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  • Islam - a Russian perspective

    FrontLine, India
    Volume 22 - Issue 01, Jan. 01 - 14, 2005
    India's National Magazine

    REVIEW ARTICLE

    Islam - a Russian perspective

    A.G. NOORANI


    "A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles
    from the Rock of Gibraltar to the Banks of the Loire; the repetition
    of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of
    Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more
    impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates and the Arabian fleet might
    have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames.
    Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the
    schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised
    people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet."

    - Edward Gibbon; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Modern
    Library, 1781; Vol. II, page 801.

    GIBBON was relieved that "from such calamities was Christendom
    relieved by the genius and fortune of one man", Charles Martel. He
    defeated at Poitiers (Tours), not far from Paris, in 732 the forces
    of Abd al-Rahman. A few years later, the Arabs returned to invade
    France, in alliance with Maurontinos, the Duke of Marseilles. But, by
    759 their expulsion was complete.

    When Prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam was confined to the Arabian
    Peninsula. After his death it spread with extraordinary speed from
    North Africa to Persia. Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638. By the
    13th and 14th centuries Muslims ruled in India, Indonesia and parts
    of China. In the 8th and 9th centuries Spain, Sicily and parts of
    France were conquered. Reverses came not long after Baghdad fell to
    the Mongols in 1055. In Spain, the Christian Reconquista movement
    conquered the last Arab stronghold, Granada, in 1492. Arab rule had
    lasted in Spain for nearly eight centuries. However, in 1453
    Constantinople fell to the force of Sultan Mehmed II. In European
    eyes, the Turks had taken over from the Arabs as "the Islamic threat
    to Christian Europe".

    The Ottoman Empire spread from Turkey to Europe. The Turks twice
    knocked at the gates of Vienna, in 1529 and 1683, but were repulsed.
    For five hundred years the Ottomans were Europe's most feared enemy.
    In the first decade of the 19th Century, their Empire spread across
    North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
    and the lower reaches of the Danube. In 1918 the Ottoman Empire was
    liquidated. The British and the French carved it up. Britain acquired
    Palestine in order, as the archives have revealed, to establish
    Jewish rule there. Thus was Israel born in 1948. For over 175 years
    Christendom had launched seven Crusades against Muslim rulers from
    1095 to 1270.

    Over the centuries European writers from Dante to Muir denigrated the
    Prophet of Islam. Defeat and humiliation of "the enemy" did not
    arrest this trend. A school of European scholars, however, dissented
    and enriched the study of Islam by its labours. Reading the Western,
    especially the American, press after 9/11, one is struck by its
    unconcealed prejudice against Muslims and Islam, which Edward W. Said
    so thoroughly exposed. It is, perhaps, natural to hate those one has
    wronged. History shapes perceptions, popular as well as scholarly;
    except for scholars who rise above the past.

    How did history shape Russian perceptions of Islam? Hitherto, we had
    only the West European and American reactions to "the spectre of
    Islam". We now have a rare exposition of The Great Confrontation as
    viewed from Moscow. Ilya Gaiduk is a senior research fellow at the
    Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and
    has also been a fellow of the Cold War International History Project
    at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, D.C. His book The Soviet
    Union and the Vietnam War won high praise (Frontline, May 30, 1997).






    President George W. Bush once famously called the "War on Terrorism"
    a "crusade". President Vladimir Putin has not far lagged behind in
    his characterisation of the war in Chechnya. Fortunately there are
    those who differ with him. C.J. Chivers and Lee Myers of The New York
    Times reported the view held by "Russian and international officials
    and experts" in Moscow recently: "Chechnya's militant separatists
    have received money, men, training and ideological inspiration from
    international organisations, but they remain an indigenous and
    largely self-sustaining force motivated by rationalist more than
    Islamic goals" and "the principal motivation for Chechnya's
    guerrillas remains independence" (International Herald Tribune,
    September 13, 2004).

    It would be unfortunate if Russia were to emulate American attitudes.
    A Report of the Defence Science Advisory Board, an advisory panel of
    the Pentagon, criticised the U.S. for failing to explain its
    "diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world but it warns
    that no public relations plan or information operation can defend
    America from flawed policies" (International Herald Tribune, November
    25, 2004). The U.S. is in a quagmire of its own creation in West
    Asia. Russia can yet resolve the Chechen issue.

