Christianity and Islam: Collision or Convergence?
Lord Carey of Clifton
Gregorian University, Rome
25th March 2004
I would like to begin this lecture by thanking Dr Eugene McCarthy for the privilege of being a McCarthy Visiting Professor this year at the Gregorian University. I have enjoyed the experience immensely and am grateful to the Dean, Dr. Franco Imoda, for his kindness and Fr.Bill Henn for his considerable helpfulness in so many ways.
We have been housed in a delightful cottage at the Irish College and I do want to express our gratitude also to the Dean, the staff and students of the College for way they have welcomed us so warmly. It is a great example of Irish/English relationships at their best!
The theme of my course at the Gregorian has been 'Unity and Mission'. My desire to offer a lecture on Christian-Muslim relations tonight has not only been fired by the course I have given, but also because for the last ten years or so it has been an important strand in my ministry as a Christian leader.
I need to make it plain, however, that I am not, in a technical sense, an expert on Islam or someone who is a specialist in one of its disciplines. What I can claim is that for many years I have spent a great deal of time with some of the most important names in Islam – Dr Tantawi, Hassan al-Turabi, King Hussein, Prince Hassan, King Abdullah, Professor Akbar Ahmed and many other Muslim leaders and scholars – seeking to build bridges of understanding between two great faiths.
In retirement I continue to engage in dialogue through the Alexander Declaration Process which attempts to bring Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders together in Israel and Palestine.
A second project I am involved in is a business driven initiative founded by the World Economic Forum. Together with Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia, I co-Chair the Council of 100 leaders from different professions and disciplines which has, as its aim, to strengthen links between the West and Islam.
My wife and I have also been to many Muslim countries and appreciate the strength and depth of Islam. I think I can say with some confidence that I have a reasonable idea of the challenges that Islam presents to Christianity and the West and the challenges that Islam faces today. Whether colliding faiths and cultures can find ways of living together in harmony and peace is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
To say we live in dangerous and unstable times is perhaps the understatement of the year. '911', the emergency telephone number in the United States similar to '999' in the United Kingdom or 113 here in Italy, has become the shorthand for the terror unleashed on America in 2001. Since 911 terrorist violence has shown no sign of abating.
The attempt to dismantle the al-Qaeda network and hunt down its leader, Osama bin Laden; the Iraq war and the ongoing conflict in the country; the tragedy of the bitter conflict in a land called 'holy' by three world faiths; the oft-repeated statements by leaders of many countries that violence on the scale of the Madrid atrocity must be expected by all western nations – all this and more make the subject of the lecture deeply relevant.
And at the heart of our concern is Islam; a faith, a civilisation and a culture. A faith, that is growing fast in every part of the world; a civilisation, that has contributed greatly the human family and still has much to offer; a culture, with a unique texture that appeals to millions.
However, wherever we look, Islam seems to be embroiled in conflict with other faiths and other cultures. It is in opposition to practically every other world religion- to Judaism in the Middle East; to Christianity in the West, in Nigeria, and in the Middle East; to Hinduism in India; to Buddhism, especially since the destruction of the Temples in Afghanistan.
We are presented therefore with a huge puzzle concerning Islam. Why is it associated with violence throughout the world? Is extremism so ineluctably bound up with its faith that we are at last seeing its true character? Or could it be that a fight for the soul of Islam is going on that requires another great faith, Christianity, to support and encourage the vast majority of Muslims who resist this identification of their faith with terrorism?
Undoubtedly, Islam's association with terrorism presents an enormous challenge for all seeking a peaceful, prosperous world. Listen to Samuel Huntington, one of the most important voices in these matters in recent days. In 1993 he published a controversial essay entitled The Clash of Civilisations.
His thesis was that the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological battles of the political kind. Western capitalism was now dominant. The next battle he claimed will be the clash of cultures, with Islamic and Christian civilisations separating the world.
Scholars, writers, religious thinkers and politicians rejected this idea as flawed for historical, theological and intellectual reasons. But Huntington was unrepentant. In 1997 he published a book of the same name, modifying the thesis but retaining the underlying argument that a clash between two great cultures was inevitable.
In an extraordinary claim he insisted: "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power".
Penetrating and disturbing - even shocking- words. Are they true to the facts? Certainly September 11 seemed to confirm his thesis that in our own day we are witnessing a clash of cultures and are dealing with two quite different world-views.
In order to go deeper into the issue allow me to ask four questions:
What are the reasons for Islam's association with terrorism and death?
What challenges does Islam itself face?
What is Islam's challenge to the West in general and Christianity in particular?
How may we move from collision to convergence in mutual understanding and respect?
ISLAM AND TERROR
To begin with, it is crucial to stress the positive before we get to the negative. Islam is the second largest religion in the world and the name means 'submission to God'. There are over one billion Muslims in the world and the vast majority are peaceful and good people just as anxious as we are to bring up their children to live in harmony with others. And, like Christianity, Islam is far from monochrome in its make-up.
It too is composed of many groups and sects and its people include secular as well as religious Muslims. Yes, they too have people who are Muslim in name only.
As J.A. Williams points out in his book The World of Islam there has always been a secular side to Islam even though the resurgence of the faith since 1970 has tended to mask this aspect.
Whether religious or nominal, it is important to recognise that the vast majority of Muslims, like Christians, are honourable and good people who hate violence and are distressed to note that they are lumped together with evil and misguided people. We should never seek to demonise them or their faith. But a fight for the soul of Islam is going on. Why is it now associated with violence and terrorism?
Let me, for the sake of brevity, approach this from a historical perspective. Although Christians and Muslims have got on very well in countries where both have settled, along with their Jewish neighbours, there have periods when both faiths have sought to expand territorially and have clashed in bloody and bitter conflict.
The Crusades are a clear example of this where attempts were made to regain former Christian lands with unfortunate consequences for both faiths. In the 16th and 17th centuries militant Islam invaded Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and even reached the gates of Vienna.
