A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Mirrors and Echoes
We have watched a broad range of tensions, hostilities, rivalries, and suspicions
unfold between Eastern and Western Christian worlds. Even while frequently
cloaked in theological dispute, in most cases the struggle involved worldly issues
of rivalry for converts and struggle over territory and institutional power. In the
end, it’s quite evident that state religion and theological disputes were ultimately
instruments to serve the social, political, and even psychological needs of the
state.
The scholar Vasilios Makrides notes that “popular protest movements of an
overtly religious character often had a different hidden character. In other words,
they reflected social and economic dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the policies and
influences of Westernization…. Anti-Westernism may take the form of an
extreme nationalism, which can function as a surrogate for religion too.” In the
modern era, even issues such as Western-led globalization within the old
Orthodox world spark similar fears, echoing earlier geopolitical struggles in
which the East lost out to Western power.
These themes apply equally tellingly to the rift between the Muslim world
and the West today. If this dynamic of deep East-West rivalry and tension exists
even within Christianity, it reflects similar foundations of tensions between the
Muslim world and the West. Identities and power are at stake, far more than
religion; and issues of gut identity in turn bolster communal differences. As
Makrides comments, “Many Orthodox are still fully convinced of their real
superiority toward other peoples and of their salvific [redemptive] mission in the
world.” The same could be said of many Muslims’ belief that Islam, too, can one
day serve to rescue a morally rudderless and foundering West.
As the gap today between the developed and powerful West and a weaker,
lagging East grows, the weaker party naturally casts about for explanations. One
tendency has been to blame the West for all the failings of the Orthodox and
Muslim worlds. Makrides adds that
in some cases anti-Westernism represents a convenient means for
providing ready-made answers and outlets for various problems of the
Orthodox world…. This mechanism of alleviating personal responsibility
and guilt feelings by constantly externalizing the main sources of evil
(here the West) is a typical phenomenon in the Orthodox East as well as
being a form of diverting social dissatisfaction and unrest.

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Makrides finally observes that in modern Greece and elsewhere in the
Orthodox world, such as Russia, anti-Western political groupings look even to
some form of confederation with Turkey based in part on the power of a visceral
anti-Western agenda. We will see how pro-Muslim and pro-Turkish feelings,
even if not part of mainstream thinking, do exist in contemporary Russia today,
reflecting some of these historic reflexes.
We see here, too, the early roots of a process in which Islam and Eastern
Orthodoxy ultimately come to share many views on the West. Indeed, if Islam
had never emerged in the Middle East and Eastern Orthodoxy had maintained its
sway there, how far-fetched would it be to imagine Orthodoxy still carrying
single-handedly the torch of anti-Western feeling in the Middle East today?

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CHAPTER FOUR