Now that pluralism has beaten communism, they say, the next great battle is between Islam and Christendom: or rather between the two chunks of the world that have grown out of those two different ideas of God and man. We therefore organized a debate between an open-minded Christian cleric and an open-minded Muslim one, Call them Francis and Mahmoud. The reasonable Muslim begins,
Mahmoud: It distresses me that so many people seem to think the next Period of history will be a fight between your part of the world and mine. It is true that we live elbow to elbow with each other, all the way from the Caspian Sea to the western end of the Mediterranean. It is also true that our elbows have banged painfully together many times in the past. But almost 2,000 years after the birth of your Jesus, and more than 1,400 years after the birth of our Muhammed, let me start by asking whether it really has to happen all over again.
We are both, after all, “people of the Book”. We both believe, along with the Jews, in the idea of a single God. We also share the idea of individual responsibility before God: in the words of my Koran, “Each Soul draws the reward of ins acts on none but itself.”
These things may sound meaningless to the many people who these days do not believe in any God at all. But it is these primal ideas that shape whole cultures, meaning the way we live. There is a great gap between the way both you and J live, different though we are, and the tangled life of the multi-god Hindu culture, or the monochrome life of the almost godless Confucian culture. Let me remind you that when Muhammed went from Mecca on his visit to heaven in what you call AD 621, he paused in Jerusalem to kneel in prayer alongside Abraham, Moses-and Jesus, That moves me.
Francis: It moves me too. But we have to face the faces of history. The facts are that we cousins of the Book have quarreled frequently, and frightfully. There are no rows like family rows. Let me remind you, in turn, of the time when the sweaty young squires of a newly confident western Europe, those yuppies of the eleventh century, clumped their way to Jerusalem to start the sequence of slaughter and deception we call the Crusades; and of that later time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when a then all-powerful Europe swallowed up almost the entire Muslim world into its various empires.
Mahmoud: And let me recall for you, since each of us is remembering the times when his own side went too far, the Arab army that swept through North Africa into Spain and France, hot with a new religion, in your eight century (and our first), until Charles Martel stopped it at Poitiers; the Golden Horde, which occupied most of what you now acil European Russia until o Grand Duke of Moscow turned it around 610 years ago and the Turkish thrust into eastern Europe that was reversed at the gates of Vienna, thanks to a King of Poland, only 307 years ago,
Francis Yes, we both have our memories. Europe and Islam have not had a quiet time together; Their fights with each other are one of history’s most familiar stories. Is there any reason to think the story is over?
Mahmoud: Well, there is one important difference between then and now.
In most of those earlier clashes, the side that went on to the offensive was full of self-confidence, for what we would now call both ideological and technological reasons; and the defending side was divided and weak. The splendidly efficient Arab army that carried the new-born Crescent as far as Poitiers was attacking a Europe still in its Dark Ages. The Crusaders whose heavy cavalry took the Cross back w Jerusalem 350 years later marched with a Pope’s blessing against a temporarily disorganized Muslim world. The Turks who then pushed the counter- attack as far as Vienna had the best organized empire of its time, and like your empire-builders of the 1990s combined religious zeal with efficiency; and they both forced a fragmented opposition.
It does not look like that now. I agree that at the moment my Islam has more religious enthusiasm than your Christendom, or ex-Christendom: most of us are still believers, most of you are not sure whether you believe or not. But the rest of the equation does not apply. You are still the side with the technological and economic superiority, from whose table we snatch the crumbs of modern life. Your Europe is pulling itself together into anew unity; the Muslims, and especially the Arabs, are still ‘hopelessly divided.
Francis: Quite. And that leads to my second reason for not being reassured by your historical comparison: you have left out probably the most important thing of all.
Most of these earlier waves of expansion by Islam into Europe, and vice versa, were at least partly caused by economics. The Arabs who burst out of the Arabian Desert in the century after Muhammed’s death were moved by religious enthusiasm, but they were also moved by the fact that there were not enough oases in the desert to keep them alive. The Golden Horde and the Turks migrated out of central Asian for similar reasons: Much of the man-power of Crusades consisted of the new European landed class’s younger sons; 05 the rural economy of medieval Europe settled down into its new post-Dark Ages order, these young people had nothing much to do, and wanted excitement The nineteenth century’s empire-builders were a bit like that too.
What worries me now is that the Muslim world to the south and cast of Europe has too many young men and not enough to feed them on, or keep them busy with. Only four of the 19 countries with predominantly Muslim populations between Morocco and Iran-Morocco itself, Tunisia, Yemen and Turkey-have economies growing faster than the number of mouths they have to food. in the other 15, people are getting steadily poorer. In four of those 15, more than half the population is under the age of 25 in nine more than 60%.