Such facts contradict the assertion by Mohammed Madhi Shams Ed-Din in an International Conference hosted by the Gregorian University in May 2000 that: 'Aggression has been Christian in all (most) great encounters and Islam's stance has always been defensive in all (most) cases'. That both Christianity as well as Islam have had such episodes of militarism should not surprise us. The facts insist that neither faith can take the high moral ground and accuse the other of using weapons of destruction.
Apart from such well-known clashes, adherents of all three world religions were able to live in peace, even though the cost of it for many Christians and Jews in some lands was to accept the position as 'protected' (Dhimmi) citizens and pay a corresponding tax.
From the 18th through to the 20th centuries the fortunes of Muslim countries took a dip for the worst. Whilst Christian countries benefited from the fruits of the Industrial Revolution much of the Middle East has lagged behind ever since.
As a young man doing my National Service in Iraq in the 50's it was understandable why so many people of my generation, looking at such societies superficially, considered Islam to be a backward looking faith, associated with backward societies, with massive problems of illiteracy and corruption.
1967, however, is viewed by many as a turning point in the minds of many Muslims. In that year the Arab nations- Syria, Egypt and Jordan – mounted a surprise attack against Israel and were humiliated in battle.
Great swathes of Arab land were taken, Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights in particular. From 1967 onwards Muslims began to analyse the reasons for their defeat at the hands of the Israelis.
That event, scorched in their memories proved to be a turning point. Many concluded that a return to the simplicity of Islamic faith and wholehearted adherence to the Koran was necessary. To follow the West and to emulate its ways seemed to be the road to decadence and moral decline.
From this period on reform and renewal movements begin to appear in Islam which in spite of different emphases have one common aim, that is, to restore greatness to Islam.
Despising the political passivity of conservative Islam on the one hand, and the eagerness of modernist Muslims to embrace aspects of secularism on the other, radical movements are one in their desire to re-Islamise Muslim societies and fight the encroaching secularism and materialism that they see coming from the West.
Although it is understandable to call such groups 'fundamentalist', the term, borrowed from the Christian world where it means a literal interpretation of the Bible, is inappropriate when applied to radical groups in Islam.
J.A.Williams makes a distinction between 'revivalists' whose aim is to help Muslims return to the fundamentals of Islamic faith and 'radical activists', who encourage a fight against infidels. It is more accurate to call radical activists, whose creed calls them to bring about revolution through violence, what they are – terrorists. But that is to anticipate; and we must continue to explore the reasons why such groups came into being.
If 1967 represents a real politicising of Islam in the hearts and minds of many Muslims we have to look to Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, to trace one of the major sources of radical Islamic thought.
Two hundred years ago a Reform movement had swept through Saudi Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Uniting with Muhammad Ibn Saud, a powerful chief, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab subdued other tribes and imposed what Prof. John Esposito has described ' a puritanical form of Islam' on the people.
We should note that Wahhabi puritanism deemed it belonged to the purity of faith to destroy the sacred tombs of Mohammed and his companions in Mecca and Medina. Today, it is the Wahhabi form of Islam that is being exported to other countries and communities in Muslim lands.
Its intolerant and tyrannical beliefs lend themselves to young impressionable minds searching for certainties. The politicisation of young Saudi Muslims was completed in our own day when the impotence of Muslim countries was compared with what they regard the decadence of the West with its materialistic power. As Saudis became rich with oil, they had, to hand, financial resources to beat the West at its own game. It wasn't to be long before some of them tried.
If 1967 represented humiliation for many Muslims, 1979 is of major significance for Islam as militant forms appeared, giving some dubious credibility to the thought that violence is a tool to be used. The first provocation was the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia. Muslims world-wide were outraged.
As one Muslim friend put it to me 'Russians were not merely infidels, they were worse- they were unbelieving infidels!' Atheists and a 'house of war' was now a reality. A jihad was called and mujahidin – warriors- were called to fight a war to the death. It was, as we know, a turning point in the life of a rich, very tall young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, who used his wealth to set up camps in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
The invasion of Afghanistan represents the radicalisation of the elite of Saudi youth. The irony was that the Americans saw leadership qualities in Osama bin Laden to undermine the Russian invasion and the United States supplied him and his comrades, now in the Al Qaeda network, with training, money, ammunition and supplies.
1979 was also of importance for the Muslim world as Shiites in Iran overturned the secular regime in a spectacular coup and formed the Iranian Islamic Republic. In 1989 another coup took place in Sudan when Col Omar al-Bashir took over control of that impoverished country and enlisted the aid of a formidable intellectual Hassan al-Turabi.
Dr Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer, a polite and polished intellectual, has a clear and unambiguous vision to impose Islam on the whole world and make Sharia law mandatory- an imposition achieved, more or less, in Sudan.
In 1994, seemingly from nowhere, a group of students living on the borders of Pakistan called the Taleban took control of Afghanistan claiming moral leadership and imposing an ultra-conservative form of Wahhabism on an impoverished country that needed an open, enlightened vision not the myopic, self-contained world of the Taliban.
In the year 2000, Osama bin Laden, now fully alienated from America and the west, announced the formation of a World Islamic Front for a Jihad against Americans and Crusaders (a euphemism for Christians).
This action may have been taken in part because of a strong sense of betrayal, as it seemed to the Afghans that the Americans had abandoned them after their sacrifices fighting the Soviets. However, the world-wide implications were very serious.
For the minority of Muslims in such movements as the World Islamic Front and the Muslim Brotherhood, the world was now divided into a veritable 'house of Islam' and 'house of war'.
For bin Laden and militants 'Jihad' now had only one meaning- a struggle to death for the soul of Islam. The alternative and basic sense of 'jihad' as a word denoting a struggle to be good and peaceful Muslims through moral and religious ways was now in danger of being lost.
On September 11 2001 the World Islamic Front struck through dedicated young men who were prepared to die with the Koran at their side shouting 'Allah is great!' guiding huge planes to destroy the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
With them died many hundreds of others who were going about their lawful and good business. Further atrocities were to follow. A few days after Sept 11, in Indonesia, 120 Muslim troops struck at a village of Chinese and Christian people at dawn shouting 'Allah is great!' killing the men and raping any women they could find.
