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Why we are so obsessed by Islam?
- Leuven University Press
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1 WHY WE ARE SO OBSESSED BY ISLAM? Tariq Ali Introduction by Ludo Abicht In his book Islam: Past, Present and Future (2004), which is the final volume of a trilogy on the religions of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the German Catholic theologian and philosopher Hans Küng quotesTariqAli as an alternative voice on Islamic history and culture, as well as on the difficult interactions between today’s leading civilizations. Küng raises the question: “Why didn’t Islam, contrary to other world religions, such as Christianity and Judaism, witness a reformation? Why didn’t we have renewal at that time? This reformation would have taken place if Islamic culture in al-Andalus had remained intact. However, the first large-scale ethnic cleansing in Europe happened in Spain, as we know, when Jews and Muslims were forced either to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. Europe was rebuilding its identity and did not care for the presence of foreigners”. None of the above is self-evident. Although both Hans Küng and Tariq Ali might be considered to be honourable dissenters against their own respective establishments, there is quite a difference between a devout Roman Catholic such as Hans Küng and a secular Muslim such as Tariq Ali. So why does Hans Küng, who after all is a world authority on religion, turn to a formal left-wing student activist, who, moreover, has ignored Winston Churchill’s advice about the proper age for radicalism and conservatism and has remained an activist past the age of thirty. A modest answer to this rhetorical question would be: “Precisely because Tariq Ali has been able to keep the fires of moral indignation and hope for a better future burning, he is a credible discussion partner for Hans Küng and anyone else who cares to listen. I hope we are among those who care to listen to him.” Tariq Ali seems to imply that Islam, just like the other two monotheistic religions, ought to have had some form of reformation. Surely he knows that both orthodox Jews and traditionalist Roman Catholics would disagree with this statement. But this point of view is exactly the reason why Mr Ali has been invited to speak here among us, at the invitation of the University of Leuven, once a bastion of the Catholic counter-reformation. If the respectable University of Leuven can change 160 Tariq Ali and so to speak reform itself, then there is hope for the rest of the world. We know that both Christianity and Judaism have known a variety of different, at times mutually exclusive, forms of reformation.Therefore it will be crucial for Mr Ali to explain what kind of reformation he thinks will be necessary for the survival of Islam as a religion and a culture in the twenty-first century and maybe even beyond. Given the history of the Christian religion and the religious wars during the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century (the famous ThirtyYears’War), what does he propose for a genuine reformation that would avoid violent confrontations among the newly formed Muslim denominations, each of which will claim, as has generally happened with all religions, to be the legitimate heir to the legacy of the prophet? Mr Ali writes: “Why didn’t we have a renewal at that time?” Tariq Ali was born and spent his childhood in Lahore, now the capital of the western Punjab, a province of Pakistan. He studied at the University of Oxford and has lived and worked in London for most of his life. Politically, he is a devout internationalist and philosophically one could safely call him a non-dogmatic atheist. His novels, historical essays, television scripts, films, play and book reviews overall cover a wide variety of topics, from Marxist history and international working class movements to the condition of women in the Third World and the relationship between the Arab-Islamic world and western civilization. What, then, does he mean by “we” when he asks “why didn’t ‘we’ have a renewal at that time?” After all, the postmodernist and politically correct new class is against any form of identity concept. However, Tariq Ali dares to talk about ‘us’and ‘we’, implying there is a ‘they’. If there is an ‘us’, there must be a ‘they’. In his book on the current world situation, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, published in 2002, he acknowledges the existence of a number of major antagonistic forces, such...