WAR WITH ISLAM, CONTD. Again, I don’t think it does our nation any good to think of a monolithic “Islam” with which we are fighting a cultural war (an underlying condition that allegedly spills over in to revolution, violence, war and terrorism). But then again, I am a half-assed student of history, so I do think that our present problems with various groups of Muslims who share troublesome political ideals may have roots in the past. Yea, there is certainly the Israel thing. But I’m not ready to take sides on that one right now.

I’d like to avoid getting tripped up on 20th Century Zionist resettlement and go all the way back to the days of Muhammad. Muhammad and his followers found themselves on territory that had once belonged to the Roman Empire and was still ruled by its successor, Christian Byzantium. For better and for worse, the religion of Islam became politicized very quickly (it took Christianity a few centuries, i.e. between Paul and Constantine, to do that). The early Islamic movement became very successful at territorial conquest, and in a few centuries controlled most of the southern and eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.

The eastern part of the Roman Empire was its economic powerhouse. The eastern provinces along the Mediterranean had the trade corridors between Europe and the far east (India and China), and north Africa was its breadbasket. Thus, unlike today when western Europe has more economic power and wealth, the major cities and highest populations were in the east, e.g. Greece, Asia Minor (Turkey), Syria, etc. There was plenty of money to be made by taxing and serving those trade routes, and early Islam did indeed make money off that.

By the 11th Century, when western Europe was locked in the backwardness and isolation of the Middle Ages, the Islamic world (stretching from western Africa to northern India) was a thriving civilization. In many ways it was like the Roman Empire in its prime, say in the second century. There was much trade, much wealth, and much military power. There was also much of the better things such as learning, art and scholarship. The Caliph was known then for its tolerance of the many Jews and Christians still living in its territory; the effort to convert the infidels was put on hold. Islam was also high-tech back then; it used math and astronomy to steer its ships, and picked up on the development of guns. When the last stronghold of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, was finally taken in 1453, it was the Islamic forces, and not the Europeans, who introduced the cannon.

Over the next five or six centuries, the Christian and Islamic religious empires both fell apart. But the Christianized territories in Europe secularized themselves from within during the Enlightenment. Also, for a variety of cultural, technical and political reasons, things in the former Christian lands generally got better. The Middle Ages came to an end, and trade, wealth and political unification slowly made their way back into Europe, along with culture and learning. In the Islamic lands, things just didn’t go as well. Their luck turned the other way. You can’t say that Europe deserved the revival it experienced, nor that the Islamic lands deserved the contractions that they had encountered. As the book “Germs, Guns and Steel” points out, civilizations rise and fall based on a lot of things that often amount to luck (changes in technology, changes in climate, new diseases, and the rise of a successful or unsuccessful political ideal, e.g. democracy in America versus communism in Russia). Some empire/cultures have a lucky streak (like Rome between the second century BCE and the second century CE, and like America over the past 250 years); but as any gambler can tell you, lucky streaks come to an end. That’s probably a good way to look at what has happened to Islam over the past five or six hundred years, and what could happen to us eventually.

Unfortunately, the ascending European culture was not sensitive to the mentality of its Islamic neighbors to the south and east. During the colonial craze of the 17th to 20th century, when Europeans set up their flags on the soils of Africa, North America, South America and Asia and told the natives “now we run the show here”, France and Britain and even Italy had no qualms about setting up shop in places like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Tunisia, Libya, etc. To the nations with battleships, these were just another set of weaklings to be exploited for their natural resources. The Euro-powers didn’t ponder whether they may be inflicting deep wounds in the pride of a people who had once conquered the likes of France and Italy’s own Roman ancestors. But even if the West knew that it was “rubbing it in”, then so what? How were these backward nomads and villagers with their camels and bazaars and minarets ever going to hurt the civilized bastions of London and Paris?

(Again, I’m not qualified to say too much about the history of modern Israel. But I can’t help but wonder if Britain and France’s support for Jewish resettlement in Palestine in the early to mid 20th Century was another example of the insensitivity behind colonialization. I’m not saying that the Jews weren’t deserving of a land of their own, nor that they were total strangers to Jerusalem; but there does seem to be a good argument that Muslim Palestinians were often pushed aside unjustly to make room for the Jewish settlers from Europe. The British, who were overseeing Palestine before and after WW2, may well have thought “so what if the natives get bent out of shape? How are they ever going to hurt us? Besides, we have to take care of our own Jewish Problem.” What I’m saying is, European treatment of the natives in all of its colonies was quite bad, but in the Islamic lands it had the effect of “hatching the chickens that are now coming home to roost”.)

My point here is not to say that it’s all our fault that a lot of Muslims are now acting badly in our midst. But it is partially our responsibility (i.e., the responsibility of Europe and America; you can’t separate the two, can’t say that America had no interest in what happened). Thus, I don’t think that it’s helpful to pontificate now about our superior virtues (democracy, tolerance, science, womens rights, rationalism), and their backwardness, as many conservative writers do. The Muslims are currently going through what our culture went through during the Middle Ages; back in those days, when their civilization was peaking, our virtues were inferior to theirs. Not so long ago, we sought to exploit their current lack of luck, i.e. to get access to their oil and to find a place for the Jews that we had mistreated. So here we are today, in a tightly connected world where the natives that we formerly mistreated now have a way to get back at us, e.g. by taking flight school lessons and by obtaining plans for uranium centrifuges from European engineering firms.

It’s nice that in most places, such as India and Africa and Latin America, the children of the natives are mostly willing to forget the colonial days and use their ties with the West to make money. But they don’t have the memories of once being the “empire next door” as the Islamic world does. They don’t have the long history of inter-empire struggles with us such as the Islamic taking of Spain and then its repulsion, the Ottoman expansion and contraction from the Balkans, and the Crusades.

I’m saying that it’s going to take a lot of cultural and historical sensitivity to untangle the mess that we are now in with Islam. And if that means us going first with mea culpas, then so be it. If you accept the comparison between 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, then remember that WW2 ended by going nuclear. Within a few years, the Shiia clerics in Iran will probably have the bomb, and a fundamentalist Sunni regime may well control Pakistan (and thus its nuclear arsenal). The question then is where the first ones will go off: will al Qaeda us
e one in the West, or will Hamas shoot one at Israel, or will the Shiia and Sunni throw them at each other? It’s all bad, unless we start encouraging everyone to admit, yes, I’m partly to blame here. Perhaps we need to set the example, to start the ball rolling.