A year after September 11 2001 came the murder of many hundreds of innocent, fun loving people in Bali, Indonesia. Madrid is but another awful episode in the unfolding drama of Islamic terrorism. The question comes with greater insistence: Is not Islam being manipulated by evil and misguided men, not only destabilising our world, but also discrediting Islam itself? Therefore, to my second question.
What are the Challenges facing Islam?
Last January I was at the World Economic Forum and appeared on the same platform as the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mohamed Mahathir who on the brink of retirement gave his sober estimate of Islam, saying that unless Islam was prepared to change it would degenerate still further.
'I find it very hard to be optimistic about Muslims in the 21st century' he said, 'Very few Muslims understand reality and they do not understand that coming to terms with globalisation is one of the greatest challenges facing them'…. 'They cannot run away' he said.
Former President Wahid of Indonesia who chaired a conference in Amman when I was speaker at the Conference on Religion and Peace expressed similar worries: 'The Muslim world is at a cross-roads. It may pursue a traditional static Islam or refashion it into a more dynamic and pluralistic world-view'.
The challenges in the opinion of such Muslim thinkers are many and varied but perhaps we might pick out four specific challenges. The first in my opinion is for Muslim societies to integrate their faith and practice in democratic institutions. Indeed, democracy will be increasingly a major challenge as more Muslim youth are educated and demand a say in the running of their countries.
Why the glaring absence of democratic governments in Muslim lands, particularly in the Middle East, we might wonder? It is said that modern Muslim experience suggests that Islam and democracy are incompatible. I see no fundamental reason why this should be so. Indeed, Turkey is an example that confirms that there is no contradiction in the idea.
However, it is uncommon. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of whom rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces.
Whether they are military dictatorships or traditional sovereignties each ruler seems committed to retaining power and privilege. When forms of democracy are introduced, as in Qatar and Bahrain, they are modest in the extreme and power remains in the hands of the Emirs.
A second challenge lies in the disturbing social conditions that militate against stable civil society and undermine the values and ethics of a great faith. Demographic factors indicate that Muslim countries will be increasingly under question as time goes on unless actions are taken to deal with chronic illiteracy, spiralling population figures leading to dire unemployment and social unrest.
Giving power to the people in democratic governance is not sufficient if economic stability, universal education and human rights are not available and accessible. The absence of such conditions are factors that may precipitate revolution or fan greater resentment at Western resources and excesses.
My third observation is that theological Islam is being challenged too, to become more open to examination and criticism. Christianity and Judaism have had a long history of critical scholarship which, we must admit and acknowledge, has not been without its pain, but there have been great gains also.
In the case of Islam, Mohammed, acknowledged by all in spite of his religious greatness, to be an illiterate man, is said to have received God's word direct, word by word, from angels and scribes who recorded them later.
Thus, believers are told, because they have come direct from Allah they are not to be questioned or revised. As it happens, in the first few centuries of the Islamic era, Islamic theologians sought to meet the challenge this implied, but during the past five hundred years critical scholarship has declined leading to strong resistance to modernity.
Christian theologians and teachers, I suggest, have two important roles to play with respect to Islamic thought. First, we should encourage theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam.
In this respect may I salute the great contribution that the Inter-religious Council of the Vatican makes and in particular the work of Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald. Second, without interfering in the workings of another faith to encourage the development of rigorous scholarship in the formation of the education of Imams. A greater openness will benefit us all.
A fourth challenge facing moderate Muslims is to resist strongly the taking over of Islam by radical activists and to express strongly, on behalf of the many millions of their co-religionists, their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah.
We look to them to condemn suicide bombers and terrorists who use Islam as a weapon to destabilise and destroy innocent lives. Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn, clearly and unconditionally, the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people.
We need to hear outright condemnation of theologies that state that suicide bombers are 'martyrs' and enter a martyrs reward. We need to hear Muslims expressing their outrage and condemning such evil.
To be sure, the stand-off between Israel and Palestine continues to be the political arena where so many of our current unrests are focussed.
Having just returned a few days ago from Jerusalem I can sympathise with those who, at best, are pessimistic of any improvement in the situation and, at worst, conclude that the polarisation is so deep that ongoing violence and many lost lives will be the bleak future of the region for many years to come.
Yet, we are talking of two great peoples who have lived together in the past; we are talking of a situation where it seems possible to arrive at a political solution if we could find a way to end the violence; we are talking about a situation where both Jew and Arab deserve justice and peace.
If Palestinians should refrain from suicide tactics, as I believe they must as a moral duty; then Jews must refrain from using their power in unjustified ways, for the same reason.
It is impossible to go through the road blocks and security checks as we did this past week-end, and on so many other previous occasions, without such experiences making outsiders realise what this does to further resentment among Palestinians who consider themselves prisoners in their own land.
The tactics that the IDF are using in state killings of suspected terrorists and Palestinian leaders like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin are unworthy of a civilised society and shames Israel.
The enormous wall, now being built, may give some temporary relief to Israelis but only alienates decent Palestinians still further. I saw graffiti on part of the wall separating Jerusalem from the West Bank which read; 'This is our Warsaw ghetto'.
Wherever power lies – whether it is state power or the power that comes from an individual targeting another with a rifle or a bomb – is, to quote Reinhold Niebuhr, 'a poison which blinds the eye of moral insight and lames the will of moral purpose'.
My third question is: What then is the challenge to the West and to Christians in particular?
There is surely a glimmer of truth in the telling remark of President Khatami of Iran who remarked that 'today's world democracies are suffering from a major vacuum which is the vacuum of spirituality'.
It is difficult to point an accusing finger at what we regard as the weaknesses of Muslim governments when spectacular economic abuse such as Enron, Worldcom and Paamalat reveal that greed, exploitation and corruption lurk in our advanced societies and shame our claim to conduct our communities in moral and wise ways.
