"The tragedy of common sense
it that it is not
very common."
(Albert Einstein)

"Politically correct Christianity
is tolerated but despised.
Full Gospel Christianity is
respected but persecuted."
(Unknown)

"If you marry the Zeitgeist
you will soon become widow."
(Goethe)

"To reach the source of a river
you must swim upstreams."
(Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)

"I note that all those,
who are positive to abortion
already are born."
(Ronald Reagan)

Defending the Western World and its Western Values

There are well-known books and there are unknown books. There are also notorious books. There are important books and there are less important books. And then, of course, there are completely irrelevant books. The latter category should constitute the absolute majority. Some important books are rather unknown while sometimes better known books are completely uninteresting. One book, with a huge impact, but almost completely unknown to "ordinary" people, is Orientalism. It was published in 1978 and the author was the "Christian" Palestinian Edward Said (1935-2003). He writes in his autobiography Out of Place that he lived between two worlds, in both Cairo and Jerusalem, up to age 12. Eventually, he made an academic career in the U.S. and was, among other things, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Columbia. During his lifetime, he was showered with all kinds of accolades and honorary titles and his ideas strongly influenced the West's vision of the Orient. Few Swedes (and other Westerners) know of Edward Said. However, many are strongly influenced by his thoughts, without knowing it.

Put simply, you can say that the argument that Said pursues in his book Orientalism is the following: The Western perception of the Orient (and especially the Arab world) is totally wrong. European colonialism, imperialism and political domination over the Orient has given even the most well-informed, well-meaning and sympathetic European researcher, writer, artist etc, a distorted view of the Orient. These often well-intentioned but misinformed people, are by Said called "Orientalists", and their "distorted" view of the Orient, coined "Orientalism". Said thus uses the word Orientalism as a derogatory opinion and in Western intellectual circles, Orientalism has become a dirty word.

Edward Said's opinions have exerted an enormous influence in many areas; history of literature, history of culture etc. Maybe they came at just the right time. One important factor may well be that many intellectuals in the West have been embarrassed by the West's colonialism and oppression of other cultures and peoples, and Said's writings have given this sentiment a voice. Below we will see that the West certainly has something to be ashamed of, but the Arab world and other cultures have at least as much to feel disgraced about, when it comes to imperialism, oppression, slavery etc.

By extension of Said's opinions rests the thought that everything negative in e.g. the Arab world, is the fault of the West. Through colonialism, exploitation, arbitrary drawn boundaries between artificially constructed countries (such as Jordan, Iraq etc) and the installation of "obedient" rulers from the Arab power élite, the Western world has corrupted the Arab world. Therefore, it looks like it does in these countries, according to Said, and many intellectuals in the West cry "Yes and Amen!" This could possibly be one of the causes of Europe's intellectuals unilateral stance on the Palestinian side of the Middle East conflict.

It is true that the West has had colonies, and it is true that they exploited natural resources and labor in those colonies. It is also true that England, France etc unwisely drew arbitrary borders when they created new countries from the colonies and that these frontiers spawned quite unnecessary conflicts between ethnic groups. The question is, however, whether this is the one and only reason why the Arab world looks like it does. One thing is for sure, all Arab countries make a big deal of Said's thoughts and blame everything on the West. In my opinion this has been a great disadvantage for the Arabs themselves. Instead of dealing with their problems, they lean back and blame everything on the West.

There is another author, Ibn Warraq, who is particularly interesting in this context. He grew up in Pakistan, went to religious schools there, but was eventually sent to England to study. Shortly after his arrival in England he left his Muslim faith and became one of the keenest critics of Islam. He relates this in the book Why I Am Not a Muslim. The title of the book is a travesty of Bertrand Russels' famous book Why I Am Not a Christian. Because of this book, Warraq today lives under protected identity (Muslims often claim that Islam is a tolerant religion without oppression — the reality shows, unfortunately, that this is not the case, Bertrand Russel never had to go underground for his similar critique of Christianity). Warraq, a philosopher with profound classical education, published in 2007 the momentous book Defending the West (Prometheus Books). There he goes to grips with Said's book Orientalism. Warraq accuses Said of deliberately misconstruing the works of many Western researchers, and of systematically providing a false view of the Western civilization. Moreover, we read that Said employs defective methodology when drawing his conclusions, and that his arguments are full of contradictions and faulty comprehension of history. Ibn Warraq writes (page 18):

The latter work [Said's Orientalism] taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity — "Were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more" — encouraging the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labeled "Orientalist".

