Islam And The West
Islam and the West: Conflict, Democracy, Identity
Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University
This short essay analyzes the deception and self-deception in talk of ‘the clash of civilizations’ and proceeds to diagnose what is wrong in the standard understanding of Islam in the Western media today by looking to the abiding history of colonial relations with Islam down to this day and also looking to the relation between ideals of democracy and the formation of religious identities. The essay closes with some remarks about the nature of identity and the importance to one's own agency of the distinction between the first and the third person point of view in Muslim self-understanding.
There is a very familiar cautionary response that one finds oneself constantly making when one engages in discussions about Islam these days. This is the response of saying, “Do not generalize about Islam. There are many Islams!” In fact this has become something of a mantra and, given the strenuous simplifications one finds in the Western media and on the lips and memos of politicians as well as in continuing forms of ‘orientalist’ academic writing, expressions of such caution are thoroughly warranted. But on the other hand, it should not become a conversation-stopper. And it should not be inconsistently deployed. There is no doubt that there are many Islams. That should be a banality. But if that is so, then equally, in that case, there are many Americas, and there are many Wests, too. And that does not stop many of us from making remarks abstracting from this manyness and diversity of the West and of America to nevertheless make roughly true generalizations about the West --such as, that there is a corporate driven foreign policy prevalent in the West, especially in the US, which has had very destructive effects in countries with Muslim populations, that the US government has consistently supported Islamic militants when it suited their geo-political and economic interests, that it has
Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University
This short essay analyzes the deception and self-deception in talk of ‘the clash of civilizations’ and proceeds to diagnose what is wrong in the standard understanding of Islam in the Western media today by looking to the abiding history of colonial relations with Islam down to this day and also looking to the relation between ideals of democracy and the formation of religious identities. The essay closes with some remarks about the nature of identity and the importance to one's own agency of the distinction between the first and the third person point of view in Muslim self-understanding.
There is a very familiar cautionary response that one finds oneself constantly making when one engages in discussions about Islam these days. This is the response of saying, “Do not generalize about Islam. There are many Islams!” In fact this has become something of a mantra and, given the strenuous simplifications one finds in the Western media and on the lips and memos of politicians as well as in continuing forms of ‘orientalist’ academic writing, expressions of such caution are thoroughly warranted. But on the other hand, it should not become a conversation-stopper. And it should not be inconsistently deployed. There is no doubt that there are many Islams. That should be a banality. But if that is so, then equally, in that case, there are many Americas, and there are many Wests, too. And that does not stop many of us from making remarks abstracting from this manyness and diversity of the West and of America to nevertheless make roughly true generalizations about the West --such as, that there is a corporate driven foreign policy prevalent in the West, especially in the US, which has had very destructive effects in countries with Muslim populations, that the US government has consistently supported Islamic militants when it suited their geo-political and economic interests, that it has