    Ilya Gaiduk's scholarly work offers a view of the past and the
    present, which is refreshingly different from the view widely
    prevalent in the U.S. and Europe. "The case of Chechnya well
    illustrates the use of Islam as a tool to fulfil political ambitions"
    (emphasis added, throughout). The idea for the book occurred to him
    long before 9/11. He sought to study the diverse forces that worked
    in history to create "a long and, at first glance, incessant war
    between European powers and the world of Islam". Was it religion or
    power that tore apart the two civilisations? This idea of a clash of
    civilisations between Islam and the West appeared initially in the
    article "The Roots of Muslim Rage", written by Bernard Lewis, and
    published in September 1990 in the Atlantic Monthly. It acquired
    worldwide popularity after the publication in Foreign Affairs of an
    article by Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?"
    Huntington wrote that in the years ahead the "clash of civilisations
    will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations
    will be battle lines of the future". After 9/11, Lewis gave tutorials
    to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Edward Said was not the only one to
    censure Lewis.

    William Dalrymple's surgery is as effective in his brilliant review
    article ("The Truth About Muslims", The New York Review of Books;
    November 4, 2004). He establishes with copious references that
    "throughout history, Muslims and Christians have traded, studied,
    negotiated, and loved across the porous frontiers of religious
    differences. Probe relations between the two civilisations at any
    period of history, and you find that the neat civilisational blocks
    imagined by writers such as Bernard Lewis or Samuel Huntington soon
    dissolve."

    By the late 18th century the Muslim world's misfortunes had begun.
    Intellectual stagnation preceded military and political decline. The
    West's progress in science, in which the Arabs were once more
    advanced, had little impact on Muslim minds. In the 19th and 20th
    centuries European colonial rule was imposed on Arab and Asian lands
    with ease, thanks to achievements in science and technology.

    "The Christian victories of the last two decades of the seventeenth
    century and the shift of fortunes in the struggle against the Ottoman
    Empire cannot be measured only in terms of military and territorial
    gains. They must be placed in a broader perspective of trends in
    European development, precursors of the coming expansion of Europe
    and its future world dominance. After hard times dating from the
    mid-14th century - when, as a result of the `closing of Europe's
    internal and external frontiers', society had entered a period of
    stagnation and even decline; when the Black Death had arrived from
    central Asia and wiped out one-third of the population in a number of
    regions and brought progress in every field to a standstill; when
    Europe's capitalistic innovations had proved inadequate and its
    economy unable to survive the Hundred Years War and the advancing
    Ottomans on its borders - the sixteenth century marked the beginning
    of `an unstoppable process of economic development and technological
    innovation' which made Europe the world's commercial and military
    leader."



    MANDEL NGAN/ AFP

    Friday prayers at a mosque in New York. The Western, especially the
    American, press displayed unconcealed prejudice against Muslims and
    Islam after 9/11.

    Gaiduk is scrupulously fair in his recall of the past: "The Caliph
    Umar entered the city in the company of the Christian patriarch
    Sophronius, after having given him assurances that the lives and
    property of the Christian population would be respected and their
    holy places left intact. As if to confirm this promise, he prayed
    outside the church of the Holy Sepulchre in order to prevent the
    Muslims from claiming ownership of the church. He also visited the
    holy places of Judaism and Islam, the Temple and the sacred rock on
    Mount Moriah. From Umar's behaviour it becomes evident that the
    Muslims firmly intended to respect the rights of the Jews and
    Christians for whom Jerusalem was likewise the Holy City" (vide Umar
    by Shibli Numani; Oxford; pages 157, Rs.225).

    HOW and why did the Muslim world lag behind the West? Muslims, in
    India particularly, would do well to ponder over Gaiduk's answer. It
    bears quotation, in extenso: "For centuries the Muslim world had
    displayed its superiority in political, military, and intellectual
    activities. With a religion considered to be God's final revelation,
    proud of their conquests and achievements, the Muslims could afford
    to be insulated. They despised other peoples who had not yet become
    adherents of the true religion but who eventually were destined to be
    included in the House of Islam, whether by force or voluntarily. Yet
    Islam's `iron curtain' isolated Muslims from the outside world and
    proved to be fateful. When history took a new turn, Islamic
    civilisation's response to new challenges was insufficient and
    ineffective... .

    "The decay of Islam was not unavoidable, nor can it be attributed to
    inherent defects of religious obscurantism or political weakness. It
    is reasonable to conclude that if the processes of modernisation had
    not occurred in Europe when they did, they could have occurred at
    another time in the realm of Islam. But events in Christian Europe
    exerted a strong influence on Islam, compounding its internal
    weaknesses and in many ways accentuating them. In other words, the
    period of relative decay that the Muslim world entered in the
    seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, and that might have
    been temporary or even transitory on the way to a new expansion, was
    significantly transformed by a rapidly developing and expanding
    Europe... . The Muslims deprived themselves not only of the knowledge
    and experience of other peoples but, more important, of an
    understanding of developments in other lands."

