The bishop and the imam ask, Do we really have to fight?

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The bishop and the imam ask, Do we really have to fight?

Dec 20th 1990
The Economist


Now that pluralism has beaten communism, they say, the next great battle is between Islam and Christendom: or rather between the two chunks of the world that have grown out of those two different ideas of God and man. We therefore organised a debate between an open-minded Christian cleric and an open-minded Muslim one. Call them Francis and Mahmoud. The reasonable Muslim begins


Mahmoud: It distresses me that so many people seem to think the next period of history will be a fight between your part of the world and mine. It is true that we live elbow to elbow with each other, all the way from the Caspian Sea to the western end of the Mediterranean. It is also true that our elbows have banged painfully together many times in the past. But almost 2,000 years after the birth of your Jesus, and more than 1,400 years after the birth of our Muhammed, let me start by asking whether it really have to happen all over again.

We are both, after all, "people of the Book". We both believe, along with the Jews, in the idea of a single God. We also share the idea of individual responsibility before God: in the words of my Koran, "Each soul draws the reward of its acts on none but itself."

These things may sound meaningless to the many people who these days do not believe in any God at all. But it is these primal ideas that shape whole cultures, meaning the way we live. There is a great gap between the way both you and I live, different though we are, and the tangled life of the multi-god Hindu culture, or the monochrome life of the almost godless Confucian culture. Let me remind you that when Muhammed went from Mecca on his visit to heaven in what you call AD621, he paused in Jerusalem to kneel in prayer alongside Abraham, Moses—and Jesus. That moves me.

Francis: It moves me too. But we have to face the facts of history. The facts are that we cousins of the Book have quarrelled frequently, and frightfully. There are no rows like family rows. Let me remind you, in turn, of the time when the sweaty young squires of a newly confident western Europe, those yuppies of the eleventh century, clumped their way to Jerusalem to start the sequence of slaughter and deception we call the Crusades; and of that later time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when a then all-powerful Europe swallowed up almost the entire Muslim world into its various empires.

Mahmoud: And let me recall for you, since each of us is remembering the times when his own side went too far, the Arab army that swept through North Africa into Spain and France, hot with a new religion, in your eighth century (and our first), until Charles Martel stopped it at Poitiers; the Golden Horde, which occupied most of what you now call European Russia until a Grand Duke of Moscow turned it around 610 years ago; and the Turkish thrust into eastern Europe that was reversed at the gates of Vienna, thanks to a King of Poland, only 307 years ago.

Francis: Yes, we both have our memories. Europe and Islam have not had a quiet time together. Their fights with each other are one of history's most familiar stories. Is there any reason to think the story is over?

Mahmoud: Well, there is one important difference between then and now.

In most of those earlier clashes, the side that went on to the offensive was full of self-confidence, for what we would now call both ideological and technological reasons; and the defending side was divided and weak. The splendidly efficient Arab army that carried the new-born Crescent as far as Poitiers was attacking a Europe still in its Dark Ages. The Crusaders whose heavy cavalry took the Cross back to Jerusalem 350 years later marched with a Pope's blessing against a temporarily disorganised Muslim world. The Turks who then pushed the counter-attack as far as Vienna had the best-organised empire of its time, and like your empire-builders of the 1900s combined religious zeal with practical efficiency; and they both faced a fragmented opposition.

It does not look like that now. I agree that at the moment my Islam has more religious enthusiasm than your Christendom, or ex-Christendom: most of us are still believers, most of you are not sure whether you believe or not. But the rest of the equation does not apply. You are still the side with crumbs of modern life. Your Europe is pulling itself together into a new unity; the Muslims, and especially the Arabs, are still hopelessly divided.

Francis: I accept that difference, but I am less than wholly comforted by it, for two reasons. One is that the Arab world has in this century shown signs, for the first time in ages, of seriously trying to unite itself; and if Iraq's Mr Saddam Hussein wins the present confrontation in the Gulf he may indeed unite a large part of it under his leadership.


Mahmoud: Which I personally think would be a disaster. Saddam would unite it under the wrong kind of political system, an ungodly dictatorship, and for the wrong purposes, the propagation of his own crude ideas about Arab power in the modern world. But I have to tell you—and warn you—that many of my fellow-Muslims admire him very much.

Francis: Quite. And that leads to my second reason for not being reassured by your historical comparison: you have left out probably the most important thing of all.

Most of those earlier waves of expansion by Islam into Europe, and vice versa, were at least partly caused by economics. The Arabs who burst out of the Arabian desert in the century after Muhammed's death were moved by religious enthusiasm, but they were also moved by the fact that there were not enough oases in the desert to keep them alive. The Golden Horde and the Turks migrated out of central Asia for similar reasons. Much of the man-power of the Crusades consisted of the new European landed class's younger sons; as the rural economy of medieval Europe settled down into its new post-Dark-Ages order, these young people had nothing much to do, and wanted excitement. The nineteenth century's empire-builders were a bit like that too.

