A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

PART TWO

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MEETING AT THE
CIVILIZATIONAL BORDERS
OF ISLAM
Samuel Huntington, in his book The Clash of Civilizations, employed the
infelicitous phrase “Islam’s bloody borders.” In a world that is fairly bloody
overall, it’s worth remembering that it generally takes two to make a border
bloody. We’re now going to take Islam further afield than its Middle Eastern
birthplace and look at how it interacted with four major cultures as it came into
contact with them and established varying forms of coexistence: Russia, Europe,
India, and China.
First, I’d like to step back a bit from the usual use of the term “Islam” to
recognize that as the religion spread, we’re really talking about Muslims—what
they thought, said, and did and how they related to non-Muslim cultures. It
matters more how Muslims see their own culture and religion and act upon it
than what other people think Islam is. Islam, in the end, is what Muslims say it
is, and how they act upon it. That can be many different things.
Through examination of Muslim interaction with some key non-Muslim
societies, we will better understand how Islam functions under diverse
circumstances, its flexibility, and variety of forms. And as we look at these
interactions, we again note that religious doctrine is almost never the issue at
stake, whereas ethnicity and community are. Did Muslims maintain some kind
of implacable hostility and posture of religious war toward these non-Muslim
cultures? Or maybe a cold truce—or possibly coexistence? Or did they share
some common interests with the non-Muslim cultures?
MOST OF THE cases of “borders of Islam” that follow are not really about
borders but about Muslim relationships inside non-Muslim cultures, essentially
as minorities. In every instance, Muslims have developed creative relationships
in living with non-Muslim power. They have not, however, swerved from one
overriding principle: the preservation and protection of Islam and Muslim
society within these states. That means an unwillingness to relinquish their
Muslim identity or to become so culturally absorbed and assimilated as to vanish
as a culture. That does not mean they will not become fully integrated as active
and involved citizens in their societies. Jews have undergone very similar

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experiences throughout their history in struggling to protect their community and
maintain the uniqueness of their own remarkable and gifted culture, while
consciously resisting assimilation, absorption, and disappearance. We find that
Muslims have managed to coexist and even share in cultural cross-fertilization in
societies that have often not been very multicultural in spirit. As we examine
these four cases, we perceive different Muslim strategies: adaptation, fusion,
sometimes resistance when threatened, but a realistic acknowledgment of the
reality of their Muslim minority status in non-Muslim states.
But Huntington’s phrase about borders was not entirely off the mark either.
He reminds us—although not the first to do so—that throughout history
“civilizations” can in fact represent significant fault lines. Fault lines are really
boundaries of any sort that can flare up into conflict: they can exist within a
clan, a village, a region, a country, or between continents or civilizations.
“Civilization” is simply a kind of community writ very large.
How strongly does a civilization or a community cohere? It depends on the
circumstances, since under certain kinds of stress almost any community can
break apart into narrower components. But just what is it that creates the
boundaries between communities—and how firm are they? It’s highly
situational. An old saying captures the sense of it: “Me against my brother, me
and my brother against my cousin, me, my brother, and my cousin against the
other clan.”
All of this matters because Islam is not necessarily the delimiting border to
which Muslims respond every time. The actual communities that may end up
facing each other across battle lines can vary. In one situation, it could be
Christians against Muslims, or Muslims against Hindus; but it could also be
Sunni Muslims against Shi’ite Muslims. Or Turkish Muslims against Kurdish
Muslims. Or struggles among various Iraqi Shi’ite militia. The unit of solidarity
is constantly shifting, as it would with Catholic or Protestant communities. We
could even imagine a badly divided globe suddenly uniting in solidarity to repel
an invasion of Martians.
Not surprisingly, it is local conflict that is everywhere more common than
wide-scale conflict. That’s where the rubber hits the road—conflict emerging
from proximity, just people rubbing up against others. Conflicts among Muslims
themselves, or among Christians themselves, are vastly more commonplace than
any “civilizational conflict.” These grand “civilizational conflicts” that
Huntington talks about are often highly theoretical, or imagined. It’s hard to
engage an entire civilization into a conflict against another civilization—but it
has, in fact, become easier in modern times, where communications greatly
facilitate a sense of group solidarity on an ever-bigger scale. You can show the

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distant enemy on the TV screen in the living room and work up emotions long
distance. “It’s the Muslims,” or “it’s the Christians,” or “it’s the West.” The
Crusades were probably the closest thing to a “civilizational conflict” the world
had ever seen up to that time—luridly articulated in the stirring speeches of Pope
Urban II about the threat from “the infidels.” But most Muslims hardly knew it
was going on at the time.
All this matters as we consider the question of Muslim minorities living in
other societies. How will they interact? As a tight Muslim bloc? Perhaps not,
unless they are under serious pressures or heavy discrimination precisely
because they are Muslim. Just as likely, it might be all the citizens of a southern
region against those of a northern region. Or mixed Muslim-Christian or
Muslim-Hindu communities of one linguistic group joining against those ethnics
of a different linguistic group—such as Shi’ite and Sunni Kurds against Shi’ite
and Sunni Turks. You can’t predict. It is all situational and changing as people
and communities constantly reassess their self-interests. Thus, it becomes fairly
foolish to posit automatic Muslim hostility to non-Muslim neighbors, unless
some very bad things are going on between them—which can periodically
happen. Thus religion—especially Islam versus other religions—is an elusive
basis for conflict. To posit permanent Muslim conflict with non-Muslims is
absurd. And so even “a world without Islam” leaves us plenty of other fault lines
along which communities can clash, have clashed, and will clash. Over long
human history, ethnicity might be at the top of such a list, however we define
“ethnicity”—itself a consciously constructed identity.

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