The Statesman (India)
May 9, 2008 Friday

A CASE OF MUSLIM DEVIANCE?

Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the
vitality of Al Qaida. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being
tarnished by association. US presidential contender John McCain is
saying that America needs a leadership to confront the transcendent
challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. And
the words still ring in our ears from Mr Samuel Huntingtons treatise,
The Clash of Civiliza-tions, which in many ways triggered this
paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public
discourse. The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic
fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM, he wrote.

Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al
Qaida is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as
Hit-ler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world
(commentators seem to overlook Hitlers early speeches calling on
Catholic principles). But Islam has a much better record over the ages
(despite its founder being far more warlike than the founder of
Christianity) of dealing with its deviants who take violence to
excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism or
communism. Christian-ity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to
resist Japanese militarism and Confucianism proved hospitable to
Maoism. Yes, there was Saddam Hussein, but he was an atheistic brute
without an ideology.

Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam
when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and
starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of
contemporary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything comparable
with Hitlers systematic genocide of the Jews ~ in-deed throughout its
history Islam has been protective of the Jews, regarding them as
people of the book to whom it had a special responsibility. Nor has it
settled other parts of the world and systematically obliterated other
civilizations, as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor
have Islamic societies created anything equivalent to South Africas
apartheid or the racist culture of the old American South. Unlike many
Christian churches, the mosque has never separated people by
race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there more
segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.

Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek
peasants of the Pelo-ponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land
there was silence. But 50 years later when there were mass killings of
Christians in Bul-garia there was a great outpouring of moral
outrage. Delacroix immortalised the massacre in his painting, Massacre
of Chaos, with Chris-tian women pursued by Turkish lancers and the
19th century Liberal British Prime Minister William Gladstone wrote a
bestselling pamphlet in which he described the Ottomans as leaving a
broad line of blood marking the track behind them, and as far as their
domination reached civilization vanished from view.

Almost forgotten today is that it was the Otto-mans who gave refuge to
the Jews when they were expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing Ger-man,
French and Czech Protestants, but every cultivated Westerner knows
Voltaires Fanati-cism or Mohammed the Prophet or Dantes portrayal of
Mohammed in hell.

Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European
descent. But the leadership of the Muslim world has been much more
fragmented ~ between 661 AD and 750 AD it was the Arab Umayyad
dynasty. Between 750 and 1258 it was the multi-ethnic Abbasid
dynasty. And from 1453 to 1922, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman
Empire. In India there was the separate Mughals and in Persia the
Safa-vids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Mus-lim empires of
Mali and Songhai.

Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like
Cairo, Dhaka and Jak-arta, criminal violence is much, much lower than
in Christian-influenced societies. Muslim countries, according to the
UNs annual human development report, have the worlds lowest murder and
rape rates.

In Teheran, the capital of Iran and according to the CIA the most
important single source of terrorism today, you can go out at 11 or 12
at night and find families with children picnicking in city
parks. When my daughters friends ask me where they can safely travel
alone in an interesting Third World city I say Cairo. Certainly not
Catholic Rio or Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders and
muggings comparatively rarer, there is much less prostitution and hard
drug use. Neither is there that much of AIDS.

The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Mr Barack
Obama, the Demo-cratic presidential candidate, is either ignorant or
scared of going into battle on these issues. I have not read one
speech by one Western poli-tician who seriously attempts to educate
public opinion. We live in a slough of ignorance.