The degree of crime and delinquency, going hand in hand with a decline in moral standards and the collapse of such institutions as marriage and the family, are reasons why the West must be reticent in claiming the high moral ground. Yes, we must own up to our shortcomings and failings and from the riches of our faith and traditions reinforce what we most value.
A second obligation is for us to strengthen western values, founded as undoubtedly they are on the Christian moral tradition and culture.
In spite of our shortcomings at least European and American civilisations are repositories of fairness and liberal values.
Democracy, as an element of these, is a beautiful and fragile flower and we should support it, value it and protect it. It allows for dissent, for freedom of expression and for rights for all. We should not give in to claims that Islamic countries are morally, spiritually and culturally superior to other civilisations and great cultures.
To give credit where credit is due, although we owe much to Islam handing on to the West many of the treasures of Greek thought, the beginnings of calculus, Aristotelian thought during the period known in the West as 'the dark ages', it is sad to relate that no great invention has come for many hundreds of years from Muslim countries.
This is a puzzle, because Muslim peoples are not bereft of brilliant minds. They have much to contribute to the human family and we look forward to the close co-operation that might make this possible.
Yes, the West has still much to be proud of and we should say so strongly. We should also encourage Muslims living in the West to be proud of it to and to say so to their brothers and sisters living elsewhere.
We should also point to the enormous contribution the West continues to make to poor Muslim countries and we should endeavour to make this better known. Recently a survey in Egypt revealed that only 6% of Egyptians viewed American favourably despite being the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel.
Most of them are unaware that American and British aid built Cairo's sewers, water supply and electrical system. Nevertheless, we should also acknowledge that the West has much to learn from Islam and value in that great tradition of faith.
But What of the relationship between church and mosque?
It is important to know what Islam stands for – its strengths and weakness. But it far more important to know some Muslims and befriend them. We shall find them that they have the same fears about us as we have of them. Most of them are good people who simply wish to be good citizens.
There is much we can admire in Islam- the simplicity of faith and devotion of worship. Islam is not a complicated faith and perhaps we have made Christianity too complicated. We can admire the devotion of the people and their desire to promote their faith. We can admire their commitment to traditional values, the family, children and peace.
But Islam is not to be feared. Muslims respect integrity and devotion too. They have no respect for Christians who take the view that all religions are the same. They know they are not. They will always respect people who stand up for their faith and are prepared to talk about it naturally.
Christians need to be more confident and argue their corner for reciprocity throughout the world. During my time as Archbishop this was my constant refrain- that the welcome we have given to Muslims in the West with the accompanying freedom to worship freely and build their mosques should be reciprocated in Muslim lands.
However, that freedom is uneven. In some Muslim lands there are strong and cordial relationships but in some others Christians have little freedom, are sometimes persecuted, are not able build their churches, or only do so after much difficulty.
Saudi Arabia will not allow Christian worship and Christian priests and ministers are not allowed to function as such in that land. Muslim leaders often tell Christians and Jews that 'there is no compulsion in religion'. This sadly is only half true. If non-Muslims are not compelled to become Muslim, Muslims are not free to choose another faith. There is, we find, some compulsion, after all.
This, then, prompts my final question: 'How may we move from collision to convergence on things we most value and share?
Professor Akbar Ahmed, one of Islam's leading scholars and Professor of Anthropology at the American University, Washington, in his most recent book: Islam Under Siege: Living dangerously in a Post-Honor World concludes by saying: 'The events of September 11 appeared to push the world toward the idea of a clash of civilisations, but they also conveyed the urgency of the call for dialogue.
The creative participation in the dialogue of civilisations, to find an internal balance between the needs and traditions of local communities and a world increasingly dominated by international corporations and political concerns, the committed search for global solutions confronting human society and the quest for a just, compassionate, and peaceful order will be the challenge human civilisation faces in the 21st century.
To meet the challenge is to fulfil God's vision; to embrace all humanity in doing so is to know God's compassion'. Heartening words indeed.
I for one do not accept that the future is one of escalating violence, deepening bitterness and a grudging dialogue between 'incompatible faiths' and cultures.
Let me proffer some pointers for discussion and reflection:
1. We must deepen inter-faith co-operation and understanding. Religion is not going to go away. We may talk of a post-modern world but certainly not post-religious.
But religion may be used for bad as well as good purposes. In the hands of evil people religion is sometimes used as a weapon to kill and to suppress as it has been, from time to time, in the long history of Christianity. But religious leaders have an important role to play alongside political leaders. There is still too little comprehension in political circle of the power of authentic faith and the possibilities of harnessing the religious imagination and energy for peace.
We must focus on root causes of unrest where religions clash and seek to heal the wounds of the past. We must confront the deep sense of injustice felt by ordinary Muslims in much of the developing world where people see the tyranny of their own leaders, the growing gap between rich and poor and what they see as the massive support of the West to regimes inimical to Islam.
Israel, as I have already said, is a serious flashpoint of unrest and America has a key role to play in healing the wounds of a land beloved to adherents of three world religions. However, Muslims do not perceive even-handedness in America's treatment of Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Of course, Israel has a right to a homeland and above all to peace.
There can be no serious argument about that. Christians, of all people, should honour the special religious ties they have with Jewish people. That should not restrain us from recognising that Palestine, no less, demands and deserves a viable State with secure borders and an independent Government. Resolve this urgent issue and a great deal of Muslim bitterness and antagonism towards the West will in time be replaced by understanding. This longest-running conflict in modern times deserves the West's urgent attention.
2. Compassion and understanding are the only tools to handle hatred and violence. It will do us little good if the West simply believes the answer is to put an end to Osama bin Laden. Rather we must put an end to conditions, distortions and misinformation that create Osama bin Laden and his many emulators.
It is the battle of ideas we must win, not to show the many bruised and aggrieved Muslims that we are stronger and more powerful than they are. In this task Christian theologians, teachers, priests, pastors and people have a significant role to play.
Christianity has much in common with Islam and working from common moral demands, our joint commitment to family life and religious values, our agreement concerning the importance of worshipping God and teaching all people to build their lives on eternal and abiding values should give us confidence to create relationships between us that endure.