    It was a direct consequence of what Iqbal aptly called the closing of
    the gate of ijtihad (reason) in the Muslim world. Even more important
    than territorial acquisitions was the preponderance of the European
    powers in technology, productivity, commerce and intellectual
    activity. What Gaiduk writes of the Ottoman empire is as true of the
    Moghul Empire, other rulers in India and, for that matter, other
    countries in Asia. After tracing the expansion of Britain, France,
    Germany, Italy and Portugal in Asia and Africa, he turns to another
    European power, Russia. It "quickly expanded its possessions at the
    expense of Muslim states. By 1828 the Russian Tsars had established
    their rule over most of the territory that now forms three
    Trans-Caucasian States - Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan - which had
    previously belonged to the Ottoman or Persian empires or had been
    contested by them. By mid-century the Russians were generally able to
    crush popular resistance in the Caucasus, in the long war against
    Adyges, Kabarda, Chechens, Ingush, and Dagestanis. They now turned to
    Turkestan, inhabited by nomad tribes and a sedentary population, a
    region of fertile oases controlled by the emirate of Bukhara and the
    Khanates of Kokand in the Fergana Valley and of Khiva in Khorezm to
    the south of the Aral Sea. The Russian conquest of the area began in
    1855 when a column under the command of General Mikhail Chernyaev
    moved into Turkestan, seizing Tashkent in May 1865 and Samarkand in
    May 1868. After the defeat of his forces at the battle of Zerabulak,
    the emir of Bukhara was obliged to sign a treaty by which his state
    was placed under Russian protection. Khiva's turn came in 1873, and
    Kokand was invaded in 1875 and the Khanate - Russia's most dangerous
    enemy in Central Asia abolished. The conquest was rounded off between
    1873 and 1881 by the occupation of the Turkmen country." The great
    game between British and Russian Empires had begun. It was to have
    fateful consequences for India's borders in the north-west.

    The hour of decline did throw up Muslim thinkers of first rank bar a
    few like Camal al-Din al Afghani, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Chiragh Ali
    who was even more daring than Sir Syed. "As Islam lost its position
    in the world and gradually retreated under the pressure of an
    expanding Europe, Muslims sought explanations. Why was it that a
    once-flourishing and powerful civilisation, which had demonstrated
    its superiority for centuries and had radiated the light of its
    cultural and spiritual achievements to the remotest corners of the
    world, now had succumbed before the advance of a previously weak and
    barbarous Europe?" That question haunts them, still; but it does not
    prod much introspection, except among a minority.

    And what a past it was: "Can one overestimate the great service of
    Islamic civilisation? It preserved for Europe - when it was rapidly
    disintegrating under the pressure of the barbaric invasions - ancient
    Greek philosophy, geography, astronomy, and medicine; and it
    supplemented these libraries of thought with its own knowledge, which
    was respected by St. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura da Bagnoregio,
    and praised by the great medieval poet of the Divine Comedy, Dante
    Aligieri. Islam played a key role in the formation of European
    civilisation, though it did so unwittingly. Much depended on the
    ability of Europe, like that of a pupil, to absorb what was useful
    and develop it. Islam at first was a willy-nilly tutor, but it became
    a willy-nilly pupil when Europeans preponderated in science,
    technology, politics and culture."






    Gaiduk's reflections on the present situation are tinged with
    empathy. He criticises his country's policies in Central Asia in the
    past and explains how they fuelled fundamentalism and praises Iran's
    President Mohammed Khatami for his advocacy of a dialogue between
    civilisations. His book is one of the most insightful works to appear
    in recent years.

    Andrew Wheatcroft's book on the same subject, a product of a decade's
    labour, is a straightforward history of the conflict between
    Christendom and Islam in many lands from 638 to 2002. His is also a
    plea for dialogue and reconciliation. The book is ably researched and
    profusely illustrated.

    Malise Ruthven's books Islam in the World and Islam: A Very Short
    Introduction were highly praised. Azim Nanji is Director of the
    Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. They have compiled a
    Historical Atlas of Islam since its birth to the present times. It is
    a work of learning and labour. Both, the texts and the accompanying
    maps, help one to understand how history unfolded itself in the
    far-flung reaches of the Islamic World from Africa to China, across
    the Balkans, Central, South-East Asia. Merely to mention some of the
    chapters is to appreciate the magnitude of the effort - Sufi Orders
    1100-1900; expanding cities; impact of oil; water resources; the arms
    trade; Muslims in Western Europe and North America; Islamic Arts;
    Muslim cinema; Internet use; democracy, censorship, human rights and
    civil society; modern movements, organisations and influences. It is
    an invaluable and indispensable work.

