In today's ever-changing and often uncertain world, encouraging healthy dialogue between all cultures and religions is vital. In Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, Mohamed Wa Baile carefully explores how Muslims and people of other faiths can achieve a peaceful coexistence instead of being victims of conflict. Wa Baile, a follower and practitioner of Islamic religion, has had the privilege of unconditional access to study Muslim communities in Switzerland. There, for the past ten years, he has examined the interactions between Muslims and the complex, introspective issues that often plague both individuals and families. Through attending hundreds of congregational prayers and interviews with Muslim leaders, Wa Baile shares his thoughtful observations as he seeks new meanings and alternative ways of thinking that will help all Muslims understand and assess the real challenges that lie ahead. It is up to the current generation to seek practical solutions and peaceful resolutions, rather than insist on the narrative of one insular side or the other. Beyond the Clash of Civilizations encourages a new respect for Islam with the hope of changing long-held perceptions of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Beyond the Clash of Civilizations
A New Cultural Synthesis for Muslims in the WestBy Mohamed Wa BaileiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Mohamed Wa Baile
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-3420-8Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................ixIntroduction.........................................................................xiiiPART I: Clash or Domination?.........................................................1- 1 - Who Are the Muslims of Switzerland?............................................3- 2 - In the Name of Civilization: "Islam and the West"..............................11- 3 - Is Islam Antipathetic to Peaceful Coexistence?.................................23PART II Islam in the West............................................................31- 4 - Getting Our History Straight: Islam Is Part of Europe..........................33- 5 - Four Pivotal Events............................................................45PART III Muslims of Western Europe...................................................53- 6 - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom........................................55- 7 - Switzerland....................................................................59- 8 - Caught in the Crossfire........................................................73- 9 - Toward a Helvetius Muslim Identity.............................................79PART IV A Way Forward................................................................87- 10 - Elements of Internal Muslim Dialogue..........................................89- 11 - From Multiple Views of Islam to Universal Islam...............................98- 12 - Nurturing a Swiss Muslim Tradition: `Amal Ahl al-Helvetia.....................112PART V Tribulations of the Swiss.....................................................119- 13 - The Reformist Voices of Muslims...............................................121- 14 - What Is Wrong with Switzerland?...............................................128- 15 - Switzerland's Dilemma.........................................................136Conclusion One Country, Different Peoples............................................143Bibliography.........................................................................161
Chapter One
Who Are the Muslims of Switzerland?
The first large wave of Muslim migration into Switzerland, Germany, and other West European countries began in the early years of the post-World War II period with predominantly Yugoslav and Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers). This is no longer the case. Today Muslims from around the world take up residence in Switzerland and other Western European countries for a variety of reasons.
Numbering around 400,000, Muslims make up a significant, if diverse, part of modern Switzerland. Some mosques attract worshippers of close to a hundred different nationalities. A Bedouin Yemenite will pray next to a Yoruba Nigerian; the next line finds a Swahili-speaker from Kenya standing shoulder to shoulder with a Turkish Kurd, Malay, Saudi, Chechnyan, Swiss, or an American. And on top of their national origin, significant ethno-cultural differences separate them, not to mention differing affiliations based on the madhhab (religious tradition).
Muslims have generally come to accept an unfamiliar reality, to which they have had to adjust, where their fellow Muslims act and even pray differently from them. As accustomed as they have grown to differences inside the mosque, however, they have met with hostility from the outside because collectively they are distinct from it. This hostility has crystallized into a surge of public opinion favoring the ban on minaret construction (approved by 57.5 percent of Swiss voters in a November 2009 referendum), and may lead to a ban on headscarves in schools and face veils inside public institutions.
This atmosphere has profited the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, or Swiss People's Party). In a spirit of corps d'élite, many Swiss politicians have taken it upon themselves to denounce the "Islamization" of Switzerland, accusing Muslims of harboring a dangerous desire to apply and enforce the Shari'ah.
Does crisis of intolerance prove the "clash theory"?
Huntington's thesis of the "clash of civilizations" identifies cultural and religious differences as the primary source of conflict after the fall of Soviet Communism. This view became a compelling narrative after a group of shadowy al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The attack, which has been widely viewed as a vindication of the "clash" theory, no doubt triggered an instance of macro-level clash, which then ramified into a series of micro-, intrastate events in Europe such as the November 2010 ban on the construction of minarets. The advocates of Huntington's thesis inferred from this that Islam must be incompatible with Western life.