Warraq calls Said's Orientalism "intellectual terrorism".

The most interesting in Warraq's argument is his analysis of the Western world and its characteristics. He argues that there are three factors that distinguish the West and sets it apart from the Orient, and furthermore in principle from all other civilizations, explaining the success of Western culture.

1. Rationalism
2. Universalism
3. Self-criticism

Let us now discuss these three factors more thoroughly — Warraq's book is over 500 pages and it is obviously difficult to give an accurate picture of the book in a short text — I recommend the interested reader to read the entire book.

 

1. Rationalism

Authority is inferior to reason because it deals with opinions about the truth rather than with truth itself (page 132).

Rationalism is the belief that human reason is capable of true understanding of large parts of reality (that today's atheists have extrapolated this to the thesis that everything can be understood through reason is another story — that is not rationalism but ideology or blind faith). Reason can be used to understand the world we live in and allows us to construct machines and other systems, which can help us in different ways. The examples are countless. Medicine today can cure diseases that formerly inexorably led to death. Plant and animal breeding has led to an explosive growth in farm yields etc, etc. The entire Western science project, which has been so successful when it comes to creating a relatively high standard of living for all people, began amongst others with the early Greek philosophers. For the Greeks, however, science was never a method to systematically investigate the total physical reality, since their use of experiments were rare. Science as a comprehensive explanation of the physical world has its roots in the Jewish-Christian worldview, where an important factor has been the belief that a rational Creator designed a logical world that our reason (ratio) can understand.

Of course you can now argue that many other cultures and peoples have been involved with "science" in various forms. Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians and Chinese to mention a few. For the Egyptians and Babylonians, who made some mathematical and astronomical advances, it was not about explaining the world, but about being able to predict the Nile floods, predict various astronomical events that had religious significance, etc. And although the Chinese invented the compass (possibly) and the gun powder, there is a big difference between designing cool fireworks and trying to give a comprehensive explanation of the physical reality, from its smallest components to the Cosmos. The first is technology, and the other is science in modern sense.

Now let's look at Islam's relationship to rationalism. Here it is appropriate to consider first what the Sharía law has to say. Interpreting Islam is not easy, because in addition to the Qur´an itself, we must take into account Hadith (which are collections of memorable words that Muhammad said during his life — there are however several versions of Hadith, which creates some confusion) and Siras (which are stories from Muhammad's life). Hadith has the same practical importance for Muslims as the Qur'an itself. It is obligatory to obey Hadith. Siras are of a lesser importance, but act as guidelines for Moslems.

One major problem with the Qur´an is that it contains grave inconsistencies (contradictions). To solve this major problem, the interpreters of Islam has agreed upon a principle called Al-Nasikh wal-Mansoukh, according to which the last of two contradicting suras applies. This means that it is necessary to know the temporal order of the suras.

This leads to the next problem; the sequence of the suras in the Qur´an is not equal to their real chronological order. For this reason a number of distinguished scholars within Islam have tried to order the suras chronologically (click here for more details). Which leads to another problem; they have arrived at different conclusions. Some of the suras are less problematic than others. I.e. sura 9 is chronologically placed as last or second last sura by most scholars, while other suras are more uncertain. Some of them, like sura 110 is regarded as sura number 3 by one scholar and as number 114 by another (the Qur'an contains 114 suras in total).

Here the Sharía law comes to our help, in that it interprets and explains Islam and shows how this religion practically should be applied. I have used a compilation of the Sharía law called Reliance of the Traveler by Ahmed bin Naïf al-Misery, which is considered to be the most compatible version in relation to other versions (within Sunni Islam, there are four Sharía traditions). Section w10.0 entitled "How is philosophy illegal?" (illegal here equaling blasphemy, punishable by death).

Any opinion that contradicts a well-known tenet of Islamic belief that there is a scholarly consensus upon is unbelief (kefir), and is unlawful to learn or teach, except by way of explaining that it is unlawful. And Allah knows best.

In the next section w11.0 with the telling title "The Unlawfulness of the Sciences of the Materialists" we read:

The unlawfulness of the "sciences of the materialists" refers to the conviction of materialists that things in themselves or by their own nature have a causal influence independent of the will of Allah. To believe this is unbelief, that puts one beyond the pale of Islam. Muslims working in the sciences must remember that they are dealing with figurative causes (absorb majaziyya), not real ones, for Allah alone is the real cause.

