Studying Islam in a Post 9/11 world
The two articles show how there is a great gap between the way Islam is viewed in the post 9/11 period and the way historic Islamic culture we have started to study in this course was appreciated or understood during the times of Classical Chinese civilization. This raises a number of troubling questions, such as the militant Islamists of the 21st century who claim that the true Islamic faith is of a severe and fundamentalist shape are very wrong and creating a strange portrayal of their own religious traditions.
Examining the way religious traditions intersected, grew and lived together along the Silk Road enables one to see the process of syncretic traditions emerging. Although religions took a shape more closely related to already existing dominant religious traditions of an area, i.e. a Chinese Buddhism different in shape from Indian Buddhism, as Edward Said in his article in The Nation suggests we always live in a world of intersections, not separate moral or political systems.
War, strife, religious expansion through aggression – as Said maintains – are found in all the religious traditions throughout history. Today, Christian-Western aggression towards people living in impoverished areas of the world who happen to practice different religions appears to ‘us’ as threatening. Terrorism is a method to induce fear and crush the other’s society. But are all Islamic people involved in this? The answer is no. Said calls this a cartoon approach to complex problems. This is propaganda on both sides of the tense divide of a post 9/11 world.
Hirschkind and Mahmood raises issues about the oversights of American feminism and American foreign policy in their supposed rescue of Islamic women from the Taliban. They suggest that the U.S. has to take responsibility for the plight of women in Afghanistan, particularly considering that the U.S. armed and trained the extremists in the Afganistan/Pakistan region in the first place. Out of this process emerged the movements like Taliban and even Al Qaeda, which, Said, critical of the West as much as he is of terrorism, identifies as somehow intertwined problems – both approaches morally suspect.
Fears of the ‘other’ and aggressive concepts like my religion or culture is better than yours could be argued are examples of pessimism in the human spirit: people are bad and the ones ‘over there’ are even worse. Studying history in our class brings a different way of looking at religion: we see the rich cultural and spiritual aspects of Islam, but we also see how the West tried, from the medieval period on, to place its culture, religious values and political systems in a superior position to the traditional East. Just as much, Chinese and Persian cultures felt they were superior to each other and to the West.
My sense is that there are opposing conflicting sides, always, but there are also more balanced and relaxed views about commonalities and respect for diversity. Islamic societies, for example, once gathered the great libraries keeping records of Ancient Greek and Roman culture that would eventually help reshape Europe during the Renaissance. Islam allowed and protected Judeo-Christian religionists to live safely in their kingdoms. Today we have the big libraries and the idea that we are protecting civilization from those who would attack its very liberal beliefs.
How are we to move beyond this kind of us-them scenario? Unfortunately as these two articles show it is easier today to create easy to digest messages that are nothing more than propaganda or stereotypes which create divisions and increase hatred. Said’s sense that both the West and the Islamic societies are participating in this war of turning each other into enemies and villains, requires us to think harder and more deeply about how ‘enemies’ are manufactured, rather than just blindly agreeing with what we are told. Believing in simple stories causes us to fear our neighbours and in doing so, makes them more wary of us: both of us are on edge staring at each other, wondering who is going to strike first.
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