If we do not, the future will remain hazardous and threatening. As Christopher Coker says in 'Twilight of the West' as he contemplates the threat of terrorism in the modern world: 'What makes Islamic fundamentalism so dangerous ..is the appeal of science and technology in the modern Islamic imagination…there has been no smashing of machines, no repudiation of the Western sciences'. Indeed, 911 has taught us as much.
Yes, we live in dangerous times. But we live, no less, in times where good will, understanding, frankness based on respect and tolerance may yield offer an exciting future. Let us look forward to the day when we shall not talk about faiths colliding, but Islam and Christianity converging in a common desire to create a world of tolerance and peace and building communities on those shared values that make us human and capable of giving and receiving God's gift of love.
In February 2005 the Australian journalist Pamela Bone, already close to her death from cancer, published an article in the Melbourne Age entitled “Where are the Western Feminists?” Some of us would still like to know.
The immediate spur to Pamela Bone’s article had been the piercing silence from Western feminists on the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s condemnation of how women were being treated in the culture of Islam. In asking her question, Pamela Bone already knew why the Western feminists were saying so little. They were saying little not just about Islam, but about Hinduism or any other culture which, when the behaviour of its more extreme groups towards women attracts criticism, bridles as if it is being attacked as a whole. Of all the liberal democracies, Australia is the one where the idea is most firmly entrenched among the local intelligentsia that the culture of the West is the only criminal, all other cultures being victims no matter what atrocities they might condone even within their own families.
Perhaps the most successful example of how a western liberal democracy can absorb migrant diasporas into its social texture, Australia would have reason to vaunt itself as a multicultural society if the supposedly universal unhappiness of the Aboriginals did not, in the eyes of its guilty intelligentsia, make the claim seem empty. But in Australia multiculturalism is not only a social aim, largely attained. It is also an ideology, in which form, to borrow Pascal Bruckner’s useful phrase, it becomes the racism of the anti-racists. Australian multiculturalist ideologues will call anyone a racist who dares to suggest that another culture than the one in which they flourish might have aspects more repellent than their own. And it was just such accusations that Pamela Bone heard ringing in her ears when she made her exit.
The essay you are reading now has its own history, which will probably be part of its subject, because I have nothing original to say on the matter. Indeed that was why I could never seem to get the thing written. That there were countries in the world where the culture visited hellish violence on women even when their governments professed a measure of equality, and that these governments were unlikely to temper the psychopathic inclinations of the culture unless there was a measure of democracy sufficient to separate the state from theocratic pressure: these conclusions seemed obvious. The only mystery was why so few female intellectuals seemed willing to reach them.
Pamela Bone was still very much alive when I began making sketches for this essay back in the first year of the decade, before the successful attack on the World Trade Center. Her cancer had already been diagnosed but she was fighting it hard and had definitely not stopped writing. Indeed she was producing some of her most adventurous things. She had made the inherent conflict between feminism and multiculturalism one of her subjects.
To do so took bravery, especially in Australia, where the multiculturalist ideology – as opposed, often directly opposed, to the reasonable approval of multiculturalism as a desirable form of social organization -- is not just a consensus, as I have said, but often thought to be fundamental to a liberal position, and therefore not to be questioned. The distinguished writer Helen Garner had been similarly daring when she raised the possibility that the occasional woman might be evil enough to falsely accuse a man of sexual harassment – a conjecture on Garner’s part which drew the wrath of all those legions of Australian female pundits who seemed honestly to believe either (a) that if the occasional innocent man should get locked up it would be a small price to pay for the sure punishment of those men who were guilty, or (b) all men were guilty. Like Helen Garner, if on a less celebrated scale, Pamela Bone was a fine enough writer to make the onlooker toy with the possibility that these matters vital to women were being debated among them.
But the onlooker needed to overlook the fact that such independent voices were few, whether in Australia or anywhere else. And as the decade wore on, the number did not notably increase, especially in the matter of the treatment of women within the culture of Islam, and especially in the matter of honour crimes. My own impression, drawn over the course of these past ten years or so, is that the amount of protest about honour crimes from Western female thinkers has diminished as the news about honour crimes has proliferated, and has steadily shrunk towards nothing even as news about honour crimes among immigrant populations in the Western countries has become more conspicuous.
In Britain especially, the worse it gets, the fewer objections we hear from writers in the serious newspapers. (In the unserious ones, the stories run all the time, as a kind of snuff video on a loop: but the purpose there is to play on fears about immigration in general, and not to highlight a failing in the law.) A serious British journalist such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who promotes the difficult double programme of wanting Islam respected and honour crimes condemned, would not have to be quite so brave if she had more-back-up. But the feminists do not want to know, or, if they know, prefer to do nothing. This was certainly a conclusion I didn’t want to draw, because I never wanted to publish this essay, or even to make much more than a start on writing it. I wanted women to do the job. After seventy years of hard training I had finally accepted that it was not a woman’s job to wash my socks, but I still thought that if there were thousands of madmen all over the world ready to murder or mutilate their own daughters for imaginary crimes, then it was a woman’s job to object in the first instance, always provided that she was free to do so. On the whole, however, it hasn’t happened.
Some people keep a file of outrageous things they read in the newspapers, and sometimes those same people are eventually found dead among their heaps of clippings, having understandably decided that life is not worth going on with. Keen to avoid the same fate, I make a point of throwing almost everything away. But there is a paragraph I saw in 2001, before the twin towers were brought down, that I have never been able to get rid of. When I clipped it out in the first place, I knew it would be harder to lose than a bad dream. I would use the clipping as a marker in a work-book, and then deliberately lose the work-book in my inland sea of papers; but I always knew where the clipping was. I knew that it would go on sending out its beeping signal until I had summoned up the courage to write something about it. Perhaps the time has come. Anyway, here is the clipping, reduced to the form of a single quotation, with a credit for the speaker.
All women killed in cases of honour are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.
--- Abdul Karim Dughmi, former Minister of Justice in Jordan, quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, July 8th, 2001.