In other words, a Muslim scientist must not believe that there is causality, i.e. that different objects interact with each other through natural forces, and that these forces, along with the objects' intrinsic properties, can explain what we observe. As a Muslim you are allowed to work as if there were an inherent cause and effect, but this is only ostensible. In the back of your mind you must all the time be aware that everything that happens is caused by Allah and nothing else.

It is not difficult to understand that this approach has heavily inhibited the Arab/Islamic science.

The Western politically correct attitude to Arab science is as follows: While the West lived in Medieval darkness, Arab scientists worked with mathematics, astronomy, physics, medicine etc and made great, decisive progresses that the West could later exploit and build on. Furthermore we got our ingenious numbering system (the positional system, where a digit's position in a number determines its value — i.e. multiples of one, ten, hundred etc) from the Arabs. This claim is constantly repeated in the media, in textbooks and by all politically correct speakers etc. Let me give an example taken from History Channel's program schedule (June 14 2009 at 04.00 am):

Islamic history in Europe

British documentary from 2005. The award-winning presenter Rageh Omaar travels Europe and reveals our debt of gratitude to Islam, for its important contribution to Renaissance. The series reveals the surprising, forgotten story of Europe's Islamic past. From the medieval Cordoba inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula that created roads and street lightning hundreds of years before anyone else, to eleven-century Muslim philosopher Averroès who single-handedly managed to launch the Renaissance thinking — 300 years before it officially began.

In my opinion the above is a great example of where Said's Orientalism has led. We are ashamed over what we ourselves have achieved and are constantly trying to belittle our own culture and our own achievements. Perhaps the mechanisms behind this is just our bad conscience because of colonialism etc. The British-American historian Bernard Lewis use to calls today's Western culture "the culture of self-abasement".

But how is it then? Did not the Arabs make great mathematical advances? Yes, there were several eminent mathematicians, astronomers etc during Islam's early history. Perhaps the most famous is Ibn Rushd, often called Averroès here in the West (he is mentioned in the program schedule above). He lived between 1126 and 1190 and was active mainly in Moorish Spain (including Cordoba and Seville). Averroès was a kind of Islamic equivalent of the universal genius Leonardo da Vinci and was involved in astronomy, philosophy, physics, mathematics, psychology, law etc. One of his conclusions was that there is no conflict between religion and science, and that it's a question about different perspectives on the one and only reality. Included in his most important accomplishments is the translation of Aristotle's works. These were almost forgotten in the West, and by Averroès' translations Aristotle was rediscovered and began to play a dominant role (perhaps too dominant — unfortunately Aristotle came to inhibit the development of European science for hundreds of years) in Western thought. Averroès' rational thinking eventually collided with the opinions of the Muslim clergy, which was inevitable (science in the Western sense is not compatible with the holy documents of Islam, as we have seen above), and he was exiled. A few years before his death, however, he was taken into favor, and devoted the end of his life to philosophical reflections. Averroès was undoubtedly in many ways an important person.

In the well-known and extensive mathematics encyclopedia Sigma (6 volumes of about 500 pages each) from the end of the 1950s, written by many different authors, the first volume deals largely with the history of mathematics. The most comprehensive article in this volume is titled "The great mathematicians", and is written by H W Turnbull (famous British mathematician who made great contributions to modern algebra and who was a member of the Royal Society). Turnbull has the following to say about the Arab mathematics:

The word algebra is part of an Arab expression for "the science of reduction and transfer", and the numbers we commonly use are often called Arabic. These relics of a bygone era remind us that it was the Arabs who transmitted the mathematical knowledge to Western Europe. But as to what has been said before, it has become apparent that the Arabs did not create either the algebra nor the numerical designation. The Arabs proved a fruitful interest in mathematics and profited from the older results whether they came from Greece or India. They translated diligently valuable ancient manuscripts that had escaped destruction during the Arab conquering expeditions [most of the famous library of Alexandria was destroyed by the Muslim conquerors — Krister's comment], and their practical tables and calculations testify great skill. However, the Arabs lacked the originality and ingenuity of the Greek and Indians, and large areas of geometry and Diophantine algebra remained completely untouched. The Arabs continued to be for many centuries the faithful guardians of mathematics (Vol I p. 66 in the Swedish edition).

