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The West is still demonising Islam
This is an age when people are beginning to discover the richness of other religious traditions. Without abandoning their own faith, some are turning for nourishment to more than one religion. More Christians, for example, read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber than Jews, while Jews read the modernist theologians Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox. Jesuits learn meditation from Buddhist omnks; people of all faiths are drawn to the teachings of the Dalai Lama.
But one religion seems excluded from this circle of goodwill. For nearly a thousand years, the Western world has cultivated a distorted vision of Islam which bears little
relation to the truth but which shows no sign of abating, even in the more tolerant climate of today’s world.
The Iranian writer Minou Reeves was horrified to discover this profound Western aversion to Islam in general and to the Prophet Muhammad in particular when she was researching her book on the role of women in the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9.
From the time of the Crusades until the present day, Christian writers of Europe attempted to discredit the Muslim faith by pouring scorn on the personality of its revered prophet. They presented Muhammad as a charlatan and an imposter, who cynically foisted a false religion on the credulous Arabs.
He was depicted as a sexual pervert and lecher, cruel and intolerant, an epileptic who passed off his seizures as evidence of divine revelation, and as a man who exploited
religion to further his own political ambitions. Salman Rushdie drew heavily on this Western perception of Muhammad in The Satanic Verses.
In this way, the Prophet and his religion became the enemy of decent civilization, a notion that has become one of the unquestioned, received ideas of the West. In her new book Muhammad in Europe: A Thousand Years of Western Myth-Making (Garnet, £25), Reeves has traced the history of this obsession, drawing on the work of such scholars as R.W. Southern and W. Montgomery Watt.
She adds little to their insights but the book is a useful and salutary guide, because alongside the distorted view of the Western writers, she puts the more accurate biography of the Prophet in the Muslim sources, which present him as a spiritual and political genius, and as a man of great humanity, with a passion for justice and equity.
Reeves is careful to point out that there have always been scholars and churchmen who tried to correct the Western stereotype, but these moderate voices were usually drowned by the more popular prejudice. As we read this dismal history of hatred, it seems clear that over the centuries, Islam, like Judaism, became the foil for the emergent Western identity. During the period of the Crusades against Islam, Western Europe began to recover from the long trauma of the Dark Ages.
The First Crusade, summoned by Pope Urban II in 1095, was the first co-operative act of the new Europe, its first appearance on the international scene. As the West shaped its soul in these new circumstances, the Islamic world became the shadow-self of Europe, the opposite of everything that we felt we were and the epitome of everything that we feared that we might be. Often Western fantasies about Islam reflected anxieties about the behaviour of Europeans.
During the Crusades, when Europe had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslims of the Near East (in flagrant violation of the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount) Christian scholars began to depict Islam as a violent and intolerant faith.
When the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, the scholar-monks depicted Muhammad as a sensualist in fantasies that reveal far more about their frustrations than about the facts of the Prophet’s own life.
At a time when feudal Europe was obsessed with hierarchy, Islam was presented as a libertarian faith which gave too much power to the poor and to women. During the Enlightenment, Voltaire presented Muhammad as the epitome of fanaticism, the obverse of all the ideals of the Age of Reason. Today, since the Rushdie tragedy, Islam has become the enemy of free speech.
Yet these images of Islam and its Prophet have borne no relation to the complex reality of Muslim faith. Islam, like any other religious tradition, has had its failures but it is certainly not the bogeyman that has haunted the Western imagination.
The distortions cultivated by the West do not reflect the fact that Islam had for centuries a better record of tolerance than Christianity; that the Koran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce that European women would not receive until the 19th century; that the core message of the Koran is a passionate cry for social justice; that the Koran is emphatic in its condemnation of coercion in matters of faith; and that, in the past, Muslim scholars have insisted on the sacred right to freedom of expression as vehemently as any Western liberal.
Yet Western people are reluctant to accept this, because their view of “Islam” is bound up with their perception of themselves.
Little attention was given in the media to the fact that at the Islamic conference, a month after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah against Salman Rushdie, 48 out of the 49 member countries condemned the fatwah as un-Islamic and a contravention of Islamic law. Many Western people preferred to believe that the whole Islamic world was clamouring for Rushdie’s blood.
But we cannot afford these old prejudices. It is wrong, for example, to inveigh against “Islamic fundamentalism” without mentioning that fundamentalism is by no means confined to the Islamic world. If Christians cannot rise above their tradition of hatred and learn to treat Muslims with respect, they will have failed to profit from some of the most solemn lessons of the 20th century.
If Western secularists cannot transcend the negative portrait of Islam that they have inherited, they, too, will have failed to live up to their highest ideals. Reeves’s book is a timely reminder of a great flaw in the Western vision of the world; only by recognising that this prejudice exists can we hope to escape from the grim patterns of the past.
Karen Armstrong’s new book is The Battle for God - Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (HarperCollins, £19.99)