EXPLORING ISLAM AND THE CLASH WITH THE WEST

Marlin Jeschke

Review of Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Random House, 2003.

Scholars in pertinent disciplines of study have monitored the Islamic world for quite some time now, as a survey of the literature shows. But interest in the world of Islam—chiefly because of Islamic terrorists—has grown exponentially since the 9-11 attacks and United States reprisals in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the rash of books since 9-11 is Bernard Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, Lewis has written much on Islam. Several of his earlier books discuss the relationship of Islam and the West: The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982); Islam and the West (1993); What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2001); and What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002).

The book jacket description for What Went Wrong? diagnoses the persistent unease within contemporary Islam. "For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement. . . . And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life. . . . Bernard Lewis examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to understand. . . . "

"The most dramatic reversal," says John Miller in a brief Amazon.com review, "may have occurred in the sciences: ‘those who had been disciples now became teachers; those who had been masters became pupils, often reluctant and resentful pupils.’ Today’s Arab governments have blamed their plight on any number of external culprits, from Western imperialism to the Jews. Lewis believes they must commit themselves to putting their own houses in order or . . . ‘there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression.’"

Reflective Middle Easterners have vacillated between two questions: Who did this to us? and Where did we go wrong?

In The Crisis of Islam Lewis goes beyond a discussion of the crisis within Islam to an examination of the threats of extremist Muslims against the West. His review begins with the citation of the fatwa from Usama bin Laden and other leaders of jihad groups in 1998. That call to holy war says that "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram mosque [in Mecca] are free from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim" (xxvii).

The events of 9-11 were prompted, Usama bin Laden himself "explained very clearly," by "America’s presence in Arabia during the Gulf War—the desecration of the Muslim holy land—and America’s use of Saudi Arabia as a base for an attack on Iraq" (160).

Numerous Muslim apologists today seek to counter the Western image of Islamic jihad as something violent, saying jihad really means spiritual struggle. Lewis offers a survey of the use of that word in the history of Islamic literature, showing how often it has designated armed conflict. And he examines contemporary charges of "imperialism" against the West made by Islamic extremists, noting that the term imperialism is never used for the extensive Islamic conquests of the past.

Islamic writers were late in taking note of America in modern history, although today America has become "the great Satan." As Lewis puts it, "By now there is an almost standardized litany of American offenses recited in the lands of Islam, in the media, in pamphlets, in sermons, and in public speeches. . . . It includes war crimes against Japan . . . Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and elsewhere. . . . And American actions in Lebanon, Khartoum, Libya, Iraq, and of course helping Israel against the Palestinians. . . . Yet the most powerful accusation of all is the degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life, and the threat that it offers to Islam" (80, 81). Islamic radicals also rail against "corrupt tyrants" of their own lands whom they charge with "American complicity."

According to Lewis the Islamic world shows a failure to come to terms with modernity. It is most obvious in economics, since "the average annual income in the Muslim countries from Morocco to Bangladesh was only half the world average. . . " (117).

The cause may well be political. Where Arab countries have tried "Western-style parties and parliaments [they have] almost invariably ended in corrupt tyrannies, maintained by repression and indoctrination. . . . No Arab leader has been willing to submit his claim to power to a free vote" (118). Too often democratic ventures in the Islamic world have meant "one man (men only), one vote, once."

In a fairly long concluding chapter on the rise of terrorism, Lewis reviews the history of this phenomenon in Islam. In its early centuries Islam had its assassins (the word comes from the Arabic) and its fedayeen (meaning "one who is ready to sacrifice his life for the cause"). But they did not engage in suicide attacks.

Lewis quotes the words of Muhammad himself on suicide: "Whoever kills himself with a blade . . . , strangles himself . . . , throws himself off a mountain . . . , drinks poison . . . , kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in hell. . . . Whoever kills himself in any way in this world will be tormented with it on the day of resurrection" (153). And in the past assassins and fedayeen did not engage in indiscriminate killing of innocent bystanders, which is against Islamic laws of war.