    POLITICAL confrontation and intellectual stagnation marked the recent
    past. What of the present? Gilles Kepel, Professor of Middle East
    Studies at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, wrote a
    notable work The Revenge of God describing the rise of fundamentalism
    in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim world. His book Jihad takes off
    from 9/11 to trace the emergence of "the militant Islamic movement"
    in the last 25 years in what he calls "a religious era" in Egypt,
    Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Algeria and various other
    countries. He paints with a broad brush on a broad canvas, not least
    in the chapter on Osama bin Laden. The point about the "decline of
    Islamism" is well taken. Prof. Oliver Roy's The Failure of Political
    Islam remains by far the best work on this subject.

    Kepel rightly avers that at the dawn of the millennium, the
    initiative was with these regimes that had emerged victorious from
    confrontation with the Islamist movement. Only, there was no central
    Islamic movement in these countries, but local groups, which spoke in
    the name of Islam to promote their political agenda. This is not to
    deny liaisons; but the movement in Indonesia, for example, has
    nothing to do with its counterparts in, say, Egypt or Afghanistan. He
    ably demonstrates that "violence in itself... has proved to be a
    death trap for Islamists as a whole", but he does not reflect much on
    the fragmented state of the movement.

    The War for Muslim Minds is much more sound in its analyses. Kepel
    begins with a thorough exposure of American neoconservatives'
    calculations on redrawing the map in West Asia. These "self-declared
    champions of Israel as a predominantly `Jewish State' saw the Oslo
    peace process as a trap" for Israel. In think tanks, in the media and
    on university campuses they began drawing up schemes and proceeded to
    lobby for regime changes in Iraq, Iran and Syria. 9/11 was seen "as a
    tragic opportunity to sell their radical new deal for the Middle East
    [West Asia] to the shell-shocked Bush Administration."



    MORTEZA NIKOUBAZL/ REUTERS

    Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, praised for his advocacy of a
    dialogue between civilisations.
    Islamism that used violence has failed. But its outlook and strategy
    are not shared by young second-generation Muslim immigrants in Europe
    who have never lived in a predominantly Muslim country and who have
    experienced personal freedom, liberal education and economic
    opportunity in democratic societies. Kepel insightfully opines "the
    most important battle in the war for Muslim minds during the next
    decade will be fought not in Palestine or Iraq but in these
    communities of believers on the outskirts of London, Paris, and other
    European cities, where Islam is already a growing part of the West.
    If European societies are able to integrate these Muslim populations,
    handicapped as they are by dispossession, and steer them toward
    prosperity, this new generation of Muslims may become the Islamic
    vanguard of the next decade, offering their co-religionists a new
    vision of the faith and way out of the dead-end politics that has
    paralysed their countries of origin."

    One wishes Kepel had considered the role liberal Islamists play in
    moulding the minds of Muslims who are prepared to study and reflect.
    It is only fair to point out that integration of Muslims in European
    societies, especially the young, depends at least as much on European
    governments and societies as on the Muslims and their leaders. Their
    progress will be of immense relevance to Muslims of India and vice
    versa.

    There are, fortunately, men of wisdom and goodwill in both
    civilisations, who advocate the path of conciliation. Vartan
    Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, who was
    born to American parents in Iran, is a highly respected figure. He
    renders service in drawing attention to two neglected features -
    diversity in the Muslim world and the voices of moderation in its
    midst. Among them is Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. He does
    not stop at dispelling myths about Islam and Muslims but proceeds to
    advocate a "universal ethic of human understanding" in an effort to
    promote inter-faith dialogue.

    One can only hope that Muslims of India will bestir themselves and
    reflect on the causes of their intellectual stagnation and the rise
    of "leaders" who feast themselves on their sad condition today like
    parasites.




    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Great Confrontation: Europe and Islam Through the Centuries by
    Ilya V. Gaiduk; Ivan R. Dee, Chicago; pages 254, $26.
    Historical Atlas of Islam by Malise Ruthven with Azim Nanji; Harvard
    University Press; pages 208, $35.
    The War for Muslim Minds: Islam & the West by Gilles Kepel; Harvard
    University Press; pages 327, $23.95.
    Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel; Harvard
    University Press; pages 454, $15.95.
    Infidels: The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002 by
    Andrew Wheatcroft; Viking; pages 443, £15.
    Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith by Vartan Gregorian; Brookings
    Institution Press; pages 164.
    To Be A Muslim: Islam Peace and Democracy by Prince El Hassan bin
    Talal; Oxford University Press, Karachi; pages 82, Rs.250.

    http://flonnet.com/fl2201/stories/20050114000807400.htm
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