The “former Minister of Justice” no longer held his post, but he was still prominent enough in public life to have his opinion quoted. A key part of his belief system, it emerged, centred on the principle that if a girl is raped, her father is honour-bound to kill her. At the time, as clueless as anyone else in the West, I was not yet fully familiar with the idea of taking revenge on the victim. Later on, when it finally emerged that a feature of the conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s was the reluctance of Muslim girls who had been raped to tell their own families, I woke up. But even while still asleep I was impressed by what this man had said, mainly because of the eminence of the post he had held, and in which country. The fact that this principle could be enunciated at all by any man not clinically insane attained a special piquancy in the context of Jordan, then as now held to be a centre of enlightenment within the Arab world. Stung to attention, I started to keep an eye on the news coming out of Jordan.
I should say straight away, when it comes to Jordan, that there was, and still is, reason for hope. Obviously Queen Rania has never believed any of this lethal nonsense, and she has often verbally condemned it as an anachronism. Even saying that much couldn’t have been easy, but she has contrived to back her words with action, and it was partly due to her influence that the notorious Article 340 of the Jordanian criminal code was at last modified so that men who murder women on a point of honour no longer automatically walk free straight away. But they still walk free soon enough to make you wonder if an enlightened ruling elite, and even a reformed justice system, really has much chance against the ingrained prejudices of the culture. We know that the present monarch, Abdullah II, and his elegant wife have done what they can for the liberal reform of the Jordanian system of justice. But we also know that they would be receiving less praise for their bravery and originality if the Jordanian system of justice had been less recalcitrant. Or, to cut the irony before it starts softening the enormity, it is a fair bet that the culture, in Jordan, goes on treating women like dirt.
Upon investigation this proves to be the case. In Jordan, to expiate the shame brought upon a family by loss of honour, a woman is murdered every two weeks. Not only the crime of having been raped brings loss of honour. A rumour can bring loss of honour. Apparently there is little to encourage fathers in these cases to the consideration that there might be loss of honour involved in murdering their helpless daughters. The King and Queen have tried: they have spoken out for reform. The lawyer Asma Kadaar and a journalist on The Jordan Times have bravely devoted a good part of their working lives to the cause of sanity – particularly bravely because they are both female, and thus potentially subject to the self-righteous vengefulness of any mentally challenged male with honour on his mind. These advocates of elementary justice are people of influence, but they count for little against the collective dementia of the culture.
One says “the culture” because one is not allowed to say “the state”. The state, we are assured, isn’t really like that. Theoretically, in Jordan, a father must go to gaol for killing his daughter. And so he does, but he is out again soon enough to be in good shape for a hero’s welcome. In response to the influential liberal voices, the Jordanian system of justice is currently, in August 2009, tying itself in yet another series of knots as it strives to assure the world that the courts will not admit a plea about “honour” when it comes to murder committed “in a fit of fury caused by an unlawful act on the part of the victim”, and that a convicted murderer in such a case, instead of being let out after three months – six months in severe cases -- might have to serve the full term of two years. (A 29-year old man who stabbed his raped sister twelve times was sentenced to fifteen years but has just had his sentence halved. Will anyone be stunned when the sentence is halved again?) It seems to occur to nobody, not even the concerned royal family, that the sentencing policy is laughably unjust even when it is strictly applied. What a threat: if you murder your daughter because you think she has been raped you might very well go to gaol for months on end.
We are told that when it comes to a case of honour, Jordan is one of the more progressive Islamic communities. In Jordan, only one quarter of all homicides are cases of honour. In the Palestinian sectors of the West Bank and in Gaza, the proportion is two thirds. In Pakistan about a thousand women get killed every year, and a startling, if lesser, incidence of ritual murder is true wherever Pakistanis live in the outside world. When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are part of the culture. It was news in Britain when, on July 14, 2006, in London, a gifted Pakistani girl (her name was Sumari) was slain by her father, brother and cousin. It needed all of them to do it, because apparently she had to be stabbed eighteen times. Her crime had been to disobey them, and she died of the proof that they had been well worth disobeying. Taking it on the lam, the father – who, while thicker than any brick, had at least been smart enough to spot the lack of congruity between British law and his own beliefs – holed up in his land of origin, Pakistan, thus providing yet another statistic in one half of the two way traffic whereby potential victims, if they are lucky, hide out in the West, whereas perpetrators flee the West to hide out in the East. That two-way traffic should surely be enough by itself to define the nature of the horrible cultural interchange, which is mainly a matter of our culture failing to provide sufficient protection against the consequences of theirs.
I long ago lost count, just as I lost the clippings, of those occasions in which a local British police force could do no more than “warn” a woman whose life was in danger from the men around her. In late July 2009 the newspapers were featuring –but for not more than the usual few days – stories of a case in which a woman had been “warned” after the men around her poured acid down the throat of the man she had been seeing. The man ended up in hospital with his tongue destroyed, but it appears that the tongues of the police had been destroyed too, because a “warning” was the only help they could give, apparently for fear that the local immigrant community might take offence. There is seldom, apparently, much chance of “warning” the men in such cases that if they publicly avow violent intentions towards a woman they will be hauled up, and there is never any chance at all that such men will be expelled from the country. No Minister of Community Cohesion has yet said that all communities would have a better chance of cohering with each other if those communities whose beliefs about honour were contrary to the law of the land could change them.
By this time the words “community” and “culture” are starting to sound like what they are: weasel words for institutionalised sadism, which the naïve onlooker is likely to suspect might have something to do with the religion, whether it be Hindu, Sikh or Islamic. But at the mere mention of Islam, cue the experts: apparently these cases of honour have no justification in Sharia, and therefore honour crimes have nothing to do with the religion. In Sharia, four witnesses have to catch a pair of illicit lovers in flagrante before they can both be killed. We are supposed to be reassured by these rigorous requirements of sufficient evidence, and are thought to be niggling if we question the assumption that the death penalty is mandatory if the case is proved. The requirement that the culprits should be killed goes unexamined. No doubt, if it were examined, the community would be placed in danger, and the culture begin to fray. But surely, if moderate Islam is to hold its own against its extremist wings, then fraying, in that one respect at least, is exactly what the culture needs to do. There are more than a billion Muslims who are not engaged in jihad against the west, and not likely to be. We should try to remember just how few people are trying to kill us, even when they feel sorely provoked. But if the non-fanatical majority can’t find a voice to condemn the few among their fellows who see nothing wrong with killing their own women for imaginary crimes, then they either condone that attitude or are afraid of those who hold it: either way, not a very encouraging start towards the more liberal Muslim future that we have been promised.
