by AKEEL BILGRAMI
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 supported Israeli occupation and brutalization of the Palestinian land and peoples, and so on. These are all things that I, and many others, insist on saying, even as we acknowledge that there are many Wests, many Americas, with diverse interests and commitments, etc. But then, if one is consistent, one should also refused to be inhibited from making efforts to understand Islam which abstract away from its diversity, and look for generalizations that are roughly plausible and that advance discussion and understanding. In a sense there could be no social explanation if we were not so prepared to abstract enough from the diversities of a social phenomenon to set up the explananda.
I say all this not to be dismissive of those who caution us against the crass and messianic media pundits on Islam. The media’s discussion of Islam is indeed brazenly ignorant and brash. I say it only to allow enough discussion to get off the ground, such that any cautions about ignoring the diversity of Islam should take the form of improving our analyses piecemeal when it is ignoring some diversity on this or that matter, rather than to wield the caution as a general mantra that preempts earnest discussion of Islam in the fear that one is always falling into some caricature familiar from what we read in the press and various popular as well as academic writings.
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