Although religion, as a belief system, is only one aspect of civilization, Huntington takes it as the main active component of collective identity. Following his logic, the social problems besetting immigrant communities—criminality, domestic violence, and unemployment—begin to look like problems rooted in religion. They have, in effect, become "Islamized," thereby conflating terrorist acts (themselves committed for a variety of reasons) with the problems of honor killings and
What does it matter which part of the world any of these abominations happen to originate from? Islam is the common thread, and it is Islam that has to be dealt with through strict legal measures and law enforcement. After all, this is a question of security.
My thesis: From victims to victors
Huntington's thesis propounds a lopsided view of the world and of Islam that will not stand the test of time. Muslims are now a permanent part of Swiss society, and no amount of collective self-exculpation for the ills created by long decades of misguided domestic policies will change that. But rather than succumb to the core assumptions of this view, Muslims have to change their outlook from that of victims of conflict to the victors of peace.
The best way to achieve this, however, is by practicing their religion properly attuned to its time and social context. Practicing Islam in a Swiss-European context and behaving like Swiss-European Muslims are not pipe dreams. There is precedent. Islam has been "Western" nearly as long as Christianity has been "Eastern."
Many reform-minded Muslims have tried to work out an Islamic framework for the Western context in which they live. Based on my studies of their works, I demonstrate to Switzerland's Muslims how to be Helvetia Muslims. Not unlike Christians and followers of most other religions, Muslims exhibit a broad diversity of practices and interpretations of their faith. Islam has a tremendous capacity for adaptation to new settings—it has acquired an Asian face as readily as it did an African or Arab one. Why not a Western face?
In Western Europe and North America, Muslims are equally capable as Asians and Africans of shaping their practices and interpretations for their particular conditions. Indeed it is already happening. Young people have wasted no time in redefining their identity. Nothing in Islam prevents them from doing this. Combining Islamic and ethnic values with elements from the host culture is both positive and permitted by the highest traditions of Islamic jurisprudence. Given this openness to change, Switzerland's Muslims should have no trouble identifying with the core values enshrined in the Swiss Federal Constitution.
I admit that their internal debate on alternative directions has taken place largely within academia, whereas a practical solution has to engage all of Europe's Muslims. Everyone, not just the intellectual leaders of reform, has to explore the possibilities of peaceful coexistence in their new homelands. But the most enduring "peace" comes from self-understanding, which requires more creative ways to explore. The question is how the experiences of Muslims from every walk of life can contribute to and enrich the community as a whole.
A crucial step in this direction is, on the one hand, for Swiss society to tear down the walls preventing greater and more wide-ranging participation in Swiss society. On the other, Muslims collectively have to dissociate themselves from the psychology of victimhood. The way forward is to practice Islam within the Swiss context; playing the victims will not get them there.
This is hardly a radical idea. Indian Muslims are Asian, but not Arab. African Muslims live in an African, not Asian, environment. They do not need to assimilate into Arab culture, and they remain Muslims in the fullest sense of the word. Muslims from different regions in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe display patterns where aspects of their cultures are integrated with Islam. Muslims of Western Europe have to reach what is, in my mind, the point of collective maturity where they can say with equal conviction that they are Muslim and Swiss or French, British or German, and so on. Perhaps their diverse origins, coming as they do from a host of other countries and regions, would need a long time frame to adopt Islam within their contemporary Western world.
My view is that the harder they persevere on the path of reform, the sooner they will be true masters of their destiny, ultimately to be counted among the victors of social peace, regardless of the present obstacles.
Fear of reform
Many ordinary Muslims living in the West have not yet fully internalized the idea of internal reform. To them the intellectual pioneers of Islamic reform are too freewheeling with matters of religion. However, this attitude may have less to do with the idea of reform than with a preference for religious teachers, people with recognized authority, to lay down religious legal opinions and rulings for all to abide by. The assumption is that too much intellectualism spoils the faith.
Although it is not very Islamic to think uncritically, an overreliance on authority has led to widespread inertia. Ordinary folks already have a tough time ordering their daily lives in alien environments, so it is hardly surprising that they should be drawn first to ready-made, accessible formulas for conduct that need no further debate. Muslim intellectuals have failed them because they "do not meet the demands of the religious market." Their ideas are overwrought and too sophisticated to strike a chord in the community at large.
The result is that Muslims generally know little about alternative currents of thought, and because they lack knowledge, they seek solutions based on the culture and customs they know best. Unfortunately, the solutions that may have worked in the "old country" will not necessarily take them far in their new life in Europe. To remedy this, reformists—in the most general, nonpolitical sense—should begin by not coming off as the proponents of stances that seem abhorrent to general Muslim sentiment, let alone a fifteen- centuries-old, world-changing Islamic tradition.