There is obviously a lot to say about Islamic science. Undoubtedly, the Islamic world had a golden age for a few hundred years. The question is, however, how great were the discoveries that were made in the Islamic world at this time? It is true, as Turnbull points out, that much knowledge was transferred from the Islamic world during and after the Middle Ages. But the bulk and most important parts of this knowledge was not developed under Islam, instead the Muslims had in turn inherited this knowledge from the Greeks, Indians etc (which Turnbull also says). The Arabs were traders who made long trips to the Far East, where they came into contact with other cultures. Our numeric system, including the symbol zero ("0"), although it is called "Arabian", was probably invented in India (it took a long time for Man to realize that nothing could be represented with something, i.e. zero), and the Arabs only worked as intermediaries (which is important enough).

Furthermore, one can question whether the scientific and mathematical discoveries in the Islam world were really so significant. During the final stages of the Middle Ages and early 1500s Western science literally exploded, and in just one century major breakthroughs in physics, mathematics etc were made. It is not even certain that the Muslim research played any significant role for this scientific development. When science began to take hold in the West, it went so fast, that the Arab discoveries made during hundreds of years, would probably have been made in the West in just a few decades (if they had not already been known). Islam's most important achievement was surely the transfer to the West of philosophical and scientific knowledge originating from Greece and other cultures. There is no doubt we owe them much gratitude in this aspect.

Though even this is not entirely true. We often talk about the Crusades, but rarely do we mention the 400 years of Muslim aggression that preceded these, where large areas around the Mediterranean were conquered by force, often with great brutality. When the Muslims conquered large Christian areas in Syria, Israel, Egypt, North Africa, Spain/Portugal etc, these regions were cut off from Europe. There were priceless libraries containing the Greek philosophers' and mathematicians' finest works and many more invaluable texts. Some of these did not exist elsewhere and were thus lost to Europe. The ancient teachings were eventually mediated to Europe by Averroès and others. Without these aggressive Islamic conquests, the knowledge, transmitted to us by the Muslims, would never have been necessary. Then Europe would have had direct access to these teachings, as they would never have been lost.

Now it is very clear to see that Islam gets the credit for things that Islam should not necessarily get the credit for. Islam is considered to be the origin of nearly all that is good and well (science, Renaissance, music, mathematics and much more). Soon we will probably read about the brothers Omar and Muhammad in Mocka who invented the airplane long before the Wright brothers (in the old Soviet state, in the same spirit, they claimed to have invented almost everything — the airplane, the computer etc). In Spain and Portugal you often hear that the guitar, being the national instrument in these two countries, originated from the Arabs. And it's certainly somewhat true, in the sense that the Arabs conveyed this instrument (or a similar instrument that eventually evolved into today's guitar). But the Arabs had in turn received the guitar (or its archetype) from Asia. Similar instruments existed in India long before Islam. The word guitar comes from the Greek kithara (κιθαρα). The oldest image of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3300 years old Hittite inscription on stone (thus, this inscription was made almost 2000 years before Islam was even thought of).

For some reason it seems indelicate to mention that the Arabs in turn got the archetype of the guitar from other cultures, just as it is a sign of impolite behavior to suggest that most of the science that the Arabs conveyed to Europe, in fact, came from the Greeks, Indians etc. I do not know what drives people to give Islam credit for things that Islam, in fact, never created. Perhaps many intellectuals are of the opinion that people in Europe have such a negative attitude towards Islam that they want to draw the attention to everything that is positive with Islam. I cannot see, however, that it is particularly encouraging to give Islam credit for something that others have created. Instead it's embarrassing and threatens to negatively impact Islam.

But whether truly groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs were made in the Islamic world or not, or if it mostly was just about the conveyance of skills from other people, the decisive question is whether this was a consequence of Islam or of something else. There are researchers who believe that the scientific progress made during Islam's golden age, was not made due to Islam but despite Islam! The reason for the success was the fact that when Islam had conquered much of the area around the Mediterranean, which was previously part of the crumbling Roman empire, you got a long period of peace (that Islam so easily and so quickly could conquer great Christian areas, was, according to some historians, due to Christianity being at the time so fragmented that it could not withstand a determined attacker). And when there is peace, trade, economics, art, philosophy etc will usually blossom. The various cultural and scientific progresses that were made, had, according to some scholars, no roots in Islam, but in the conquered cultures and to some extent in the interaction between Islam and other cultures. Such cultural encounters can sometimes cross-fertilize one another. What indicates that this is really the case, is Islam's assimilation of the Greek philosophers (something that was not long-lived — when the clergy's power grew, Islam turned inward, which we shall soon come back to). Warraq cites in his book (p. 66) Ernest Renan's Islamisme et la Science:

Science and philosophy flourished on Muselman soil during the first half of the Middle Ages; but it was in spite of Islam. Not a Muselman philosopher or scholar escaped persecution. During the period just specified persecution is less powerful than the instinct of free inquiry, and the rationalist tradition is kept alive, then fanaticism win the day. It is true that the Christian Church also cast great difficulties in the way of science in the Middle Ages, but she did not strangle it outright, as did the Muselman theology. To give Islam the credit of Averroès and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo…

Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics, wrote not so long ago ("A Deadly Certitude", Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 2007):

Much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science; even people whose religion might incline them to hostility to the pretensions of science generally understand that they have to rely on science rather than religion to get things done. But this has not happened to anything like the same extent in the world of Islam. One finds in Islamic countries not only religious opposition to specific scientific theories, as occasionally in the West, but a widespread religious hostility to science itself. My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam [see my article about Islam and the Nobel Prize], tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest center of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

According to al-Ghazzali, the idea of a law-bound universe signified an attempt to limit Allah's freedom and thus his omnipotence. This was nothing less than blasphemy. Anyone who claimed such a thing contradicted the Qu`ran. The only relevant punishment for this was death. This resulted in the Muslim world making limited progresses in mathematics and some practical fields, such as astronomy and medicine, but not developing science in the modern sense (where you through hypotheses and theories and experiments and observations try to give a logical and comprehensive explanation of the physical world, assuming a lawful universe that can be studied and understood with the help of reason.

The Western rationalism, built on the Judeo-Christian thought, has given us science, which in turn has given us technology, which in turn has given us an astoundingly high standard of living (rationalism alone cannot create a better world, it must be complemented by morality, which unfortunately is in short supply in the Western world today and might explain our current problems). At the same time, we see the situation in the Arab world. Without its oil (that we have found for them, that we pump up for them, that we transport to the consumer for them and that we pay enormous sums for) they would still find themselves living in the Middle Ages (to a great extent they are still living there when it comes to humanity and attitude to women). The Palestinian territories are among the world's poorest despite being given more money per capita by the world community than any other people on earth. It seems that one of the reasons for the problems in the Islamic world is the lack of rationalism. And this deficiency is not an accident at work, but a fundamental consequence of the very nature of Islam. An internal, built-in system error.

 

2. Universalism

All evil, totalitarian systems are immanent (closed). Nothing meaningful or worthwhile exists outside of their own system.

The Western civilization has always been open to "the others" — other ideas, other habits and other people. It was said about the ancient Greeks, "whatever the Greeks acquire from foreigners, is finally turned by them into something nobler". In the fundamental Hellenistic thought there was a cosmopolitan thinking, an idea of human unity, of all universal.

The Judeo-Christian thinking goes much further than that, not only talking about the common humanity and that we are at heart the same, but gives each individual the same infinite value and all people the same basic rights.

We find plenty of examples of how the West has been influenced by other cultures and ideas. Islam, however, is a closed system. Aside from the brief golden age of Islam, that occurred around the 1000s, when they brought in ideas from other cultures, Islam has since been closed. For sure they utilize Western technology, because it's useful, but this technology is like a foreign body in the Islamic world. Much like a transplanted organ which may at any time be rejected.

The West's intellectual curiosity manifests itself in many ways. Historical research in India began e.g. during the British colonization. British officers were surprised that the Indians did not seem interested in their own history. Pretty soon British archeologists and officers began making excavations at historic sites. Madelaine Katz writes in A book about India (The original title in Swedish is En bok om Indien):

The old India has no historical works, no biographies either, no portrait paintings [because the individual is unimportant]. The Indians see personality as a veil to tear away… Why write biographies… when no-one can contribute to development, as no development exists — history leads nowhere, it has no goal, no beginning nor end.

Indian historians of today recognize that their domestic historical research started by the British and their curiosity.

After almost 800 years of Muslim presence in Spain we only know of a single document with a few pages, showing Muslim interest in a foreign language. On the whole it was considered indecent, even as infidelity, for a Muslim to learn a foreign language. At the same time, the best Arabic grammars and dictionaries are compiled by Western linguists and much of the Arab world's literature has been translated into Western languages.

