Terror and Toleration, East and West, Despotic and Free: Dichotomous Narratives and Representations of Islam

Despite the critiques of orientalism by Edward Said and others the popularity of simplistic variants of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations meta-narrative in both popular and scholarly narratives demonstrate that stereotypical orientalist assumptions as to the nature of the East or the Islamic world continue to be unproblematically and uncritically asserted. Such narratives imagine a monolithic Islamic world which is qualitatively different in cultural terms and in the values it espouses to a secular or Christian West. Rather than valuing freedom, democracy, rationality and tolerance, the Islamic world is characterised as despotic, oppressive, reactionary, militantly prosletyising and expansionist. Particularly since 11 September 2001 and the subsequent Anglo-American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, fear-mongering and negative caricatures of a so-called militant Islam or Islamism have occurred with regularity in the strident, often inflammatory writings of some journalists and media commentators.¹ Such authors argue that their accusations are only directed against jihadists, fundamentalists, or proponents of radical Islam, and not moderate, or reasonable Muslims, although who the arbitrators of reasonableness or moderation are is not clearly articulated. Moreover, in practice such a distinction is not always clear and their arguments suggest that Islam as a religion, and by implication, Islamic cultures in general, have an inherent tendency to be less democratically-inclined, tolerant and civilised; more oppressive, and reactionary; and motivated to a far greater degree to spread their religion throughout the world, by force if necessary. A theme common to all such commentators is their conviction that ‘Islamism’, despite the amorphous nature and indeterminacy of the term, constitutes a dire threat not only to the core tenets of ‘our’ culture, but also possibly to our very existence.

In more recent months such views have also been articulated by less polemical media personalities including novelists and prominent members of the Christian clergy. Ian McEwan commented in June to an Italian journalist: ‘I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well’.² The thesis that the Christian West and the Islamic East are, and have always been, fundamentally different cultures has been recently reiterated employing old orientalist rhetorical stereotypes by the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali.³ He asserts that British values, which ultimately derive from the Judao-Christian tradition, consist of dignity, equality, freedom in the context of the rule of law (particularly freedom of belief and expression), and democracy. The omission of Islam from the phrase the Judao-Christian tradition is interesting. Nazir-Ali thereby situates the development of such values explicitly outside of an Islamic tradition. The implication being that Islam and Islamic cultures do not value such principles as highly as ‘we’ do. Instead, according to Nazir-Ali, radical Islam ‘emphasise[s] the solidarity of the umma against the freedom of the individual’, and instead of valuing the Christian virtues of humility, service and sacrifice, it prefers honour, public piety and the importance of ‘saving face’ (Nazir-Ali 2008). He further presents these cultural differences within a wider confrontational framework; that of a clash of civilisations. Having defeated Marxism we, by implication the Christian West, now face another ideological battle: one with radical Islamism. This conflict is not however, a new one: by claiming that the contemporary Islamic radicalism that we must now confront has its roots in the thought of the thirteenth-century reformer Ibn Taimiyya, Nazir-Ali constructs a continuous narrative of the past in which East and West, Muslim and Christian have been in conflict for centuries.

Such a selective use, and interpretation of, past events to construct an overarching meta-narrative of conflict between two competing ideologies or cultures is also evident in ostensibly more scholarly works. A recent article in History Today...