Reformulating the Relationship between Islam and the West

John L. Esposito, a student of political Islam, argues that 9/11 tragedy had changed the constructive relationship between Islam and the West. The relationship is in tension nowadays. The issue of the abuse of the Quran in Guantanamo bay prison, Cuba, has shocked and provoked Muslims’ rage in many countries. Thousands of people in Jakarta, Kabul, Cairo and Islamabad hit the streets condemning America.

This is a small portion of the clash between Western (particularly American) and Islamic civilizations. Aggression and terror will always be in the mid of Islam-Western relationship as long as tolerance and mutual understanding is not maintained. It is quite easy to blow the conflict up into the global scale since the history of the encounter between Islam and the West has been colored more by tension and conflict than by harmony.

Huntington’s thesis that the difference of culture and civilization will trigger global conflict is not a mere provocation, since one of the dominant factors of the clash is the Western arrogance and Islamic militancy. It is obvious that Western arrogance and its interventionist approach to the Muslim world, as well as the radical and militant reaction of Muslims, frequently raise violence.

But what we’re seeing is more than that.  The clash between Islam and the West is also triggered by their respective fear and anxiety toward each other. The West is worried that Islam will grow and develop as the political rival of the West. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and other Islamic revivalisms convinced the West that the Islamic ideology is another post-communism threat.

Meanwhile, the Muslims are worried that western modernism, secularism and materialism will erode their “holy traditions”. For that reason, the Muslim world always acts defensively against the West; furthermore, they reject anything that came from the West, primarily Western thoughts and ideas. In fact, this is one factor behind the deterioration of Islam.

Islam and Western fear and anxiety toward each other stemmed from their ignorance of each other. As a result, the West observes Islam negatively. Montgomery Watt said that the West had been inheriting the past prejudices, where the negative images of Islam in the past has occupied Western consciousness and dominated Western thought. The legacy of revenge influenced Western view about Islam today.

The West has partial and biased knowledge about Islam and failed to understand Islam fully. They always positioned Muslims as barbaric and primitive communities who are fond of war. This attitude arouses western arrogance in imposing their notions and concepts as the universal culture. The West provides two choices for Muslims: to remain loyal to Islam and achieve no material progress; or to advance and leave the Islamic values.

On the other hand, the majority of Muslims have their own perspective about Western civilization. They positioned the West not as a dialog partner, but as a colonizer and enemy. Muslims saw that the West is drowning in spiritual crisis and therefore it has to return to the spirit of Islam, and that Western knowledge and technology bring no more welfare. Thus, Islam has become arrogant and self-confident and started to proclaim Islamic science and Islamization projects.

Up to now, the relationship between Islam and the West has no foundation. Moreover, unilateral anxiety and conservative views has increased on both parties. Arrogance, militancy and fundamentalism developed although the future of global civilization determined by the harmony between the two civilizations. In this case, we should not view Islam and West in the dichotomous way, politically as well as ideologically. We have to observe them in the dialectical frame of humanitarian civilization.

The principle of cultural dialogue will remove the existing conflict, disintegration and destruction. The dialogue between civilizations assumes that there is no one universal and valid civilization to be imposed upon all others. Human civilization is always in the process and imperfect, therefore Muslims and Westerners may sit together as cultural dialogue partners.

The success of this cultural dialogue depends on several conditions. First, the West has to remove its arrogance in declaring that western civilization as the universal civilization, because universal civilization is the one that serves humanity. 

Second, theWest has to reduce its political, economic and military arrogance and respect the independence and autonomy of a nation. Third, the West has to initiate a sympathetic research and study on Islam as performed by several Western intellectuals before.

In the same time, Muslims must open themselves and have dialogue with other civilizations. Whatever the case is, Islamic glory is not laid on the pride upon the achievement of the Islamic tradition in the past, but on the capability to build and establish contact with other civilizations. Furthermore, Islam has to develop scientific civilization that values freedom and rationality. The Islamic civilization has to be committed to the urgency of disseminating humanitarian values and supporting global peace.