Although the Muslims began making long land- (by caravan) and sea journeys in earlier times, the purpose was not curiosity or to discover new countries and cultures. The journeys were either linked to trade or to conquer new territories for Islam. Traveling for the sake of traveling, to discover new worlds, new cultures, new ways of thinking, is absent from the Islamic world of thinking. Sir John Chardin traveled during the 1600s in Persia (today's Iran) and was surprised at the lack of intellectual curiosity. He writes in his travelogue Travels in Persia 1673-1677 (p. 143-144):

I remember that well-read people in Europe have debated whether tobacco and sugar originally came from the New World [America] or if they originated in the Orient. I had decided to find out the answer right there and then. But one could hardly believe how little curiosity Oriental people have for such things. There is almost not a single scholar who keeps track of the discoveries made in the arts and sciences.

Chardin was also surprised by the Persian's lack of interest in other peoples and cultures.

It is from this Spirit of theirs no doubt, that the Persians are so grossly Ignorant of the present state of other Nations of the World, and that they do not so much as understand Geography, and have no Maps; which comes from this, that having no Curiosity to see other countries, they never mind the Distance, nor Roads, by which they might go thither… The Ministers of State generally Speaking, know no more what passes in Europe, than in the World of the Moon.

Islamists who settle in the West often live isolated from the rest of society and form their own little world. This is obviously a consequence of their religion (they take it very seriously) and leads to these groups probably never assimilating into their new Western surroundings. But of course, this is not their intention. Their goal is to eventually, through Jihad, take over the Western world, and establish the Caliphate (i.e. to oppress and enslave the population who once received them with open arms). According to the Qur'ran and the Hadith, it is mandatory for every Muslim to take part in Jihad.

There is much to say about universalism, but I think I have explained this point with sufficient clarity. So let's move on to the last point.

 

3. Self-criticism

An unusual burden accompanied me on my way to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as in Poland. The machine-like annihilation of Polish Jewry represented a heightening of bloodthirstiness that no one had held possible. On my way to Warsaw I carried with me the memory of the fight to the death of the Warsaw ghetto.
(The German Chancellor Willy Brandt, after he knelt in the remains of Warsaw's ghetto in December 1970, and asked the Jewish and Polish people for forgiveness for what the Germans did to them during World War II).

Something that Warraq (and I fully agree) believes is unique to the Western world, is its capacity for self-criticism. The biggest critics of Western civilization we actually find in the West.

Personally, I believe that the Christian concept of sin has had a significant impact in this context (along with the belief in an absolute morality). The Christian faith calls us to confess our sins (mistakes) and ask for forgiveness for our evil deeds. The absolute morality gives Man the knowledge of what is right and wrong/good and evil (the voice of conscience speaks also to the people who are not consciously aware of the absolute morality — that is perhaps why "normal" people get so furious when you criticize phenomena such as abortion, because their conscience tells them that abortion is wrong, while their politically correct intellect tells them that abortion is right). To recognize one's faults and ask for forgiveness and try to set things right, does not mean, in the Christian perspective, to lose face (as it does in most cultures), but is a desirable virtue. Confession (of one's sins) is a holy sacrament in Christianity. Wikipedia (Swedish version) writes:

The Sacrament of Penance is the ritual act of Christianity through which someone shows his remorse, confesses his sins, receives God's forgiveness and makes amends for what he has broken. Penance is there for the Christians who have been baptized, to give new life to grace for those who sincerely regrets and repents to Christ after having committed a sin. This Sacrament can also be called the sacrament of atonement, forgiveness, confession or conversion.

People in the Christian West have during more than a thousand years been accustomed to think in terms of absolute right and wrong, confession, repentance, forgiveness and restoration. Assuredly, most Westerners today don't believe in God anymore, but nevertheless, they are heavily influenced by Christian thought. When a Christian is accused of having done wrong, instead of resorting to violence and threats, a true Christian recognizes his fault (if he has done any wrong) and asks for forgiveness and tries to set things right. This is definitely not in the thinking in Islam. In Islam it is shameful and suggests weakness to admit your mistakes, which leads to a society based on lies and oppression and hypocrisy, where no one dares to say what is true or take responsibility for one's actions. A further consequence of this is a society where you blame everything on others. In such a culture, responsibility and remorse is replaced by self-pity and denial.