If Jordan is progressive, you can imagine what things must be like elsewhere: except that you can’t imagine. Interviewed in our press, a Tunisian woman who dares to write about what is going on in her homeland clearly credits herself with the life expectancy of a snowflake on a hot stove. No wonder she is a lone voice. From Afghanistan, when the Taliban ruled, the reports were awful beyond belief. But we did better if we believed them, because it turned out that some of the Northern Alliance forces that replaced the Taliban were united only in their conviction that the Taliban were soft on women. Later on the Taliban came back to prominence and in the areas under their control things were re-established on the same plane of dementia as was the rule until just yesterday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where it was considered a mercy if, when a girl’s school was burned to the ground, the girls were not still inside it. At the time of writing, the Pakistani army has cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, to the point where the streets where they used to dump the bodies of the punished are now full again of living people. But when the BBC interviews boy “fighters” who have been rescued from the Taliban’s suicide schools, the hoys have to be fully masked for their “protection.” It doesn’t sound as if the madmen have gone very far away, and judging by the fact that the BBC correspondent has only her face showing, the local men who theoretically aren’t insane might not be as sane as all that.
We had also better believe that where men alone decide what women’s rights are, the results are rarely good. Western liberal democracy, or a reasonable imitation of Western liberal democracy when it comes to the rule of law, is still the only kind of society we know about where women are not at the mercy of systematic injustice –that is, of justice conceived of and maintained as a weapon of terror. Where women are concerned, countries like Japan have climbed out of their dark histories to the exact extent that they have become Western-style liberal democracies, and no further. The same is true for the “Tiger” economies: the condition of women might have been ameliorated only because it has been thought expedient to subject theocratic pressures to the rule of law, but it doesn’t matter why the law is there, as long as it is there. The rule of law does not guarantee justice, but there is no justice without it. It has been one of the sour amusements provided by our feminist movement in its modern phase to watch its proponents trying to blink this fact.
At one point our feminists, getting frustrated as the pace slowed down in the home stretch to utopia, started telling us that other cultures (cultures practising clitoridectomy, for example) were more “authentic” in the respect of female sexual identity. A woman in Somalia, we were told, at least knows she is a woman. At one point my friend Germaine Greer could be heard propounding this view, but she has a good heart, and perhaps found reason to dial back on her fervour after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has actually suffered a clitoridectomy in Somalia, pointed out that the practice, far from being a sign of authenticity, was a mechanism of repression. How Germaine Greer could ever, even momentarily, have thought anything different is a matter for study in a field that needs to be explored: the way Western intellectuals lose sight of elementary liberalism in the heat-haze of their own rhetoric.
In a free society, radical dissatisfaction is usually a condition of mind before it is a response to circumstances, so it has to go somewhere. As atomisation continues in the liberal democracies, the number of candidates for an irresponsible semi-intelligentsia continues to increase. They come from either wing, but are always more vociferous on the left, because capitalism provides the more blatant source of provocation. One can hardly blame them for that. What is striking is their capacity, once they run out of injustices in liberal democracy that they can blame on capitalism, to look for injustices in the rest of the world that they can blame on liberal democracy. In sub-Saharan Africa, especially, criminal states are regarded as victim states even when their sole concern is the victimisation of their own people. By now Bob Geldof seems ready to admit the possibility that he and President Mengistu of Ethiopia were in a symmetrical relationship. But Geldof is a long way ahead of most of his admirers. Food aid enthusiasts are still reluctant to believe that most of the money raised for Ethiopia was wasted.
But it was worse than wasted. It fuelled the engine of injustice, and the result of injustice, in Ethiopia and in any other African country that melts down, is invariably a situation in which the lot of women, already bad, gets worse. In those failed states where Islam is a factor, the sufferings of women seem to be even worse than in the others, but in the others it is bad enough to suggest that what we are talking about goes far beyond religion. An African state where men rule the roost is usually on its way to chaos, and the inevitable inference is that a fair shake for women is the only hope for a decent future. It is some encouragement to find that Barack Obama, whose influence is bound to count in Africa for the foreseeable future, seems to think the same. His excellent first book Dreams from My Father is ruled by the spirit of his mother, not his father. She is the responsible one. And as the Australian Aboriginal political thinker Noel Pearson has insisted, the right to responsibility is crucial. (Pearson, who argues that welfare for Aboriginals should be accompanied by a strict application of the law against abusive Aboriginal men, will no doubt become an object for execration among Australian intellectuals once they have finished collating the evidence that he is a CIA sleeper who was planted in Cooktown by a low-flying C-130 after he completed his training at Langley, Virginia.)
The other crucial requirement, surely, is for the pampered intelligentsia of the West to give up finally and forever on any notion that the Third World –for all its deprivations and perhaps because of them – is some kind of Eden in which countervailing values against the excesses of the West may be found. What may be found is more often a heap of dead bodies. Most of those get blamed on the West, too, but when half of the population of Rwanda sets out to murder the other half, with no recourse to Western technology except the metal to make machetes, the explanation starts looking thin. And always it is mandatory for the women to be raped as well as being chopped up, the only question in the minds of the men being about what order in which to do these things. No doubt the same sort of dialogue was going on somewhere in the mind of Fred West, but at least he found it advisable to hide the corpses.
