor the other and to allow the other to represent itself now of course I don't always do this because I teach world religions so I'm not I'm representing you know 13 other religions and I'm not from them but I try to compensate for that by ordering books which have articles written by practitioners of those religions themselves rather than just some homogenizing textbook although I he was those two because to me and there's nothing else I mean there and there's better books and worse books and some you know well you all know that about having to choose books know what kind of sources you will rely on when you're teaching and the second rule would be this that it's very vitally important and often not observe including by the Muslims to not compare one's own ideals with the others actions this is very commonly what is done when compares one's own ideals with the actions of the other and that's not really legitimate ideals should be compared with ideals and actions with actions that would be fairer and more accurate if one did things like that obviously Islam from my point of view has something to gain from the application of these principles because it would mean that Muslims would be able to represent Islam and on the whole in the American media Muslims have not been allowed to represent Islam of course Muslims are allowed to create their own media products and distribute those because we have press freedom but in the major networks and so on the whole discourse is about things that rather carefully constructed and you will all have to admit that on the whole more often than not Islam is represented by Christian or Jewish or non-religious spokesmen our spokespersons of non Muslim origin than it is by Muslims or if it is represented by Muslims often they are people with foreign appearances and accents who are used as foils by the moderator or the interviewer to portray an unfavorable view of the religion of Islam and I can point to particular interviews where that has been the case and on the other hand what the other communities gain from that is that if the Muslims themselves also adopt these principles and allow the other religions to represent themselves instead of representing them then the pact will be mutual and there will be the two-way traffic on that point for example when we speak of the Palestine question or the conflict of Israel and Palestine which a Jew would describe is the land of Israel question if anything it is the case that the land of Israel is an important aspect of the ancient Judaic law and that has been on the books for 2,000 years in fact more than that because it's described in the Torah and quite apart from whether the Jews actually had any historical presence on that land for much of its history or not which is a point that may be disputed from either side nevertheless it's on the books as a significant concept in the Jewish religion and so that's something that exists and I admit that and state that and that is something that can clearly be seen and so to forward the discussion then one has to kind of listen to the other and people are often not willing to do that and the Muslim side that is the case as well I mean I can cite things that you know would not impress you favorably about what Muslims think about the West in this that or the other respect some of these things come about through ignorance and so forth but there are certainly room for improvement on this on all sides and I think everyone can see that the another thing is that maybe to wrap up it would be that certainly it is possible for different viewpoints to contribute to each other that is obviously throughout history there have been a mixture of viewpoints and things have gotten information knowledge and so on different trims in different societies have taken knowledge from other places and that usually has been beneficial even when it's created dissension and discord and trouble it's usually been beneficial because it has stirred things up and stirred up thinking and stops society from falling into a kind of a static mode or a fixed or hardened ossified mode where the creativity might be more limited the the idea of having some kind of cross-pollination and cross fertilization it's good it's beneficial now it's true that a lot of Muslims will probably view this as not very desirable but I am saying and would think that well we should rather you know cut ourselves off from the world more and try to be isolated and build walls around ourselves to a greater extent and so on and that has a certain desirability from the pure istic aspect because if someone is thinking of their religion in the sense of a pure thing and they want to purify it in every respect that they possibly can so that they would then isolate themselves from the world but it has obviously very serious downsides as well and it is against the current current of things where things are very mixed up and there is a great deal of pluralism in the world so in the end I guess I would not recommend that and would recommend more dialog and also another point I wanted is that the end of purpose of dialogue cannot be to establish that some single way is right that can't be because then it doesn't become dialogue it becomes something coercive and subordinating that wouldn't be acceptable it has to be something where you don't expect the end product to be the submission or conversion of the other and therefore it has to be in the end a kind of recognition of pluralism there is not any other end product that can be imagined to be arrived at in plural istic world that's something that we would have to be looking for in this for the Muslims from my point of view that's a benefit because given the power relationships that exist in the world a non pluralistic dominating ideology in the world will