NP - Wrestling with Islam

[David Morris]

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Miscell/index02.shtml

[...]

I have been trying to make a couple of very big and very obvious points about
the world we are now sharing with the "Islamist" fanatics. I have made them not
as ends in themselves, but as correctives to the very big and partial ideas I
find in circulation around me. Now, I want to make my biggest point of all,
qualifying all the previous ones. In fact the subject is so large I can only
hope to tag it, like touch football, but I think the implications will tend to
present themselves. 

For now we come to the real crux, the real contest between civilizations; one
which I fear is unavoidable, and must lead over the coming years to terrible
violence between East and West, between what is left of Western Christendom and
what is left of Islamdom, after the ravaging both of us have taken in the
modern, or I would say, post-modern world. 

We in the West passed through an extraordinary experience in the 18th century,
one with implications for the whole planet. From different angles it is
referred to as the "Industrial Revolution", or the "Enlightenment", or even the
"Age of Revolutions" -- French, and American. We tend to focus only on the
material consequences of that experience, the "technological" and "economic"
aspects of a sudden explosion in human self-understanding -- how we got rich
when others stayed poor -- rather than on the spiritual aspects. 

But the core of that Enlightenment -- the wick of the candle -- was moral, not
practical. It is important to remember that in the course of inventing or
discovering or achieving the full "modernity", the French and Scottish
philosophes of the 18th century did not only create the steam engine. They also
perfected the first-person narrative, creating such things as daily journalism,
and the modern prose novel. 

Out of an essentially Christian tradition, they discovered or enlarged upon the
mechanism of "sympathy" in human nature. For the first time, large numbers of
people, including women and those belonging to the lower classes, were able to
read about "how the other side lives". And vice versa, the rich "discovered"
the poor, masters discovered the horrors of slavery, the English discovered the
French, the Europeans discovered the world -- no longer as things entirely
external to themselves, but as subjects into which they could now be
imaginatively projected. 

[...]

The important thing to note is that this revolution happened, and made everyone
it touched -- ultimately everyone in the West -- as different from our own
ancestors, as we remained different from people in other parts of the world.
The revolution spread quickly to the limits of Christendom, but only partially
beyond. And what we have today is the technical and economic ramifications of
that revolution, continuing to spread, but not necessarily its inner, spiritual
core. 

Even we have also been losing that thread -- we, too, have been losing our hold
on the moral and spiritual, as opposed to the narrowly material and
technological achievements of our Enlightenment. Yet even so, that idea of
"sympathy" remains something we take for granted, something reinforced in our
media every day. And something that marks us apart, culturally, from much of
the rest of the world. 

One sees the consequences of this every minute, when trying to make sense of
Arab and Muslim media, or in trying to debate across the cultural frontier. The
world they paint is black and white, "us versus them" quite strictly. There are
no bridges, only ferries that never return. The attitude towards the United
States and Europe is a stark, simple, "righteous" one, which we confuse with
"self-righteous". Either America is the Great Satan, or else it is the source
of every good thing; there's no room in the middle. Either you hate the West,
or you just give up and join it, by getting on the ferry. 

These are, still today, cultures of the "pre-Enlightenment"; people not
incapable of sympathy, for their own, but not yet versed in the imaginative
projection of that sympathy into people who are not their own. And at this
level, it is not Islam, but the Enlightenment, that stands between East and
West in these matters. For we have largely lost the category of an "infidel",
and they still have it. 

On this side, the endless effort to understand "where those people are coming
from", mostly missing the main point, that they do not think as we do. On that
side, no effort at all, and it is taken for granted that we are "infidels"
simply, living "beyond the pale", even when, as often, there is no desire to
harm us. For us, there can be both Israeli and Palestinian victims; for them,
only Palestinians feel pain. 

I would like to call this an over-simplification -- being a child of the
Enlightenment myself -- but I'm afraid it is not much over-simplified. The gap
between us yawns very wide. For the sad truth is that the only people to whom
we can appeal for "mutual understanding" from the other side, are the people
who have themselves been Westernized, or "Enlightened". 

I must therefore end on a pessimistic note, as I look to the immediate future.
As a Christian, I feel optimistic that God will lead us, Muslims, Jews, and
Christians alike, finally to the best conclusion, in the grand cosmic scheme of
things. But as a practical person, using everything I know to understand the
present order of cause and effect, I must tell you, that this clash is unlikely
to end well. 

David Warren



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