It should be obvious that in Africa there is little hope without education and that any educational reform should emphasise the educating of women. We can’t be sure that the rise of women to political prominence, there or anywhere, will guarantee the beneficial modification of a monolithic state – Madame Mao, after all, was a product of the Chinese educational system – but we can be sure that any monolithic state which resists the very idea of educating women has no intention of liberalising itself. This principle holds true all the way up to – or down to, if you like – the level of Saudi Arabia, which even the West’s most ardently anti-Western feminists are ready to concede is an organized insult to their gender. (They would probably be less ready to concede this if Saudi Arabia were a declared enemy of the United States, but that’s by the way.) Where women are concerned – and where women are concerned we are all concerned, or should be --Saudi Arabia is such a horror show that it would constitute all on its own sufficient reason for the West to wean itself off oil, if only to deprive those untold thousands of idle princes and useless Koranic scholars of their endless supply of free money, large amounts of which are used in an export drive to flood the world with extremist doctrine on the intellectual level of the Sexcetera channel but with the virulence of botulism.
Countries in receipt of free money are under no compulsion to develop a real economy, and are thus less likely than ever to see even the material benefits, let alone the moral ones, of setting women free.
Similarly, to return to my main theme, it should be permissible to say that if Islamic leaders really believe that the Koran is a book of justice, they should enforce its spirit. It took Western civilization almost two millennia to do a decent job of enforcing the spirit of the New Testament, and part of the job consisted of imposing a separation between church and state, which couldn’t be done until the book was subjected to critical scrutiny, so that it could be taken as a source of benevolent metaphor rather than a set of inflexible precepts. In this regard, the enforced halt, in the 19th Century, to any critical scrutiny of the Islamic sacred writings had such deleterious effects that they were regretted even by Edward Said. But even in less enlightened times, the New Testament had one salient virtue: the merciful teachings of Jesus Christ. In Italy, perpetrators of crimes of passion were still being given a free pass well into my own day, but finally even the Catholic Church felt obliged to remind the legal system that the Son of God might have taken a dim view. It would be a blessing for Islam if its book featured a leading character imbued with the belief that when a woman is taken in adultery the best idea is not to throw stones at her unless you are certain of being without sin yourself. Jesus never said that if four of you catch her in the act, you can stone her to death.
But at least the Islamic holy writings say that Allah is merciful. Some kind of Islamic protestant reform might start from that assurance. In the case of Christianity, protestant reform started with pointing out what was actually written in the book, instead of concocted by a priesthood. Islamic protestants might have less to go on, and it could be that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct in wanting the whole religious edifice pulled down. But if we think that a reformation, rather than a dissolution, is more desirable, or at least more likely, then surely a movement that puts the emphasis back on the less fanatical interpretation of the texts that prevailed before the Wahabist aberration is one to be encouraged. Islamic protestants, however, seem more likely to come from among women than among men. Recent initiatives from putatively liberal thinkers among Islamic men have not been very convincing. Paul Berman has dealt in detail with the thought processes of Tariq Ramadan but really Nicholas Sarkozy had already done the necessary when, before he was President of France, he asked Ramadan on television whether he condemned the stoning of women, and Ramadan said that he could have no opinion until the imams had discussed the matter first. And Ali A. Allawi’s recent assurances that the Islamic civilization of the future will be ruled with the aid of a modernised Sharia sounded a lot less promising than his fond reminiscences of what the secular movement in some of the Arab countries used to be like when he was young enough to enjoy it.
A modernised Sharia? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury would have smelt a rat there. Instances of these nice noises from Islamic male thinkers could be multiplied, but even at their best they sound hollow beside those cries of protest arising from women where protesting is momentarily permitted without penalty, as it was when the admirable Wafa Sultan confronted a studio full of imams on Al Jazeera Television and told them where they could put their parade of clerical authority. But Wafa Sultan was safe in America when she said her piece, although the assembled male clerics would undoubtedly have thrown stones at her satellite image if there had been any stones available. It’s the cries of protest when protesting is not permitted, however, that really tell you what you need to know. The cries tend to be brief, and in the case of the girl we now all know as Neda Iran, we might not have heard the cry at all if she had not been so beautiful. The cult of glamour worked, for once, in the cause of justice. It was a crumb of comfort to offset against the depressing extent to which the cult of glamour has failed to work in the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi. She is beautiful too, and she is still alive: but she is wasting away.
What is to be done about this world-wide victimisation of women? What else but to condemn it? To do so, it would be a help to uncouple the question from all the other questions that look more pressing but are much more equivocal. Let me end where I started, in Australia, where Pamela Bone asked “Where are the Western feminists?” when she already knew the answer. They were hiding, under the guise of concerning themselves with those pressing questions. In Australia, which is in so many ways the ideal Western liberal democracy, and all the more instructive for being so, it is hard to find more than a handful of pundits, academics, journalists and broadcasters who do not hold the West responsible for world poverty, Israeli imperialism, genocide in Iraq, and the imminent heat death of what they insist on calling the Planet. On each point, they might well be less silly than they sound. They can make a case for their views. The feminists among them are especially eloquent in the condemnation of Western evils. But Pamela Bone wanted the feminists to speak out clearly about a simpler topic, which can be exemplified by a sign on the wall of a temple in Bali. NO MENSTRUATION WOMEN ALLOW. And the fact that there are men in charge of synagogues who feel the same is not really an answer, because except for the occasional ultra-orthodox head-case no man who runs a synagogue wants to burn the women inside it.
But there are men all over the world who really do want to kill women on a point of honour. What kind of honour is that? When are these dreadful men, and all who encourage and “understand” them, to be condemned as the homicidal maniacs they are? It could be said that there is not much point in condemning what we can’t change, but in our own countries, where it could be changed if the will existed, condemnation would surely be a useful first step, and it might help some of the countries of origin to at least see the point. Jordan, which is sensitive enough to Western opinion for its Queen to see the advantage of regular appearances in Hello magazine, has recently announced a shelter system for women running away from danger. While the women are in the shelter, the men in their families are given counselling. I suppose that’s a start, although some of the women might be wise not to take it on trust when they are told the danger is over. Daddy says it’s all right to come home now.
-- Standpoint, September 2009
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