Islam in the Mirror
March 28, 2002
Today's Islam has been victimized by a Western hegemony that yesterday's Islam empowered when it handed Europe the Renaissance on a silver platter.
Among the ingredients fueling terrorism, none is more hi-octane than
fundamentalism. Fundamentalism of every stripe, Jewish, Christian, Islamic,
Hindu, etc., claims that traditional values have been forgotten, or perhaps
corrupted by the Great Satan of your choice. Return, and all will be well.
(Minor details like the Wayback Machine are invariably left out of this
critique.) Fail to return, and we may have to kill you.
Fundamentalism is also the clearest evidence yet for what Alvin
Toffler called "future shock" in his 1965 book of the same name. It's roots
go back to the Renaissance and our first encounters with a modernism that
continues to insist on too much change, too darn fast. No one likes it,
including we Westerners who fancy ourselves liberal and open-minded. It's
too much. It's too fast.
Further, it's just here, like the atmosphere; no one really chooses
it, but everyone has to breathe. Families split up, irrespective of
"values," because job opportunities lie in distant corners of the planet.
The affordable automobile, conceived as a transportation device by
arch-conservative Henry Ford, turned out to have an unchaperoned back seat
where liberal things happened. The TV is always loaded with mischief. You
may ax the TV, but you probably need that job.
Every generation of the Industrial Era has grown up with accelerated
change, and its wacky sidekick "progress," arriving at an ever-faster pace
with ever-more radical content. The very notion of Progress, the idea that
history actually changes; that it has some sort of utopian direction
assisted by science, is itself a modern invention. For tens of thousands of
years one lived the life of one's great-great-grandparents and thought
nothing of it. Even long after the arrival of Neolithic civilization around
10,000 BCE, the rhythms of life remained as fixed as the Sun's orbit around
the Earth. Then, 15th century scientific and cultural innovations launched
"Civilization: the thrill ride."
We've done a good job of pretending we're used to its unpredictable
bumps and thumps, the thrilling ascents, sickening falls and occasional,
sometimes fatal, breakdowns. After all, with Progress, poor men can get
rich. Women can get free. Kids can turn up the volume.
Even when Progress appeared as Frankenstein in Dickensian factory
hells or the trenches of "The Great War" or on MTV's "Real World," we
invariably forgot and forgave in anticipation of the next new set of toys.
Part of our pretension to be at ease in the midst of this maelstrom
includes a blank "all is forgiven" chit that Progress can use over and over
again.
The fundamentalist sensibility breaks with this pretense to promote
its own modernist fantasy: the lost Golden Age. Islamic fundamentalists
announce the virtues of the 7th century on videotape, at their Web sites
and via their martyrs and their exploding shoes. And whom do they tell
first?
Americans took the Industrial Revolution from Great Britain in the
19th century and more or less ran with it in the colonialist/imperialist
style so popular at the time -- and so hateful to its victims. Accordingly,
America now gets blamed for change generally, and especially for the
secularist, humanist, liberal mores that best lubricate its machinery. (The
Nazis proved that hi-tech and medievalism could co-exist. The Chinese are
proving it today. It's just not particularly efficient.)
And America is an equal opportunity offender. It is no accident that
Christian fundamentalists Falwell, Robertson, and Graham offered post-9/11
critiques that could have come straight from Osama bin Laden. Muslims do
have a special problem, however: it's all their fault.
History books say the Renaissance arrived after the Crusades via
the Ottoman Empire and Moorish Spain. While Europeans were still trying to
reinvent decent plumbing, Islam was in glorious flower. Muslims not only
found and preserved Greek, Roman and Byzantine works of classical
antiquity, they worked new wonders of their own in medicine, astronomy,
architecture, mathematics (algebra is named after Mr. Al Jabr, etc.)
Islam also discovered the enormous value of tolerance and
cross-cultural pollination; the secularist, humanist, liberal benefits to
be derived from living peacefully (and profitably) with Jews, Christians,
even Pagans. Europe, by contrast, contributed the Holy Inquisition, the
Counter Reformation, various expulsions, pogroms and witch burnings.
If it weren't for Great-Minded Islam, there might well have been no
Renaissance, no Ages of Reason and Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution,
no Western colonialism/imperialism -- no Small-Minded Islam. Essentially,
today's Islam has been victimized by a Western hegemony that yesterday's
Islam empowered when it handed Europe the Renaissance on a silver platter.
Now, descendants of the original perpetrators complain.
Of all the nerve.
If you are a Muslim who wants to destroy modernism, you will have to
begin by looking in the mirror. Same for Falwell, et al. Medieval Christian
clerics who so eagerly copied the salvage of Aristotle and Democritus, as
well as Islam's own innovations, were nothing if not co-conspirators in
this Progress mess. If our secularist, humanist, liberal atmosphere puts
fundamentalist noses out of joint, spare us the exploding shoes. Simply
hold that nose until the Wayback Machine kicks in. The rest of us will be
happy to wait.
A futurist and commentator, Travis has been published nationally and internationally since 1978.
Copyright © 2002, Travis Charbeneau, All Rights Reserved.
travchar@mindspring.com
http://www.richmonder.com/charbeneau
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