Entente Islamique

The familiar image of a zealous and militant Islamic faith has been reinforced by the recent act of terror in eastern Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans. There evidently are powerful xenophobic trends within Islam which are anta-gonistic to western culture and which threaten international security. But this image is a travesty of the truth for most of the 1.3 billion adherents to the faith. Moreover, there are small but promising signs that the politicisation of Islam is in retreat. Whether this is the case depends, in part, on an appropriate reaction from the west. For this the historical antecedents are not promising but we can learn from the past.

The end of the cold war provided some plausibility to the forecast that Islam was set to replace international communism as the principal threat to western security and values. This clash of the two civilisations-expounded three years ago in an alarmist article by Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University-fed into an ancient tradition of western demonisation of Islam. In Europe, not least in Britain, it was compounded by nervous reaction to the devout and expanding new Muslim community.

The antipathy lies deep in our history. It originates with the explosion of conquest and conversion which brought the word of God, as revealed to the prophet Mohammed, through the Christian communities of the Levant and Asia Minor, of north Africa and deep into Spain within only a century of the death of Mohammed at Medina in 632 AD (year 11 of the Muslim calendar).



This early sense of threat was consolidated with a western counterattack spearheaded by the crusades, which ran for more than 200 years from the end of the 11th century. The reconquest of Spain, culminating in the fall of Granada in 1492, and the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews, sustained the antagonism between Christianity and Islam. Along Europe's southern frontiers confrontation continued for a further four centuries through piracy and trade in Christian captives by the Barbary states of north Africa. American perceptions of Islam were also given hostile shape at this time when, as the US marines' anthem commemorates, the fledgling republic's navy cut its teeth on attempts to fight off attacks by the Barbary states on US shipping.

The image of a hostile and fanatical Muslim culture, "the impregnable face of Islam" as Lord Curzon described it, lived on through the 19th century, fed by the accounts of European travellers to the middle east, by the challenge to colonialism presented by uprisings such as that of the Mahdist movement in the Sudan, and into our own century with the emergence in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, for whom strict governance according to the laws of Islam, partly in protest at British rule, took on a political form. Robert Playfair, a Victorian predecessor of mine as British diplomatic representative in Algiers, added his contribution to the mythology of an inimical Islam with his work, The Scourge of Christendom.

These prejudices are by no means one-sided. For Muslims, too, the inherited image of the Christian west is far from benevolent. An image of Christian savagery, contrasted with Saracen tolerance, echoes down from the crusades. This gained fresh impetus during the past 100 years from the process of imperial conquest which traversed the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia, from the Balkans to Zanzibar. Since mid-century the perception of a continued hostility on the part of the Christian west, including the US, has been further fuelled by western support for Israel and its occupation of Jerusalem, the third Holy City of Islam. Most recently, the conflict over Bosnia has rekindled the myth of a campaign by the Christian west to eradicate the last outpost of Islam in Europe. This is not a superficial conviction; its persuasive message has formed a brimstone staple of Friday sermons in the mosques throughout the Muslim world for the past four years.

The history of Christian-Muslim relations has been a chronicle of conflict and misunderstanding. The benefits which each has brought to the other, whether through the Muslim heritage of classical European thought which helped dispel the miasma of the middle ages, or through the benefits of administration and modern technology which resulted from more recent western political and commercial dominance, are usually discounted when set against this history.

Despite its universalist message, Islam is tolerant of other faiths, even if its more fanatical followers forget this. The Qur'an contains the injunction that there is no compulsion in religion. Where Islam differs from modern Christianity is in its all prescriptive message of a divinely revealed law, shari'a, which regulates not only daily personal behaviour but social, political and economic activity as well. To its most zealous adherents little if any latitude is permitted for the interpretation of these regulations through the exercise of discretion (ijtihad); for them priority in human activity should be devoted to prescribed ritual (ibada) rather than to secular works (mu'amalat). Moreover, in contrast to the permissive state of Christendom today, Islam remains a deeply pious and devout faith. This may owe something to its comparative youth-by the Muslim calendar the year is only 1417, a period when in Christian history scholastic bigotry was still in the ascendant.