almost certainly be deleterious to the lives and livelihoods of the Muslims in the world if that were to take place and I hope that it would not take place ok so I think I'll stop there and see if you have any questions or comments or anything most areas in the world haven't really had democratic government or long experience with that I mean first of all could you say that China really ever had a parliamentary system I mean if you've not tried to point to the nationalist period Chiang kai-shek was it you know a sort of a mafioso type dictator he was terrible and then obviously the communist regime hasn't had anything Lee would recognize his democracy so since the period before Chiang kai-shek was civil war and then before that Manchu Empire that's not had it either and and that's a very substantial part of the world and its population and if you said Latin America well yes but Latin America is part of the Western tradition more or less and of course it's also have not always been honored democracy there but at least you could say it's been sometimes honored and the Middle Eastern countries first of all there have been more there are more practical democratic aspects in the countries there than often meets the eye now except Saudi Arabia which you mentioned actually although you some kind of called that a parliament at the pleasure of the king and I may have said something like that but but it's really the consultative council it really it has no legislative power at all I mean that there's simply no parliamentary regime in Saudi Arabia and never has been so that would exactly fit what you're saying in that particular case but other countries are quite other than that the iranian parliament since the revolution has been a very lively place and that has been you know full of opposition against the government although that doesn't get filtered over here and Iran doesn't have a dictator because there isn't any single dictatorial figure there in that country of course it was also true that at one point as far as women went the for a period of two years Tan's who chiller was the Prime Minister of Turkey and benazir bhutto is the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the Khaleda Zia was the prime minister of Bangladesh collectively ruling 1/4 of the Muslims under them and they were three women and they only got to their positions in each case through an electoral process and now the electoral process has gone with fits and starts in various places so that there's our military crews that come back and so forth and then sometimes the governments are less democratic than they appear on the surface although they veer this way in that way somewhat like in Egypt for example there was a parliamentary democracy during well it was never really quite a full one but it was pretty lively or a part of its time especially from the years 1933 to 1952 under the british protectorate in effect and the kings and then after that it's been a fairly dictatorial military regime although it's frequently had elections and you know it has had intermittently a certain amount of press freedom in fact the egyptians press freedom is something like that that is typical of many of the countries is that the ruler cannot be criticized in the press that high ruler but everybody else can be even the ministers and the government and so on can be criticized and so that certainly gives you an opening to criticize the government and Morocco has quite a you know a fairly liberal system it is rather more parliamentary than before and especially the new king has said that he means to be like Juan Carlos of Spain that is to just be a constitutional monarch with that not any effect on the date running of the state jordan has had very free elections all of the muslim party parties boycotted the last elections there but it has had what has been recognized as a you know more liberal type of parliamentary regime and then you have other things like the Eradicator xin algeria are dictatorial tunisia is dictatorial in much the same sense as egypt in that it has some window-dressing but not in a real democracy and libya has been rather dictatorial state and and so on so some of them have had you know more of that kind of history but it's not completely without democratic side also and that has gone through a completely different history and if you look outside of europe on the whole you know most for the most places you don't see it as being completely democratic and if you looked at india which is sometimes called the world's largest democracy which although it has obviously dominated by Hindus and hinduism this is 82% of the people there but the population is also at least 11 or 12 percent Muslim and they do vote in the elections too especially they go out and vote against the Hindu nationalist parties that want to hurt their interests and yet that has certain limitations on it as well because the government has often dissolved state governments and ruled by decree and you wouldn't find that the case here so he wouldn't say that that would be either quite a democracy on the American lines it not quite although still it's you know are you can argue that it's been a fairly good thing as well anything else usually I wait with my with my students and you know because sometimes waiting helps but of course if you want to go and get ready to go to Santa Fe then that's nothing all right thank you

Channel: Islam On Demand

Views: 8,269

Rating: 4.8039217 out of 5

Keywords: Muslim, Islam, Khaled, Blankenship, Dar, al, Teachers, Institute, New, Mexico, Mosque, Abiquiu, West, Clash, Between, Civilizations, Moslem, Koran, Qur'an, Samuel, Huntington, Religion, Interfaith, East, Christian

Id: UEON_q-ggeU

Length: 82min 34sec (4954 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2011