Advertisement

Commentary: Islam and the West

By JEREMY BLACK
Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter

EXETER, England, June 17 (UPI) -- First of three parts.

Over the past two years, a flood of works has appeared on the history of terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq and relations between Islam and the West. Some of the work has been of high quality but much has been superficial. This is understandable. Commercial opportunity plays a major role. There are also serious analytical problems.

Advertisement

One of the most important relates to the need to distinguish between long-term perceptions of Islamic power and more short-term, but still pressing developments. In particular, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the centrality of conflict, still more relations, with the

Western world in Islamic history. This is at the expense of three different tendencies.

First, the need for Islam to confront other societies, secondly the importance of divisions within the Islamic world itself, and, thirdly, the variety of links between Islam and the West.

The last point can be related, more generally, to modern revisionism on the multiple nature of Western imperialism, a theme I have probed in my 2002 book, "Europe and the World 1650-1830."

To turn to the first point, throughout its history, Islam has interacted not only with Christendom but also with other cultural areas. Our own concerns on the relationship between Christendom and Islam appear to be underlined by the map with its depiction of an Islamic world stretching into the Balkans and the Western Mediterranean.

Advertisement

However, if the conventional map -- an equal-area cartogram -- is replaced by an equal-population cartogram as I displayed in my 1997 book, "Maps and Politics," then a very different perception of Islam emerges. It becomes a religion not primarily of the Arab world but of South Asia: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Iran.

In some respects there is a parallel with Christendom, which is now more prominent in the Americas and, increasingly, Africa than in Europe.

This geographical reconceptualization is linked to a focus on different challenges than those from Christianity. In particular, the clash between Islam and Hinduism proved a major aspect of political tension in South Asia and this became more pronounced after the end of British imperial rule.

Thus, Kashmir is a major faultline for many Muslims, while there is considerable concern about increasing Hindu militancy in India and the difficulties the Congress Party faces in maintaining a secular approach.

In Central Asia, the challenge came as much from Chinese as from Russian expansion. Furthermore, like the Christians, for example in the Amazonia region of Brazil, Islam competes with tribal beliefs, particularly in Indonesia. The importance of the eastern world of Islam is such that areas of conflict with the "West," at least in the shape of Christendom, include the Philippines and Timor.

Advertisement


Next: Islamic Models of War


Jeremy Black is Professor of History at University of Exeter in Britain and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. This article is based on his presentation to FPRI's 2003 History Institute for Teachers on "The American Encounter with Islam," May 3-4, 2003 and is reprinted by permission of FPRI.

Latest Headlines