The West is undoubtedly guilty of horrible atrocities; slavery, the Inquisition, the conquest of the Americas, where pure genocide of the Native Americans took place, not to mention the Holocaust's heinous crimes against humanity. But what people and what civilization is without blame? Still to this day slavery exists both in Asia and in the Arab world. What do you say about this: Although 9-12 million black slaves were transported to America over the Atlantic Ocean, 12-18 million (at least) black slaves were transported to the Arab World from Africa. Or about this: Mao's mass murders of China's population (100 million or more), Pol Pot's genocide in Kampuchea (25 percent of the population was killed), the Japanese atrocities during World War II (e.g. the massacres in Nanking, where 300,000 civilian Chinese were raped and murdered), Turkey's genocide of millions of Armenians and Assyrians and Kurds, the massacre of over a million Muslims in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) by Muslims in West Pakistan, the massacre in Rwanda with 800,000 victims, 1,8 million people murdered in Sudan, Saddam Hussein's crimes in Iraq, not to mention Hamas' and Hezbollah's countless crimes against their own people. So the West is in no way worse than other parts of the world (see for example my article where I a.o. thoroughly discuss the slavery in the Arab world).

And now we arrive at the big difference. Ibn Warraq writes (p. 76):

And yet there persists a profound difference between the West and the Rest. Western intellectuals, writers, historians, politicians, and leaders have themselves chronicled the follies of the West and have forced Westerners to fundamentally rethink their policies, ideas, and political and social behaviour, thereby bringing about change. Profound self-reflection and courageous acts of self-criticism have brought about movements that have led to the abolition of slavery, the dismantlement of empire, and legislation to defend the human rights of women, minorities and to defend freedom of inquiry and expression.

Slavery has existed in every civilization in human history, but it was the West that first took active steps to abolish it.

When European and North American ships collected slaves in Africa, we must not forget that most slaves were delivered to the coast by the Africans themselves. They captured the slaves from other tribes and sold them to the slave traders. When slavery was to be banned in England, an African delegation traveled there to try to convince the English not to prohibit slavery, as this was a lucrative income for some African groups.

Edward Said and his ilk believe that the brutal acts that occurred in the colonies were built into the very foundation of Western culture, as opposed to representing degenerates of this culture, and that colonialism ended only after criticism from the colonized areas. This is not true according to Warraq. The criticism of colonialism, which led to its termination, came from anti-imperialist groups in the West, i.e. from the West itself, which then inspired freedom movements in the colonized countries (both the Khmer Rouge top leaders and North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh were e.g. educated at French universities and highly inspired by Western philosophers and ideologies). In contrast to the West's capacity of being self-critical, stands the Arab world's almost total lack of self-criticism. Warraq writes (p. 80):

By contrast, self-criticism remains an elusive goal in modern Islamic cultures. David Pryce-Jones, keeping to the Arab Islamic world, argues that the "acquisition of honour, pride, dignity, respect and the converse avoidance of shame, disgrace, and humiliation are keys to Arab motivation, clarifying and illuminating behaviour in the past as well as in the present.

The two codes of honor and shame "enforce identity and conformity of behaviour." In such a system of values, it is impossible to admit publicly that one is wrong, for that would bring shame on the individual, the family, the country, or even his religion. Western-style satire would be very difficult in Arabic society, for that would risk humiliation of one's own culture. Taslima Nasrin, the atheist writer and human rights advocate from Bangladesh, once gave a talk in Germany criticizing Islam for its treatment of women and non-Muslim minorities. After her talk, an Arab warned her never to insult their religion in public again; he felt totally humiliated, especially in front of an infidel audience, even though in private he agreed with many of her strictures of his nominal (and her former) religion.

Daniel Pipes shows in The Hidden Hand how conspiracy theories are very influential in the whole of the Middle East, "By filtering reality through a distorting prism, [conspiracism] fosters anti-Western, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, antimoderate, and antimodern actions. At the same time, and almost paradoxically, it infuses the region's peoples with a sense of passivity." This mentality can only lead to a refusal to take responsibility for one's own destiny, to take responsibility for their own economic, cultural, and political backwardness. Everything is the fault of the West. Edward Said fed into this mentality and reinforced a culture of self-pity.

The Arab world is circulating even in public, state-controlled media with a plethora of conspiracy theories: Israel is engaged in biological warfare against the Palestinians, against Egypt etc. They send beautiful Jewish HIV infected women to brothels in the Middle East to give the Arabs aids. They spread poisoned water in the Arab world. The planes which flew into World Trade Center were controlled by Israeli agents, possibly in cooperation with CIA. The tsunami a few years ago, that killed so many, was triggered by Israel and/or the U.S., blowing up a hydrogen bomb in a crack fault on the seabed. Not to mention the Arab denial of the Holocaust — it is a figment of the Jewish world conspiracy, that the world, because of a guilty conscience, should give the Jews a country of their own, i.e. Israel. Unfortunately — I am not kidding! I wish I was. But regrettably these conspiracy theories are flourishing in the Arab world right now, and I dare say that the absolute majority seriously believe in them. Hitler's Mein Kampf is incidentally one of the best- selling books today in the Middle East.

