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NEWS ANALYSIS Taboos Are Put to Test in West's View of Islam John Vinocur International Herald Tribune Tuesday, October 9, 2001
PARIS As the United States and Europe seek to hold together an anti-terrorist coalition including key Muslim countries, they clearly want no part of arguments that there are basic elements of opposition between Islamic and Western civilizations.
Indeed, a kind of no-go zone has developed surrounding the international offensive against terrorism, closing off in large part a basic discussion about Islam, its nature, history, and deepest political implications.
Last week, after President George W. Bush's clumsy use of the word "crusade" to characterize the effort against terrorism - to many Muslim ears, a reference to Christianity's crusades into the Muslim world in the Middle Ages - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spent much of his time during a tour of Islamic capitals stressing compatibility, and the absence of any anti-Islamic motivation in American leadership.
Now, while air raids continue against Afghanistan's Taliban installations, an awkward imbalance has developed.
On one hand, the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden proclaimed in a broadcast message Sunday night that the last month's events had "divided the whole world into two sides."
"The side of believers and the side of infidels, may God keep you away from them," he said. "Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come."
On the other hand, in order to hold its coalition together, to avoid security problems with its own Muslim communities and to escape participation in what its adversary defines as a jihad, the West is responding by insisting that Mr. bin Laden is a perversion of Islam, representative of only a small, minority current.
For the foreseeable future, the coalition's Western leaders seem to show little interest in a more nuanced analysis that reality may require in the longer run.
However well Western democracies succeed in not rising to Mr. bin Laden's cataclysmic bait, the question of whether profound, conflictual differences exist between the West and Islam haunts consciences in Europe and the United States as well as the anti-terrorist campaign.
At an extreme, the British historian Paul Johnson wrote in the current issue of National Review, a U.S. conservative monthly, that appeasement is tempting to Western governments now because "attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world."
Prime Minister Tony Blair brushed closer to this sense of conflict than any other democratic leader in a speech last week, saying that while the West must confront its ignorance of Islam, "It is also time for Islam to confront prejudice against America."
This more challenging tone has been sharpest in the Netherlands, where the government openly indicated two weeks ago that the army might be used to maintain public order if the American riposte led to unrest in immigrant neighborhoods. Against the background of the rich Dutch history of religious and cultural tolerance, the cover this week of HP/De Tijd, a leading newsmagazine, startles, containing only the words, "There's Something Wrong with Islam."
Its lead story said: "It is very hard to suppress attempts to make criticism of Islam a taboo. After the attacks on the U.S., we are certainly entitled to ask whether Islam's ideas are acceptable, that is, acceptable for us. That's not hatred, or a phobia, it's concern."
Without this kind of call for debate, a rarity in both Continental Europe and the United States, discussion of how the West, Islam and the Arab world can coexist may get pushed further from confident exchange and toward two unuseful extremes: Islam's demonization or its incomplete representation as a purely spiritual current that escapes from political contradictions or challenges to nonbelievers.
A jarring example of this retreat from open discussion has come in the European Parliament where the presidents of its party groupings, from Greens to Christian Democrats, sought last week to register concern to the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, about a Dutch commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, who said the Islamic world bears resentment and grudges against the West.
The complaint went to the substance of the remarks by Mr. Bolkestein and to why the former Dutch political leader responsible for the commission's internal market portfolio was giving interviews on Islam. The parliamentary chiefs' focus was, however, on phrases, regarded as insufficiently vague, that pointed up obvious tensions between the West and the Islamic world.
"We are big and powerful," said Mr. Bolkestein, who has contributed to two books on Islam in the Netherlands. "And they are not. They feel humiliated, excluded, despite the fact that they are the ones with the oil."
The fact is that at least in Italy, and the Netherlands, where polls have shown more than 60 percent of the Dutch favoring the expulsion of Muslim immigrants who support the terrorist raids on the United States, there may be a measure of ground-level support for politicians examining Islam and the Muslim world from a critical standpoint, although Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi hardly won admiration with his remark (later recanted) that the West should be confident in the "superiority" of its civilization.
Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to Moscow, who writes for Corriere della Sera, said in an interview, "I don't think [Mr. Berlusconi] said the right thing. I do think lots of Europeans feel this way. It expresses a widespread idea. It isn't politically incorrect with a large group of people. It is so, of course, for the left-wing intelligentsia, and it is in terms of the official diplomacy of the West."
If anything, he said, Mr. Berlusconi was probably more popular at home now than before.
Indeed, one of the newspapers belonging to the Berlusconi family's media group, Il Giornale, produced a poll that pointed in this direction. It reported that from a sampling of about 4,000 Italians, 60.3 percent agreed with the proposition that the West ought to be convinced of its superiority. Some 27 percent were said to be opposed.
If Mr. Berlusconi was talking only about political culture, as some of his political friends initially suggested, remarked David Frost, the BBC television moderator, then he would have considerable support, pointing in comparison with Islam to the West's record on freedom of speech, democracy, and women's rights.
Samuel Huntington, the professor at Harvard University who popularized a notion of a clash of civilizations, notably between Islam and the West, to describe the geopolitical dangers of the new century, stated in an interview that although it was Mr. Berlusconi's use of the word "superiority" that caused an uproar, "Muslim leaders are saying continually" that Islam is superior.
"I don't think you get anywhere saying this or that culture is superior," Mr. Huntington said, repeating his view that the attacks on New York on Washington were not a clash of civilizations but a blow by a fanatical group on civilized societies in general.
At the same time, Mr. Huntington said nothing changed his idea that the preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity.
As for Islam and the West's interrelation, Mr. Huntington wrote earlier, "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam . is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining power, imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world."
Far from calling for a defeat of Islam (or the West), Mr. Huntington has written that "the security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality."
But a willingness to discuss the points of conflict may be making headway regardless of governmental desires to look elsewhere.
In France, where a soccer match between the world champion French team and Algeria was abandoned with France leading, 4-1, Saturday night when Algerian youths invaded the playing field in Paris, the sports newspaper l'Equipe talked in an editorial of a defeat for what it designated as the "politically correct" officials who resolutely refused to plan for trouble.
On Monday morning, the host of a talk show on radio Europe 1, perhaps seeing the match as a possible conflict of civilizations dramatically close to home, spoke of his shock when the French national anthem was drowned out by derisive whistles. Whatever else, he said, it was now time to stop sweeping things under the rug.