This is already producing a flood of economic refugees and, if economic misery leads to more political repression, will produce a food of political refugees too, including a lot of angry revolutionaries, That will cause arguments between Europe, which will say cannot take so many refugees, and the governments that want to get rid of them. These arguments could get mixed up with other things: freedom of movement between our two parts of the world, Europe’s access to Arab oil, the ambitions of the next generation of Saddam Husseins. The wrong sort of mew Arab leadership will create the wrong sort of new Arab self- confidence, And all this in a world of chemical weapons and nuclear missiles. I cannot claim to foresee the outcome, but there are the makings of trouble here.
Mahmoud: There are indeed. Let us both say, even if we differ over the details, that we are worried about how Islam and Europe will get through the next 50 years without a clash, What can men of good heart ‘on both sides do to limit the danger?
Francis: I think that depends on whether we can agree about the basic nature of the world we shall inhabit in the twenty-first century. If we can, we should then be able to ask ourselves how our two different traditions, the Christian one and the Muslim one, can cope with that sort of world.
The past two years, 1989 and 1990, have brought a great clearing of minds about the way man organizes his day-to-day life here on earth. After the rout of communism, it is really no longer possible to believe that politics and economics can be left under the control of a handful of people who claim to “know how to run these things. We have returned to individual responsibility, to the belief that each man carries the burden of his own life: an idea which, as you say, Muslims and Christians share. It seems clear to me that in future everybody in the world will want democracy for the political side of life, and the free choice of the marketplace as the basis of economic life.
Mahmoud: My picture of democracy may be a little different from yours, as shall explain in a moment. But in general I agree. Indeed, if I may be tactless, I will point out that my Islam has been much better about communism over the past 70 years than your Christianity has. Most communist governments came to power in the Christian part of the world. None ever did in the Muslim part, unless imposed from outside. Some foolish Christians used to say that communism was “just another Christian heresy”. Every Muslim saw it for what it was, an enemy to do of us. Let that pass, however. We agree that, in future, people everywhere will wish to have a much bigger say in how their earthly lives are organized.
Francis: Then let us go on from there. I claim that the ideas Christianity introduced into my part of the world are a beaver basis for the pursuit of democracy than the ideas produced by Islam. It is from Christianity, for instance, that we have learnt the essential idea of separation of church and state.
This is essential because, in matters that have to do with God, the absolute reigns; things are right or wrong, and no voting will make them otherwise. But in running our day-to-day life on earth, if we want to do it the democratic way, we must accept that the other man’s opinion is as good as our own. This is the realm of relativity, of honest doubt, The two realms are separate. Christians have been told so from the start, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. The Koran-forgive me-has nothing like that to say to Muslims On the contrary, you are told that any such separation is sinfully wrong.
Mahmoud: It rooks Christians a very long time to put that principle properly into practice. Your Holy Roman Emperors and your Popes of the Middle Ages reached many convenient political arrangements with each other, in general, apart from an admirable early experiment by the Swiss, it took you 1,600 or 1,700 years-longer than Islam has yet been inexistence-before you even started to develop the democracy for which you say the separation of church and state is a necessary condition.
You must give us time too. In fact, though we have no great phrase to Point to like your quotation from Jesus in the Matthew gospel, most Muslim countries already practice a rough-and-ready separation between the business of God and the business of the state, We are terribly slow to do it in a democratic way but so were you.
Francis: Yet it goes much deeper than the God-state separation. The practice of democracy requires a special attitude towards other people. Mt is necessary to accept, not just in the intellect but in the heart, that other being out there is as important as you are. He may not be as good-looking, or as clever, or ax well-read in Aristotle or Adam Smith, but he is as important. This is not something men feel naturally, It cannot be thought in sociology lessons in school The only way of learning it, gradually, is out of the climate of ideas in which we grow up, the body of thought that shapes our lives our “culture” to use that clumsy word.
I am going to press you hard. “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, said the founder of Christianity, adding that next to loving God this was the most important rule of all I cannot find any equivalent in Islam’s basic book, The Koran says much about the love of God; that is excellent, but not sufficient. The New Testament is full of exhortations-the Sermon on the Mount is one example-to look at our fellow-men with respect, and without self-assertion. The index of my copy of the Koran has nothing under “compassion” or “mercy”, and only one entry under, “peace” except as a word you say when you meet somebody. There are some fine verses about patience in Sura 16, and about modesty in Sura 31, but that is not gutted the same thing.
