[lit-ideas] Islamic propensity toward group conflict
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:17:46 -0800
We are familiar with and attracted to the thesis of Francis Fukuyama who
writes (in The End of History and the Last Man, 1992) that Liberal-Democracy
is sweeping and will continue to sweep the world, and Liberal Democracies do
not war against other Liberal-Democracies. With a couple of caveats
Fukuyama implied that world peace was very likely an inevitability.
Samuel P. Huntington took a different view of the future. He saw the
characteristics of each civilization as being so ingrained and so hostile to
other civilizations that instead of world peace, ongoing "clashes" would
occur.
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996,
describes some of the reasons the Islamic Civilization isn't likely to fit
into Fukuyama's scenario. On page 262 Huntington wrote, "The question
remains as to why, as the twentieth century ends, Muslims are involved in
far more intergroup violence than people of other civilizations. Has this
always been the case? In the past Christians killed fellow Christians and
other people in massive numbers. To evaluate the violence propensities of
civilizations throughout history would require extensive research, which is
impossible here. What can be done, however, is to identify possible causes
of current Muslim group violence, both intra-Islam and extra-Islam, and
distinguish between those causes which explain a greater propensity toward
group conflict throughout history, if that exists, from those which only
explain a propensity at the end of the twentieth century. Six possible
causes suggest themselves. Three explain violence between Muslims and
non-Muslims and three explain both that and intra-Islam violence, while
three others explain that and a historical Muslim propensity, if it exists.
If that historical propensity, however does not exist, then its presumed
causes that cannot explain a nonexistent historical propensity also
presumably do not explain the demonstrated contemporary Muslim propensity to
group violence. The latter then can be explained only by twentieth-century
causes that did not exist in previous centuries.
"First, the argument is made that Islam has from the start been a religion
of the sword and that it glorifies military virtues. Islam originated among
'warring Bedouin nomadic tribes' and this violent origin is stamped in the
foundation of Islam. Muhammad himself is remembered as a hard fighter and a
skillful military commander.' (No one would say this about Christ or
Buddha.) The doctrines of Islam, it is argued, dictate war against
unbelievers, and when the initial expansion of Islam tapered off, Muslim
groups, quite contrary to doctrine, then fought among themselves. The ratio
of fitna or internal conflicts to jihad shifted drastically in favor of the
former. The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contain few
prohibitions on violence, and a concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim
doctrine and practice.
"Second, from its origin in Arabia, the spread of Islam across northern
Africa and much of the middle East and later to central Asia, the
Subcontinent, and the Balkans brought Muslims into direct contact with many
different peoples, who were conquered and converted, and the legacy of this
process remains. In the wake of the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans urban
South Slavs often converted to Islam while rural peasants did not, and thus
was born the distinction between Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs.
Conversely the expansion of the Russian Empire to the Black Sea, the
Caucasus, and Central Asia brought it into continuing conflict for several
centuries with a variety of Muslim peoples. The West's sponsorship, at the
height of its power vis-a-vis Islam, of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East
laid the basis for ongoing Arab-Israeli antagonism. Muslim and non-Muslim
expansion by land thus resulted in Muslims and non-Muslims living in close
proximity throughout Eurasia. In contrast, the expansion of the West by sea
did not usually lead to Western peoples living in territorial proximity to
non-Western peoples: these were either subjected to rule from Europe or,
except in South Africa, were virtually decimated by Western settlers.
"A third possible source of Muslim-non-Muslim conflict involves what one
statesman, in reference to his own country termed the 'indigestibility' of
Muslims. Indigestibility, however, works both ways: Muslim countries have
problems with non-Muslim minorities comparable to those which non-Muslim
countries have with Muslim minorities. Even more than Christian, Islam is
an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line
between those in the Dar al-Islam and those in the Dar al-harb. As a
result, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western Christians, and Orthodox
Christians have less difficulty adapting to and living with each other than
any of them has in adapting to and living with Muslims. Ethnic Chinese, for
instance are an economically dominant minority in most Southeast Asian
countries. They have been successfully assimilated into the societies of
Buddhist Thailand and the Catholic Philippines; there are virtually no
significant instances of anti-Chinese violence by the majority groups in
those countries. In contrast, anti-Chinese riots and/or violence have
occurred in Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia, and the role of Chinese in
those societies remains a sensitive and potentially explosive issue in the
way in which it is not in Thailand and the Philippines.
"Militarism, indigestibility, and proximity to non-Muslim groups are
continuing features of Islam and could explain Muslim conflict propensity
throughout history, if that is the case. Three other temporarily limited
factors could contribute to this propensity in the late twentieth century.
One explanation, advanced by Muslims, is that Western imperialism and the
subjection of Muslim societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
produced an image of Muslim military and economic weakness and hence
encourages non-Islamic groups to view Muslims as an attractive target.
Muslims are, according to this argument, victims of a widespread anti-Muslim
prejudice comparable to the anti-Semitism that historically pervaded Western
societies. Muslim groups such as Palestinians, Bosnians, Kashmiris, and
Chechens, Akbar Ahmed alleges, are like 'Red Indians, depressed groups,
shorn of dignity, trapped on reservations converted from their ancestral
lands.' The Muslim as victim argument, however does not explain conflicts
between Muslim majorities and non-Muslim minorities in countries such as
Sudan, Egypt, Iran, and Indonesia.
"A more persuasive factor possibly explaining both intra- and extra- Islamic
conflict is the absence of one or more core states in Islam. Defenders of
Islam often allege that its Western critics believe there is a central,
conspiratorial, directing force inn Islam mobilizing it and coordinating its
actions against the West and others. If the critics believe this, they are
wrong. Islam is a source of instability in the world because it lacks a
dominant center. States aspiring to be leaders of Islam, such as Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and potentially Indonesia, compete for
influence in the Muslim world; no one of them is in a strong position to
mediate conflicts within Islam; and no one of them is able to act
authoritatively on behalf of Islam in dealing with conflicts between Muslim
and non-Muslim groups.
"Finally, and most important, the demographic explosion in Muslim societies
and the availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the
ages of fifteen and thirty is a natural source of instability and violence
both within Islam and against non-Muslims. Whatever other causes may be at
work, this factor alone would go a long way to explaining Muslim violence in
the 1980s and the 1990s. The aging of this pit-in-the-python generation by
the third decade of the twenty-first-century and economic development in
Muslim societies, if and as that occurs, could lead to a significant
reduction in Muslim violence propensities and hence to a general decline in
the frequency and intensity of fault line wars."
Lawrence
Other related posts:
