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Is the West really the
best?
(Filed: 30/09/2001)
Silvio Berlusconi's comments about Western
superiority attracted a barrage of criticism, but there can be no
real comparison between representive democracies and Muslim
theocracies, says Alasdair Palmer.
SILVIO BERLUSCONI'S comments about Western
superiority attracted a barrage of criticism, but there can be no
real comparison between representive democracies and Muslim
theocracies, says Alasdair Palmer.
Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, has
brought down a torrent of international condemnation on his head for
his now infamous comments that "we [in the West] must be aware
of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed
well-being, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic
countries - respect for religious and political rights". He added
that he felt that "Islamic civilisation is stuck where it was 1,400
years ago".
Mr Berlusconi's remarks were insensitive,
particularly at a time when the West is trying to build a coalition
with Islamic countries to fight terrorism by Islamic
fundamentalists. He was predictably forced
to apologise, although he apologised only for upsetting Muslims.
He did not retract his opinion.
Still, while recognising that it was an inappropriate
time for Berlusconi to say such things, many people in Britain,
Europe and America will secretly agree with him.
It is not just that the European cultural tradition
has a richness and variety - from painters such as Michelangelo and
Picasso, to the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner -
that Islamic cultures cannot match.
It is also that extreme fundamentalist Islamic
regimes, such as that of Afghanistan, are an affront to
civilisation. Women are treated as little better than beasts of
burden; they are denied education, property, and even medical
treatment.
They are stoned to death if they are discovered
committing adultery. Their inferiority is enshrined in law, and
their testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man.
It is a capital offence to convert to Christianity or
Judaism. Men and women have no political rights, there is no
possibility of free speech and the country has been impoverished,
indeed economically destroyed by the mullahs' insistence on forcing
obedience to Islamic law in every minute detail.
The horrible persecution of the people of Afghanistan
by their Taliban rulers has become the public face of Islam in the
West. That persecution is not, of course, the essence of Islam
itself, or indeed any necessary part of it - any more than was the
regime of Ayotallah Khomeini in Iran. (Khomeini, in between stoning
adulterers and burying other offenders alive, banned chess and
musical instruments as "an offence against God".)
Nevertheless, it is a notable fact that even Islamic
regimes that are avowedly not fundamentalist remain places that do
not enshrine the values that, in the Western democracies, we regard
as essential to an acceptable society.
It is difficult to think of an Islamic state governed
by what we in the West would recognise as the rule of law, for
instance, or based around the separation of powers of the
legislative and executive functions of government, or that separates
church from state, that tolerates dissent, accepts as fundamental
the notion of a "loyal opposition" and that recognises that every
individual has the right to live as he or she chooses, providing he
or she does not harm anyone else in doing so.
Even the "nicer" Islamic states are, in the main,
one-party regimes. They are not liberal democracies, and they are
not places in which those brought up on Western values would like to
live. Islamic countries are neither as economically prosperous nor
as politically advanced as Britain, America, or most of the
countries of mainland Europe.
All citizens are not equal before the law: women are
of inferior status to men. Punishments are often barbarously
violent. There is very little individual liberty, and there is often
no freedom of religion at all.
In that limited sense, it is difficult to deny that
Berlusconi is right: Western societies are politically better than
Islamic ones. That of course does not mean that citizens of Western
countries are superior to Islamic people, or that they are somehow
morally better: a quick glance at the history of this century, from
Auschwitz to Srebrenica (where 8,000 unarmed Muslims were massacred
by Christians), will show that Christians yield to no one when it
comes to a willingness to wade knee-deep in the blood and bones of
their enemies.
But the point remains: the secular societies of the
West are more tolerant, more prosperous and more dynamic, and place
more emphasis on respecting and preserving individual liberty, than
any of their Islamic counterparts.
That fact is not one which has escaped Muslim
leaders. In the period after the First World War, which saw the
final dissolution of the Islamic Ottoman empire - it had backed the
German side - many Islamic thinkers started to wonder why Europe
seemed to have forged ahead so decisively.
The gap between the two civilisations in terms of
technology was indisputable, but the differences in law and
politics, and the attitude of governments to the rights of their
populations, was hardly less noticeable.
In what had been the heartland of the Ottoman empire
- Turkey - there was a secular revolution led by Kemal Ataturk, who
tried to transform the country on Western lines. Many other Islamic
countries were tempted to follow suit, including Iraq, Iran and
Egypt.
Europe's technological superiority was extremely
difficult for Muslims to accept. After all, Islam led the West
technologically and in terms of political power for hundreds of
years after its foundation in the seventh century by Mohammed. In
the eighth century, it seemed a serious possibility that Islam might
conquer all of Europe.
As the historian Edward Gibbon noted in the 18th
century, by 732, Islam had conquered from Baghdad to the north of
Spain, and was raiding as far north as the Loire. "The Arabian fleet
might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the
Thames," he added. "Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would
now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might
demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the
revelation of Mohammed."
That did not happen. Gibbon thought it was entirely
due to the "genius and fortune of one man", Charles Martel, to whom
Europe's Christian clergy "are indebted for their present
existence".
Today's historians do not agree with Gibbon about the
importance of Charles Martel, but whatever the explanation for
Islam's defeat by Martel's army at the battle of Tours, the fact is
that, for at least the next 400 years, Latin Christendom was
indebted to the Islamic Caliphates for most of the intellectual
developments that took place in Christian countries: Islamic
philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna introduced their
Christian counterparts to the learning of the ancient world, Islamic
doctors provided medical insights to Christian doctors, and Islamic
mathematicians developed algebra and helped European mathematicians
recognise and develop the mathematically critical notion of
zero.
Islamic armies destroyed the Crusader Kingdom of
Jerusalem. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottomans drove the
Venetians out of the eastern Mediterranean, conquered Byzantium,
Greece and the Balkans, invaded Hungary and besieged Vienna.
The Ottoman system of "enlightened despotism" seemed
to have achieved power, peace and stability in regions where
Europeans had found it impossible to do so, and was eagerly, and
enviously, studied by Western political and social thinkers.
Then the balance suddenly seemed to change. Islam
appeared to stagnate, while Europe moved into economic and political
"take-off", developing technologically and politically. Islam seemed
to look backwards, to the golden age of the Prophet and the Koran,
rather than forwards. Many Islamic clerics, then as now, seemed to
think that the problem with Islam was that it was not sufficiently
"stuck where it was 1,400 years ago".
They abhorred the drift towards secularisation and
irreligion that they saw, perhaps rightly, as the fundamental
characteristic of European and American society. Western democracies
are indeed thoroughly secular. Islamic societies are not.
The process of secularisation that took place in
Europe in the three centuries after the Continent had been soaked in
blood by a series of religious wars produced states based around the
idea that, whatever God thinks about any given policy, it cannot be
made the basis of political decisions on whether or not to implement
it.
By contrast, Islamic societies are, in aspiration at
least, theocracies. They hope to follow God's word, which is thought
to be decisive on all political questions. A theocracy - which is
what Islamic clergy would like every Islamic society to be - cannot
be a liberal democracy, because the views of "the people" cannot be
taken to be more important than the voice of God.
The conflict between a secular and a theocratic view
of politics and the state lies at the heart of the conflict - if
such there is - between Western societies and those of Islam. It is
not an issue on which there is much room for compromise.
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