by SEAN LEDWITH
Medieval Muslim thinkers ironically provided the intellectual foundations for the rise of the West, writes Sean Ledwith
Such is the extent of Islamophobia in Western societies since the start of this century that the notion that there even could be such a thing as ‘Islamic Science’ would be met with scepticism in some quarters. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistran and Iraq spawned a wave of anti-Muslim bigotry in Europe and North America that now make it the dominant form of racism in those parts of the world. The ill-conceived ‘War on Terror’ devised by Bush and Blair provoked counterattacks from the Muslim world by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Isis which exacerbated the negative stereotype of Islam that has prevailed in the West for decades.
Hard-right politicians such as Farage in the UK, Le Pen in France and the AFD in Germany have perniciously exploited the othering of Islamic communities in their countries for electoral advantage. Across Europe, Islamophobic policies such as burka bans and restrictions on Muslim worship have become increasingly normalised. The EU has adopted a ‘Fortress Europe’ siege mentality which condemns thousands of refugees, most of whom come from majority Muslim states, to watery graves in the seas surrounding the continent. In the UK, the government’s Prevent agenda is nominally aimed at tackling all forms of extremism but, in reality, blatantly penalises the Islamic community more than any other.
Historic irony
Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, became one of the key texts that provided academic cover for this resurgence of Islamophobia in the West. Huntington took his title from a phrase used by another neocon US commentator, Bernard Lewis, in an article titled ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’ written the same year. In that piece, Lewis claimed:
‘It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and movement in Islam far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations. The perhaps irrational, but surely historic receptions of an ancient rival against our Christian heritage, our secular present and the world-wide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.’
The great historic irony of Huntington and Lewis’ attempt to validate the assertion of US military power in the Middle East since 9/11 is that many of the intellectual and technical innovations that allowed the West to rise to global hegemony from the seventeenth century onwards were devised by thinkers from that same region during what is known to historians as ‘the golden age of Islam’, lasting approximately from the nineth century to the fourteenth CE.
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