What worries me now is that the Muslim world to the south and east of Europe has too many young men and not enough to feed them on, or keep them busy with. Only four of the 19 countries with predominantly Muslim populations between Morocco and Iran—Morocco itself, Tunisia, Yemen and Turkey—have economies growing faster than the number of mouths they have to feed. In the other 15, people are getting steadily poorer. In four of those 15, more than half the population is under the age of 25, in nine more than 60%.

This is already producing a flood of economic refugees and, if economic misery leads to more political repression, will produce a flood of political refugees too, including a lot of angry revolutionaries. That will cause arguments between Europe, which will say it cannot take so many refugees, and the governments that want to get rid of them. These arguments could get mixed up with other things: freedom of movement between our two parts of the world, Europe's access to Arab oil, the ambitions of the next generation of Saddam Husseins. The wrong sort of new Arab leadership will create the wrong sort of new Arab self-confidence. And all this in a world of chemical weapons and nuclear missiles. I cannot claim to foresee the outcome, but there are the makings of trouble here.

Mahmoud: There are indeed. Let us both say, even if we differ over the details, that we are worried about how Islam and Europe will get through the next 50 years without a clash. What can men good heart on both sides do to limit the danger?

Francis: I think that depends on whether we can agree about the basic nature of the world we shall be inhabiting in the twenty-first century. If we can, we should then be able to ask ourselves how our two different traditions, the Christian one and the Muslim one, can cope with that sort of world.

 

-con't-

The past two years, 1989 and 1990, have brought a great clearing of minds about the way man organises his day-to-day life here on earth. After the rout of communism, it is really no longer possible to believe that politics and economics can be left under the control of a handful of people who claim to "know" how to run these things. We have returned to individual responsibility, to the belief that each man carries the burden of his own life: an idea which, as you say, Muslims and Christians share. It seems clear to me that in future everybody in the world will want democracy for the political side of life, and the free choice of the marketplace as the basis of economic life.

Mahmoud: My picture of democracy may be a little different from yours, as I shall explain in a moment. But in general I agree. Indeed, if I may be tactless, I will point out that my Islam has been much better about communism over the past 70 years than your Christianity has. Most communist governments came to power in the Christian part of the world. None ever did in the Muslim part, unless imposed from outside. Some foolish Christians used to say that communism was "just another Christian heresy". Every Muslim saw it for what it was, an enemy to both of us. Let that pass, however. We agree that, in future, people everywhere will with to have a much bigger say in how their earthly lives are organised.

Francis: Then let us go on from there. I claim that the ideas Christianity introduced into my part of the world are a better basis for the pursuit of democracy than the ideas produced by Islam. It is from Christianity, for instance, that we have learnt the essential idea of separation of church and state.

This is essential because, in matters that have to do with God, the absolute reigns; things are right or wrong, and no voting will make them otherwise. But in running our day-to-day life on earth, if we want to do it the democratic way, we must accept that the other man's opinion is as good as our own. This is the realm of relativity, of honest doubt. The two realms are separate. Christians have been told so from the start. "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." The Koran—forgive me—has nothing like that to say to Muslims. On the contrary, you are told that any such separation is sinfully wrong.

Mahmoud: It took Christians a very long time to put that principle properly into practice. Your Holy Roman Emperors and your Popes of the Middle Ages reached many convenient political arrangements with each other. In general, apart from an admirable early experiment by the Swiss, it took you 1,600 or 1,700 years—longer than Islam has yet been in existence—before you even started to develop the democracy for which you say the separation of church and state is a necessary condition.

You must give us time too. In fact, though we have no great phrase to point to like your quotation from Jesus in the Matthew gospel, most Muslim countries already practise a rough-and-ready separation between the business of God and the business of the state. We are terribly slow to do it in a democratic way; but so were you.

Francis: Yet it goes much deeper than the God-state separation. The practice of democracy requires a special attitude towards other people. It is necessary to accept, not just in the intellect but in the heart, that that other being out there is as important as you are. He may not be as good-looking, or as clever, or as well-read in Aristotle or Adam Smith, but he is as important. This is not something men feel naturally. It cannot be taught in sociology lessons in school. The only way of learning it, gradually, is out of the climate of ideas in which we grow up, the body of thought that shapes our lives: our "culture", to use that clumsy word.

I am going to press your hard. "Love thy neighbour as thyself", said the founder of Christianity, adding that next to loving God this was the most important rule of all. I cannot find any equivalent in Islam's basic book. The Koran says much about the love of God; that is excellent, but not sufficient. The New Testament is full of exhortations—the Sermon on the Mount is one example—to look at our fellow-men with respect, and without self-assertion. The index of my copy of the Koran has nothing under "compassion" or "mercy", and only one entry under "peace" except as a word you say when you meet somebody. There are some fine versus about patience in Sura 16, and about modesty in Sura 31, but that is not quite the same thing.