This pious and puritanical tradition transcends sectarian boundaries dividing Sunni from Shi'a. It has fostered recurrent manifestations of what is called Islamic fundamentalism, but which has two, sometimes overlapping, strands of born-again revivalism and political extremism. The revivalism is exemplified by the puritanical Wahhabi movement in 18th century Arabia, which still dominates Saudi Arabian society-analogous with Hasidic Jewry. The more political dimension can be seen in the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, devoted to social reform-reminiscent of England during the Protectorate or 17th century Massachusetts.

Fundamentalism has in recent decades acquired a new impetus from a mood of political introspection within the Islamic, and particularly the Arab, world. It is fuelled by the failure of Arab society to achieve prosperity and stability after the end of colonialism. This mood of disillusion has been compounded by an anti-imperialism re-emerging in the form of resistance to the corrupting influence of western culture-or "coca-colonisation"-with its evils of economic domination, a licentious materialism, and even political pluralism. The young often give a lead in this revivalism calling in vague terms for stricter "Islamic" standards in government policy. Religion has become the focus of a restored lost sense of identity and self-respect, based upon the idea of a golden age when Islam led the world. In a country such as Saudi Arabia, Islamic standards in government are usually welcomed by most ordinary people, and they create no difficulty in co-existing with the west. Indeed, the pattern in much of the Islamic world has been to support the adoption of western technology and economics, while discarding western politics and morality, described by Professor Fouad Ajami in his riposte to Huntington's thesis as "the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion that the west breeds."

The damburst of fundamentalism came with the Iranian revolution of 1979, where theocracy installed itself on the back of acute social discontent. This politicised fervour, operating largely underground, recurred over the next decade-in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Egypt. It has since emerged in savage form in Algeria, and less provocatively in Jordan, Bahrain, and now in secular Turkey. During the Kuwait crisis the Sudanese Hassan al Turabi, the Algerian Abbasi al Madani, the Tunisian Rachid al Ghannouchi and the Afghan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar all chose to pay their respects to Ba'athist Baghdad instead of to Mecca in coalition with the infidel west, a refrain even taken up by a handful of Saudi clerics. Recently the current has reappeared in violent form with acts of terror, also involving the supreme Islamic sacrifice of martyrdom, aimed at wrecking the fragile peace between Israelis and Arabs.

This religious ferment has political echoes among Muslim communities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. It has led to the growth of an ultra-Islamic movement, the Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Freedom, the uncompromising and aggressive attitudes of which have made themselves felt in student circles. Moreover, it was unease over the involvement of British forces in the Muslim cause of the liberation of Kuwait that played a part in the establishment in this country of the so-called Islamic parliament, and produced a groundswell of sympathy with Iraq despite its act of brigandage in seizing Kuwait.

But the political message of Islamic revivalism has not measured up to its spiritual one. In instances where revivalist movements have aspired to political authority, as in Algeria, or have secured power, as in Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and now Turkey, their lack of a positive programme for government is soon evident. Once the incompetent or corrupted edifice they challenged has been removed, they can offer no coherent policy to put in its place. Standard democratic practice has to be circumscribed by what is deemed correct in Islamic terms. A return to secular government through the ballot box is seen by some as apostasy. Yet theocracy has proved inflexible and economically Luddite.

Radical Islam's inability to end the social and economic frustrations which brought it to power may, indeed, be starting to erode its support. This can be seen from the results of recent elections in Iran, Egypt and Jordan, as well as from the high turnout in presidential elections, from which the Islamic Salvation Front were excluded, in an Algeria becoming weary of violence. In Palestine, too, the message of Hamas has been largely ignored at the polls by a newly enfranchised electorate, causing the extremists to switch their operations to acts of terror. Turkey has its first Islamic-led government since the end of Ottoman rule, but the Welfare party has been ready to compromise most of its more radical Islamic principles to enter government.

The developments in Iran offer the most important insight into the evolution of radical Islam. Reform pressures are mounting as the authoritarian theocracy fails to produce solutions to the social and economic problems which have beset the country since the heady days of revolution 25 years ago. The fervid rhetoric of Islamist anti-western sentiment also appears to hold less appeal for a younger generation restive at the social restrictions and discrimination enforced by the clerical regime. The swing towards a more pragmatic interpretation of religion in politics, discernible in the tightly controlled elections to the national assembly earlier this year, came as a shock to hardline, radical elements. There have been public calls in the press for less clerical and ideological involvement in government, as well as isolated demonstrations in favour of social liberalisation, particularly over the status of women.

