Islam and the West

When discussing this most important and timely issue, before anythingelse and beyond all current passions and prejudices, one must pause and askwhat we mean by the two terms Islam and the West. Which Islam andwhich West are we considering? Is it traditional Islam as practiced by themajority of Muslims, the Islam of pious men and women who seek to livein the light of God‘s teachings as revealed in the Qur’an and in surrender toHis will? Or is it modernist interpretations that seek to interpret the Islamictradition in view of currently prevalent Western ideas and fashions ofthought? Or yet, is it the extreme forms of politically active Islam that, inexasperation, before dominance by non-Islamic forces both outside andinside the borders of most Islamic countries, takes recourse in ideas andmethods of certain strands of recent Western political history, including, insome cases, terrorism, which is against Islamic law and which was notinvented by them?Nor is the reality of the West in any way homogeneous. In fact, practicallythe only political unity observed in the West these days appears inits hatred of Islam, as shown in the case of Bosnia and Chechnya, whereone has observed, with very few exceptions, the uniformity of silence,indifference, and inaction by various voices in the West in the face of theworst kind of human atrocities. Otherwise, the opposition of forces anddiversity of what is usually called the West is so blatant as to hardly needmention. But since it is ignored in many quarters that speak of global orderbased on what they call Western values, it must be asked if the West ischaracterized by Trappist and Carthusian monks or European andAmerican agnostic or atheistic “intellectuals” on university campuses or inthe media. One wonders if the Westerners are those who still make pilgrimageto hurdes in the thousands, or those who journey, also in thethousands, to Las Vegas or the birthplace of Elvis Presley. This diversityand even confrontation within the West is of the greatest importance notonly for those in Europe and the United States who speak of confrontationwith the Islamic world on the basis of the idea that there is an at least relativelyunified West, but also for the Muslims, at least some of whom arein general fully aware of deep divisions not likely to be integrated intounity soon but which are in fact on the verge of creating disorder and chaoswithin the very fabric of Western societies ...