living islam _ Islamic tradition

Karen Armstrong
Thursday June 20, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,740468,00.html

A century ago Muslim intellectuals admired the west. Why did we lose
their goodwill?

On July 15 1099, the crusaders from western Europe conquered
Jerusalem, falling upon its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants like the
avenging angels from the Apocalypse. In a massacre that makes
September 11 look puny in comparison, some 40,000 people were
slaughtered in two days. A thriving, populous city had been
transformed into a stinking charnel house. Yet in Europe scholar monks
hailed this crime against humanity as the greatest event in world
history since the crucifixion of Christ.

The crusades destabilised the Near East, but made little impression on
the Islamic world as a whole. In the west, however, they were crucial
and formative. This was the period when western Christendom was
beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the
Dark Ages, and the crusades were the first cooperative act of the new
Europe as she struggled back on to the international scene. We
continue to talk about "crusades" for justice and peace, and praise a
"crusading journalist" who is bravely uncovering some salutary truth,
showing that at some unexamined level, crusading is still acceptable
to the western soul. One of its most enduring legacies is a profound
hatred of Islam.

Before the crusades, Europeans knew very little about Muslims. But
after the conquest of Jerusalem, scholars began to cultivate a highly
distorted portrait of Islam, and this Islamophobia, entwined with a
chronic anti-semitism, would become one of the received ideas of
Europe. Christians must have been aware that their crusades violated
the spirit of the gospels: Jesus had told his followers to love their
enemies, not to exterminate them. This may be the reason why Christian
scholars projected their anxiety on to the very people they had
damaged.

Thus it was, at a time when Christians were fighting brutal holy wars
against Muslims in the Near East, that Islam became known in Europe as
an inherently violent and intolerant faith, a religion of the sword.
At a time when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the
reluctant clergy, western biographies of the prophet Mohammed, written
by priests and monks, depict him, with ill-concealed envy, as a sexual
pervert and lecher, who encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest
instincts.

At a time when feudal Europe was riddled with hierarchy, Islam was
presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and
freedom to menials, such as slaves and women. Christians could not see
Islam as separate from themselves; it had become, as it were, their
shadow-self, the opposite of everything that they thought they were or
hoped they were not.

In fact, the reality was very different. Islam, for example, is not
the intolerant or violent religion of western fantasy. Mohammed was
forced to fight against the city of Mecca, which had vowed to
exterminate the new Muslim community, but the Koran, the inspired
scripture that he brought to the Arabs, condemns aggressive warfare
and permits only a war of self-defence. After five years of warfare,
Mohammed turned to more peaceful methods and finally conquered Mecca
by an ingenious campaign of non-violence. After the prophet's death,
the Muslims established a vast empire that stretched from the Pyrenees
to the Himalayas, but these wars of conquest were secular, and were
only given a religious interpretation after the event.

In the Islamic empire, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians enjoyed
religious freedom. This reflected the teaching of the Koran, which is
a pluralistic scripture, affirmative of other traditions. Muslims are
commanded by God to respect the "people of the book", and reminded
that they share the same beliefs and the same God. Mohammed had not
intended to found a new religion; he was simply bringing the old
religion of the Jews and the Christians to the Arabs, who had never
had a prophet before. Constantly the Koran explains that Mohammed has
not come to cancel out the revelations brought by Adam, Abraham, Moses
or Jesus. Today, Muslim scholars have argued that had Mohammed known
about the Buddhists and Hindus, the native Americans or the Australian
Aborigines, the Koran would have endorsed their sages and shamans too,
because all rightly guided religion comes from God.

But so entrenched are the old medieval ideas that western people find
it difficult to believe this. We continue to view Islam through the
filter of our own needs and confusions. The question of women is a
case in point. None of the major world faiths has been good to women
but, like Christianity, Islam began with a fairly positive message,
and it was only later that the religion was hijacked by old
patriarchal attitudes. The Koran gives women legal rights of
inheritance and divorce, which western women would not receive until
the 19th century. The Koran does permit men to take four wives, but
this was not intended to pander to male lust, it was a matter of
social welfare: it enabled widows and orphans to find a protector,
without whom it was impossible for them to survive in the harsh
conditions of 7th-century Arabia.

There is nothing in the Koran about obligatory veiling for all women
or their seclusion in harems. This only came into Islam about three
generations after the prophet's death, under the influence of the
Greeks of Christian Byzantium, who had long veiled and secluded their
women in this way. Veiling was neither a central nor a universal
practice; it was usually only upper-class women who wore the veil. But
this changed during the colonial period.

Colonialists such as Lord Cromer, the consul general of Egypt from
1883 to 1907, like the Christian missionaries who came in their wake,
professed a horror of veiling. Until Muslims abandoned this barbarous
practice, Cromer argued in his monumental Modern Egypt, they could
never advance in the modern world and needed the supervision of the
west. But Lord Cromer was a founder member in London of the Men's
League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. Yet again, westerners were
viewing Islam through their own muddled preconceptions, but this
cynicism damaged the cause of feminism in the Muslim world and gave
the veil new importance as a symbol of Islamic and cultural integrity.


We can no longer afford this unbalanced view of Islam, which is
damaging to ourselves as well as to Muslims. We should recall that
during the 12th century, Muslim scholars and scientists of Spain
restored to the west the classical learning it had lost during the
Dark Ages. We should also remember that until 1492, Jews and
Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain -
a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.

At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly every single Muslim
intellectual was in love with the west, admired its modern society,
and campaigned for democracy and constitutional government in their
own countries. Instead of seeing the west as their enemy, they
recognised it as compatible with their own traditions. We should ask
ourselves why we have lost this goodwill.

· Karen Armstrong is the author of Muhammad: A Biography of the
Prophet (Weidenfeld); The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism,
Christianity and Islam (HarperCollins), and Islam: A Short History
(Weidenfeld).

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...the bedrock truth of a religious doctrine is not established by
holding an opinion poll among its adherents. - Charles Le Gai Eaton :
King of the Castle