This has led to reprisal and intimidation. In the reality of Iran's power game, the ideologues continue to rule and it is difficult to see how incipient popular disaffection can transform itself into political change short of a new civil war. But there can be no doubt that Iran's model of government has diminishing appeal, both internally and in the wider Muslim world.

These signs of misgiving over the extreme manifestations of "political Islam" serve to strengthen the hand of those Muslims, active in politics, business, intellectual life, and even among the clerical establishment, who argue against the insulation of Islamic society and seek to come to terms with the ways of the west. The Islamic community, its consciousness reawakened, may have arrived at a crossroads. Should it seek a fossilised refuge in the forms and rituals of revivalist tradition; or make a fresh attempt to reconcile its strong, and in many respects estimable, moral and social values with the spirit of innovation that impels western society?

Faced with this confusion within the Muslim world, the reflex in the west has been to respond with apprehension. Certainly, we cannot afford to remain bystanders. The attacks launched by radical Muslim groups make this impossible. Moreover, extreme Islamist governments can harm western interests, by denying access to important markets and distorting the supply of crucial commodities, notably oil, regardless of the reciprocal damage such activity causes to their own economies. Tales of an "Islamic atom bomb" are no doubt exaggerated. Yet as long-range missile technology develops, so the threat of random attack cannot be excluded.

But how should the west respond? Direct western intervention in the policies of the Muslim world only aggravates radicalism and fosters the assumptions of western conspiracy on which the prejudices feed. By the same token it is counter-productive to insist on the full conformity of Muslim society to systems of government and standards of human rights, as they have evolved in the west. The self-righteous censure of Islamic customs, to which the western media are prone, invites accusations of prejudice and hypocrisy by appearing to ignore the existence of obnoxious features within western liberal culture itself. Similarly the cases of religious dissidents who take refuge in the west must be handled with care; some of these figures masquerade under the banner of western liberalism, whereas in reality they advocate a system less tolerant than the one they oppose.

The phenomenon of political Islam needs time to play itself out. The west can help in many small ways. For a start we can demystify Islam for ourselves, exhibiting a greater understanding of its customs, while looking to its points of contact with Christianity and western culture. Unfortunately, it remains unfashionable to do this. For example, commercial sponsorship for exhibitions of Islamic culture is almost impossible to obtain in Britain, despite the imposing scale of our trading relations with parts of the Muslim world. Sections of our own Muslim community, 1.5m people, see this indifference or even hostility as extending to them.

At the political level, it is mistaken to assume that the west is on a collision course with Islam. It is perfectly possible to co-exist and to co-operate with devout Muslim regimes, as the case of Saudi Arabia demonstrates. In turn there is a great deal which they respect and seek to emulate in our own more secular systems. Public contacts and professions of common interest by church and state play an important role here. The activity of the Prince of Wales in the encouragement of greater understanding between the west and Islam has met with a positive response at home and overseas.

It is also right to encourage greater democracy and public accountability in the Islamic world along the lines of recent developments in Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Malaysia. More cautious experiments are happening in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in Arabia, albeit based upon the hierarchical system of public consultation, or shura, of Islamic tradition. Such developments can help deny to Islamist militancy a monopoly of political opposition and protest.

Economic aid offers an instrument for easing the frustrations of poverty on which extremism feeds. But it can also become a two-edged sword, inducing a sense of resentment towards the donor. It is currently prominent in French, Italian and Spanish policy towards Algeria and other Maghreb states, as a means to counter political Islam in those societies and reduce the pressures for northward immigration. At the human level, too, much can be done to develop association across cultural boundaries, through educational and business contacts. Islam was after all founded by a merchant and is sympathetic to trade.

Above all we must remove the basic sources of anti-western sentiment which help to confuse politics with faith in many parts of the Muslim world. This requires the settlement of a variety of intractable international disputes. In the past year the balance sheet has begun to look more encouraging with a precarious settlement reached in Bosnia and real advance in Arab-Israeli relations. More recent developments in Israel are less promising. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that peace in Palestine would remove the foremost prop of Muslim antagonism towards the west as well as a significant rallying point for extremism under the standard of Islam, throughout the Arab world and beyond. But if Zionism is to cast a shorter shadow over the Islamic community, we must see that it is not substituted in Muslim eyes by an anachronistic Christian one.