Without plunging into theology, I will briefly say what I think lies at the root of this. To somebody who lives in the Christian world, even if he is not himself a believer, it seems clear that the Christian view of how one man should think of another man is linked to the Christian idea of a threefold God, father, son and holy ghost. If you have been told that God detached the son-part of himself, as it were, to become a human being, and get crucified, you are liable to start feeling rather more respectful towards all human beings. Islam, denying the Trinity, denies itself that opportunity.

Mahmoud: If I do not take you up on the Trinity, you will understand it is solely in the interest of peace and out of compassion for our readers. That is not entirely a joke.

Look, let me repeat: you must give us time. The New Testament has its strong points, including what it says about loving your neighbour; so does the Koran, especially on the wonder of God. But 600 years ago, when Christianity was roughly as old as Islam is now, the politics of Christendom was no more admirable than you say the politics of Islam is now. In your year of grace 1390, Christian Europe was authoritarian, brutal, had a Pope and an Anti-Pope, and was wondering whether to have an Eleventh—or was it a Thirteenth?—Crusade. Europe's great change for the better was still around the corner.

You brought up economics earlier in the debate, to score a point against me. Let me deploy economics now. That great European change for the better, including the growth of democracy, came about partly because Europe grew richer. The spread of wealth, and leisure, and thoughtfulness, helped to liberate the forces of the spirit that brought about the Renaissance and the Reformation, which in turn led to the coming of democracy. Those forces of the spirit were there, waiting; economic growth was no more than one key, among others, unlocking the door for them; but it played its part. I am confident that, if the Arab world can get its economics straight, a similar door can be unlocked for us. And, if it is, our democracy may have one or two special advantages.

Francis: If you are right, we can breathe again: what might otherwise have been the chief danger to the peace of the twenty-first century will have eased. And I accept your point about the importance of economics. Indeed, I gratefully acknowledged that the flowering of Europe in the Renaissance and the Reformation was much helped, economically and otherwise, by what Europe imported from the Arabs 600 years and more ago. We re-learnt from you the natural sciences and the other things you had learnt from classical Greece, but we had forgotten during the Dark Ages. That was partly why Europe woke up again. Thank you.

But what did you mean when you said that your version of democracy, if it comes, will be in some ways better than ours?

Mahmoud: You have set out what you think are the advantages of your religion as a foundation for democracy. I will now set out two advantages I think mine has.

One is that we Muslims are better on the race question: which will matter a lot in the coming century. The Koran is clear about it. In the beginning, it says, "mankind was but one nation"; and then "O mankind! We . . . made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other but not despise each other." And by and large, if you look around the world, we have carried the principle into practice fairly well.

Francis: You had in East Africa, not all that long ago, a slave trade as abominable as ours in West Africa.

Mahmoud: True: we both have to admit our failures. But on the whole the record of Islam in this matter is not bad. Muslims do not seem to have the race-consciousness that has marked so much of the history of Christianity since the Roman empire went Christian. One of Muhammed's last instructions to the Arabs was not to treat non-Arabs as inferior. This will be relevant, I think, in the coming century.

The other advantage may be harder for people in the modern West to understand, but is even more important in the long run. I think Islam can point to the danger that lies inside the triumph of the West, the weakness in its strength.

As you said, the birth of democracy and capitalism was made possible by removing one part of life from the realm of the absolute. In the operations of pluralism there is no permanent right and wrong, no unmistakable good and bad. Each man's judgment counts as much as the next man's. When a majority decides something should be done, it is done; if it changes its mind, it is undone. Whether a field is occupied by sheep or a computer factory depends on the intricate working out of millions of individual preferences between roast lamb and printouts. It is an admirably efficient system, and 1989 and 1990 suggest it is what the whole world wants; but it is not perfect.

The decisions of the majority sometimes produce results that many people see as not just temporarily inconvenient, but wrong. These may be put right later, if the majority changes; but there is no guarantee that they will be. Also, in any system based on the working out of individual choices, some individuals will finish up at the bottom of the pile, perhaps permanently. The system has no monitor, as it were, nobody watching it from outside. The more universal the system becomes, the more I worry about this lack of any guiding set of rules. If capitalist democracy is the worldwide system of the future, many people will begin to feel that they live inside a smoothly humming but, when you look at it, amoral machine.

Islam, which insists that daily life is part of a wider whole—that there are always objective truths to be honoured—is a reminder of these imperfections. I do not know exactly how the imperfections will be put right; but then neither did anybody know 600 years ago, back in AD1390, exactly how the Renaissance and the Reformation would come to the rescue. Nor am I asking you to become Muslims. I merely suggest that you address yourselves, in your own way, to the unfinished business of pluralism.

Francis: As a Christian I agree with you, of course; although many people in the western world will think we are talking nonsense just because it is Christmas. How marvellous if Islam, which helped to prod Christendom awake at the end of the Middle Ages, should after all help the modern West in the shaping of the next few centuries.