AMERICAN DREAMING:

Islam and us: Europe has most to fear from a Muslim backlash after America's crusade against Iraq (Timothy Garton Ash, March 6, 2003, The Guardian)

The politically correct position on the war against terrorism is "this is not about Islam". Two groups dissent: American fundamentalist Christians and European fundamentalist secularists. Born-again Christians of the American midwest think that the reunification of all the biblical lands of Israel will hasten the Second Coming, in which Rapture they will be forever saved. European fundamentalist secularists think that all religion is blindness and stupidity, a kind of mental affliction, of which Islam is a particularly acute example.

The polite form of this attitude is to say "Islam must have its Reformation". After all, Muslims are still living in the Middle Ages aren't they? In 1424, to be precise. This, apart from being unbearably condescending ("come on you chaps, reform yourselves and maybe we'll let you into the house"), is also half-baked. The Reformation started as a revolt against the pope in the name of a true reading of the holy books. Islam doesn't have a pope, which is one reason it's so hard for it to have a Reformation. But anyway, would those who say "Islam must have its Reformation" really want Muslims to get back to a strict, literal interpretation of the Koran? No, what people who say this really mean is "Islam must have its Enlightenment". Or, better still, its post-Darwinian secularisation. Muslims must, in short, evolve .

The one form of evangelism that is still acceptable on the European left is evangelical Darwinism. Its fundamental belief is that all other forms of belief are symptoms of intellectual backwardness. Thus Martin Amis wrote on this page a couple of days ago "we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive". By this logic, Archbishop Rowan Williams is more psychologically primitive than Stalin and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is more psychologically primitive than Hitler.

Europe is the place where post-Darwinian secularisation is most advanced. It's now the most secular continent on earth. And it's precisely the fact that Europeans, especially on the left, have such a secular imagination that makes it so difficult for us to understand and accept the religious Muslims who have come among us in growing numbers. You need a religious imagination to respond to the music of other religions. Jonathan Sacks expressed this well in his account of a meeting with radical Muslims, including a senior Iranian Ayatollah. "We established within minutes a common language, because we take certain things very seriously: we take faith seriously, we take texts seriously. It's a particular language that believers share." [...]

The leap of imaginative sympathy from Christianity or Judaism to Islam is much smaller than that from evangelical secularism to any of them. That's why America, which has preserved the religious imagination it imported from Europe, may actually be better placed to accept the Islamic other. That's not all. America has a rare combination of religious imagination and an inclusive, civic identity. Europe has a fateful combination of secular imagination and exclusive, ethnic identities.

A couple of months ago, taking a crash course of enculturation in the American Bible Belt, I sat in Homer's coffee house, in a suburb of Kansas City, talking to Chris Mull, a singer of rather excruciating "Christian rock". He said some interesting things about the local Muslims. Being religious themselves, he said, the local Christians were better able to understand Muslim religiosity. Since this was an area of so many competing religious sects, everyone accepted that religion had to be a matter of private choice and community life. In this sense, a place where most people are religious can come closer to the pluralist ideal in which, as Rabbi Sacks has memorably put it, "Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind; any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others." Finally, my Christian rocker said that local Muslims made more efforts to adapt to American ways because "they're living the American dream".

Pie in the sky, you may retort. Apple pie in the sky. But can you imagine anyone in Marseille or Hamburg or Oldham even thinking of saying of the local Muslims that "they're living the European dream"? Contemporary Europeanness is secular, but it's not an inclusive, civic identity, as Americanness is. That's Europe's double problem. The Iraq war may be America's crusade, but it's Europe which is closer to the likely Muslim backlash and worse equipped to deal with it.

None of this is to deny that there are large dangers in Islam itself, especially in radically politicised Islam. The captured al-Qaida commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed chillingly reminds us of this when he describes the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "the holy raids on Washington and New York". But the beginning of the Islamic new year is a good moment for post-Christian Europe to look not at the mote in our Islamic neighbour's eye but at the beam in our own.

Of course, there's a third, and the most important, group who thinks this is a holy war: the terrorists. So whether the European secularists like it or not, they're in the midst of a holy war--and not only do they seem not to like it, they seem entirely unable to process the information. Unable any longer to imagine that religious faith may motivate people, they seem content to lie back and depend on the Islamicists to Europeanize/secularize themselves, because, after all, who would not choose to be European.

We happen to believe that Islam must be reformed and fear that, lacking a central authority, that reform will have to be generated from without. However, that reform, while it must secularize economics and politics, must not secularize the entire culture, lest Islam follow Europe into terminal decline.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 8, 2003 10:08 AM