Without plunging into theology, I will briefly say what I think lies at the root of this. To somebody who lives in the Christian world, even if he is not himself a believer, it seems clear that the Christian view of how ‘one man should think of another man is linked to the Christian idea of a threefold God, father, son and Holy Ghost. If you have been told that God detached the son-part of himself, as it were, to become a human being, and get crucified, you are liable to start feeling rather more respectful towards all human beings. Islam, denying the Trinity, denies itself that opportunity.
Mahmoud: If I do not take you up on the Trinity, you will understand iris solely in the interest of peace and out of compassion for our readers That is not entirely a joke,
Look, let me repeat you must give us time. The New Testament has its strong points, including what it says about loving your neighbor; so does the Koran, especially on the wonder of God. But 600 years ago, when Christianity was roughly as old as Islam Is now, the polities of Christendom were no more admirable than you say the politics of Islam is now. In your year of grace 1390, Christian Europe was authoritarian, brutal, had a Pope and an Anti-Pope, and was wondering whether to have an Eleventh-or was it a Thirteenth?-Crusade. Europe’s great chance for the better was still around the corner.
You brought up economics earlier in the debate, to score a point against me. Let me deploy economics now. That great European change for the better, including the growth of democracy, came about partly because Europe grew richer. The spread of wealth, and leisure, and thoughtfulness, helped to liberate the forces of the spirit that brought about the Renaissance and the Reformation, which in ‘urn led to the coming of democracy. Those forces of the spirit were “here, waiting: economic growth was no more than one key, among others, unlocking the door for them; but it played its part. Jam confident that, if the Arab world can get its economics straight, a similar door can be unlocked for us and if it is our democracy may have one or two special advantages. But what did you mean when you said that your version of democracy, if it comes will be in some ways better than ours?
Mahmoud: You have set out what you think are the advantages of your religion as a foundation for democracy. I will now set out two advantages I think mine hat.
One is that we Muslims are better on the race question: which will matter a lot in the coming century, The Koran is clear about it. In the belonging it says, “Mankind was but one nation”: and then “O man- kind! We…made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other but not despise each other.” And by and large, if you look around the world, we have carried the principle into practice fairly well.
Francis: You had in East Africa, not all that long ago, a Slave trade as abominable as ours in West Africa.
Mahmoud: True: we both have to admit our failures. But on the whole the record of Islam in this matter is not bad. Muslims do not seem to have the race-consciousness that has marked so much of the history of Christianity since the Roman Empire went Christian One of Muhammed’s last instructions to the Arabs was not to treat non-Arabs as inferior. This will be relevant, I think, in the coming century.
The other advantage may be harder for people in the modern west to understand, but is even more important in the long run. I think Islam can point to the danger, that lies inside the triumph of the West, the weakness in fie strength.
As you said, the birth of democracy and capitalism was made possible by removing one part of life from the realm of the absolute. In the operations of pluralism there is no permanent right and wrong no unmistakable good and bad. Each man’s judgment counts as much as the next man’s. When a majority decides something should be done, it is done; if it changes its mind, it is undone, Whether a field is occupied, sheep or a computer factory depends on the intricate working out of millions of individual preferences between roast lamb and printouts. It is an admirably efficient system, and 1989 and 1990 suggest it what the whole world wants but it is not perfect.
The decisions of the majority sometimes produce results that many people see as not just temporarily inconvenient, but wrong. These may be put right later, if the majority changes’ but there is no guarantee that they will be. Also, in any system based on the working out of individual choices, some individuals will finish up at the bottom of the pile, perhaps permanently. The system has no monitor, as it were, nobody watching i from outside. The more universal the system becomes, the more I worry about this lack of any guiding set of rules. If capitalist democracy is the worldwide system of the future, many people will begin to feel that they live inside a smoothie humming but, when you look at it amoral machine.
Islam, which insists that daily life is part of a wider whole that there are always objective truths to be honored-is a reminder of these imperfections. I do not know exactly how the imperfections will be put right: but then neither did anybody know 600 years ago, back in AD I390, exactly how the Renaissance and the Reformation would come to the rescue. Nor am I asking you to become Muslims I merely suggest that you address yourselves, in pour own Way, to the unfinished business of pluralism.
Francis a Christian I agree with you of course: although many people in the western world will think we are talking nonsense just because it is Christmas, How marvelous if Islam, which helped to prod Christendom awake at the end of the Middle Ages, should after all help the modem West in the shaping of the next few centuries. The Economist December 22, 1990
Article extracted from this publication >> January 18, 1991