Lewis concludes his analysis in The Crisis of Islam with the words, "For Usama bin Laden, his declaration of war against the United States marks the resumption of the struggle for religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century. . . . If the fundamentalists are correct in their calculations and succeed in their war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam" (162, 164).

Although a notable scholar in Islamic studies, Lewis says little about the theological background to Islam’s modern dilemma. Islamic theology sees Islam as the product of a revelation that supersedes Christianity. And it views this revelation as final. Indeed, Muslim scholars at one stage of Islamic history declared the door closed to further interpretation of the Qur’an or of Islamic thought. This position is reflected in the modern Islamic fundamentalist fear of new truth and progress and its call to return to an Islam of the past.

Christianity, while seeing God’s revelation in Christ as definitive, has noted Christ’s promise that the spirit would lead the church into further truth. Also those Christians with a healthy view of eschatology have allowed the vision of Christ’s future kingdom to lead them into new ventures, such as the elimination of slavery, equal rights and opportunities for women, democratic freedoms, and in fact openness to new discoveries in science, technology, and medicine.

These have too often been misused in the so-called Christian West—as evident in consumerism, environmental damage, and, especially, in the West’s wars. However, openness to new truth is a reason for Western progress in such matters as education, life expectancy, and (when it moves from theory to practice) human rights.

Islam and Christianity also have quite different understandings of what creates a moral individual and produces an ethical society. To begin with, Islam denies the doctrines of original sin, the need of a human transformation called conversion or regeneration, and the availability of divine grace to effect such change. Islam calls for the achievement of good people and a good society by the imposition of law from the top-down accompanied by the use of forceful sanctions. Unfortunately America also believes all too much in violence and force in war and in criminal justice to create a good society.

The apostle Paul recognizes that God has instituted rulers and "the sword" but at the same time claims that ultimately good persons and a good society are achieved by the teaching of the gospel, Christ’s way, and its power to change people’s thinking (Rom. 12:2) and behavior (Rom. 1:16, 1 Cor. 1:18).

The quite different Christian view of how to produce good persons and a good society is what lies behind the Anabaptist doctrine of separation of church and state, or more exactly, the distinction between those who have accepted the call to live the regenerate life and those who have not.

When viewed according to Anabaptist emphases, throughout much of Christian history many Christians have not accepted the distinction between church and state. So the Constantinian state church arrangement was unfortunately all Muhammad and his followers saw in Christianity from his time (around 600 CE) onward. In this respect Islam and state church Christianity have been all too much mirror images of each other.

From the perspective of many Christians today, especially those standing in the believers church tradition, the Constantinian marriage of church and state was a departure from the way of Jesus and apostolic Christianity. Now Islam has always held that Christianity is guilty of a "falsification," or corruption, of the revelation from God through Jesus, which is why God had to reissue the true revelation again through Muhammad. This charge by Islam has focused more particularly upon the Christian Scriptures, but today’s Christians should admit that the church did not remain true to the message of Jesus.

Admitting this may in fact be a prerequisite to better relations with Islam. At the very least, people in the believers church tradition should try to make clear to the Islamic world that they are not part of the church that still shows all too many features of Constantinianism and that all too uncritically supports many of the aggressive policies of America.

Of course Islam too has suffered its corruptions, as reform movements in Islam show. Islamic reformers such as the Wahabhis of Saudi Arabia have decried the paganization of Islam in Arabia’s history. The call by today’s Islamic fundamentalists for a return to pristine Islam underscores the point. Unfortunately the clamor by many Muslims for a return to a past Islam comes into conflict with the pressing need of the Islamic world to open itself to new truth in many fields: the natural and social sciences, economics, politics, and not least, even theology. That is the crisis in the Islamic world Lewis has presented in many of his recent books and is a reason for much of the turmoil in the Islamic world.

Lewis says at the beginning of The Crisis of Islam, "Obviously the West must defend itself by whatever means will be effective" (xxxii). The means the United State has chosen are not, I fear, effective, chiefly because they do not help the Islamic world find a way out of its present turmoil. And they surely are contrary to the message and calling of Jesus Christ.

—Marlin Jeschke, Goshen, Indiana, is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Goshen College, where he taught for 33 years.