As long as the Arabs are incapable of self-criticism, there is no solution to the problems in the Middle East. Palestine will remain one of the world's poorest and most ravaged areas in spite of all the money that the international community pumps in. The oppression of women, the medieval justice system etc, all this will continue. And go on and on and on.

Of course, the above does not mean that there are no Arabs/Muslims etc that are critical of their own system. There are many brave Muslims who can think for themselves, and who express very harsh criticism against the Arab world's failure to recognize and acknowledge their own shortcomings. Most of these, however, live in the West, as it would be very dangerous in many Muslim countries to come up with such criticism. Critical intellectuals, living in countries such as Syria, Egypt etc and speaking their minds, risk on the one hand going to jail and on the other hand to be murdered by Muslim militants.

But these critics are not criticizing because they are Muslims, but despite being Muslims. Islam as a religion seems to be incapable of self-criticism.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s there was an emerging liberal class in the Arab world, and for a brief period it seemed that the Islam world had the potential to become part of the modern world. Barry Rubin writes in The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley 2006):

During the 1920s and 1930s, such thinkers and political figures — especially but not exclusively, in Egypt — declared themselves rationalists, patriots of their own countries rather than pan-Arab nationalists… They dreamed of making Egypt a modern state along European lines, while at the same time preserving its own traditions.

Then something went wrong. Warraq writes (p. 82):

From the 1950s onward, liberal ideas of freedom, democracy, and representative government were no longer in evidence, and "the idea of taking responsibility for the ills of one's own society" lost out to the ease of blaming everything on evil foreigners.

Some people seem to have the ability to bring out the worst in each other. Each one, individually, would perhaps have been able to live a fairly normal life, but together they encourage each other to commit horrible crimes or to destroy their lives in different ways. Other combinations of people instead take out the best in each other. When a religion or ideology meets a culture, we can similarly see different results. Communism took different forms in the Soviet Union and in Cuba. In the USSR it developed into a loathsome hydra who killed one hundred million people or more. This, I believe, has to do with the Russian mentality. In the Russian culture, tearful sentimentality and terrible cruelty go hand in hand. One minute they play "Evening Bells" and the next moment they torture to death 50 people (the Cossacks were guilty of terrible atrocities against the Jews during the Holocaust, while at the same time they spent the evenings singing their sentimental songs to the accompaniment of balalaika). The Latin Americans, on the other hand, can commit terrible things in anger, but when the anger subsides, they return to everyday life. Therefore, communism in Cuba never manifested itself in such a terrible way as in the Soviet Union (killings on industrial scale). Perhaps they shot and killed a few, and when the fury had passed they went to the bar and had a glass of wine (I'm simplifying, of course, but I believe there is something in what I'm trying to say — many Russian writers, for example, have described the Russian's peculiar mixture of sentimentality and cruelty).

Islam has taken different expressions when encountering various cultures. The encounter between Islam and the Arab culture (it was so it began and perhaps Islam is simply a manifestation of the Arab culture) has had particularly negative impacts. It seems that Islam and the Arab culture has managed to bring out the absolute worst in each other.

Ibn Warraq writes (p. 82):

Al-Afif al-Akhdar, a Tunisian intellectual, wrote a blistering critique of the Arab world, lamenting that while the rest of the world was embracing modernity, knowledge and globalization, the Arabs were regressing to the Dark Ages. Why was human knowledge growing except in the Arab world, where all one found was illiteracy, ideological fear and mental paralysis? "Why," wrote Akhdar, "do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us, but [when we hear] fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance? Why have the people of the world managed to mourn their pasts and move on, while we have… our gloomy bereavement over a past that does not pass? Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and call it heroism and martyrdom?" Arabs suffer from both an inferiority complex, leading to self-hatred and "national humiliation whose shame can be purged only by blood, vengeance, and fire." And a sense of superiority and the belief that they were chosen by God to lead humanity… Arabs should learn from the Japanese, who understood the "vital necessity to emulate the enemy… becoming like him in modern knowledge, thought and politics…"

The question is whether there is any salvation for the Arab/Islamic world, or if they have to take it to the bitter end, which in this case probably means World War III, or at least a major civil war in Europe. The question is whether the brave, intellectual thinkers in the Islam world can reverse the trend. Let's hope so, because the alternative is too horrible to even imagine.

Back to page with current comments