The stuff of adaptation
I think this state of affairs has deprived the community of a rich and authentic voice. The choice we are left with is either to pick up where the intellectuals have failed or to fall back on blind imitation.
I have identified the most authentic Islamic sources that I believe will be crucial to genuine reform in the future but that religious scholars who should know better too easily dismiss. My arguments in this book hinge on the Islamic legal concept of `urf (custom). Integrating `urf has enabled Muslims throughout history to adapt in orderly fashion to every cultural, legal, and even normative environment they have encountered. Islam flowered as the greatest, most brilliant civilization the world had ever seen, in part because of its "religious pragmatism," if I could call it that.
Strangely enough, many reformists have shied away from an approach based on custom, in the words of Ahmad Atif Ahmad, "out of fear that an argument from common customs would be dismissed out of hand, or out of fear that social custom will not support their reform projects." Ahmad counters that "Muslim societies can adapt themselves to Western cultural and legal norms, but these norms will, in due time, become Muslim norms and will likely take forms that differ from their Western counterparts." Although he is of the view that Muslims will remain distinctive, how distinctive is a good question. Muslims will continue to differ from each other in various respects—as do Westerners, who are by no means monolithic in political opinion, religion, culture, and so forth. It is simply part of the natural evolution of social groups. Locally shared customs tend to bind people more than their differences.
A few observations
In light of the above, here are six observations to guide the reader through the arguments I present in this book:
1. Conflict may develop because of ideological, social, economical, racial, cultural, or even religious differences. Therefore, religion and culture are only two elements that can create crisis.
2. Conflict occurs not only between civilizations, but also within each civilization. True, Muslims prevail over a huge part of the world, with a population to match, but they also reside in Europe and have been there for numerous centuries. They experience conflicts there themselves as well as with their host Western mores.
3. Reconciling Islamic belief with Western values is the biggest challenge facing Muslims in Europe. They have no choice but to make this process integral to their maturation into European Muslims, not just Muslims living in Europe.
4. Unless Muslims in the West redefine their identity within their immediate context, their internal fissures will widen and more conflict will erupt among themselves as well as with non-Muslim neighbors.
5. Interreligious or civilizational dialogue fosters peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non- Muslims. In the West it will be fruitful only if it begins with a separate dialogue aimed at reconciling Muslims' internal differences, and if Muslims can distinguish the core of faith from its external expression. Culture and contextualization in time and place change; the essence of the faith need not.
6. An Islamic framework that could be applied within a Western context has to rest on the compatibility of two aspects of identity: the Muslim and the local ones. There is nothing inevitable about the clash between being a good Muslim and a good Swiss citizen. This idea—largely academic for now—has not quite reached Switzerland's Muslim community at large.
Chapter Two
In the Name of Civilization:
"Islam and the West"
"I slam and the West"—IT used to sound perfectly innocuous. Yet the historical character of this critical axis in international and intercultural relations has been distorted by sheer intellectual dishonesty and mythmaking. Following the Red Menace, the Islamic Threat is the new bogeyman, a Cyclops ready to chomp on the West limb by limb. Clearly, Islam has replaced Communism in the minds of many in the Western intelligentsia and political classes.
Deliberately or not, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington has put himself at the center of a new, more horrific vision of endless conflict, that of the "clash of civilizations." His thesis, that cultural and religious differences are the primary source of conflict after the fall of Communism, has provoked a worldwide debate. No less a figure than reform-minded Iranian president Muhammad Khatami responded to it, declaring the following at the UN Roundtable on Dialogue Among Civilizations:
In order to provide natural unity and harmony in form and content for global culture and to prevent anarchy and chaos, all concerned parties should engage in a dialogue in which they can exchange knowledge, experience and understanding in diverse areas of culture and civilization.
This is a view that needs to be cultivated around the world. But as laudable as it is, I would still like to move away from the focus on Islam as a global civilization, which of course it is, and limit our scope to Islam as a religious presence in the West (Europe, North America, Australia, and so on).
This, first and foremost, is the nature of its presence in Western Europe, beyond which lies the separate issue of Islam as a global civilization. Huntington has confused these two distinct perspectives of Islam.
The roots of the confusion
One must ask: Why is a religion pictured to be in conflict because of its geographical presence?
As Andrea Lueg points out, "it is not Islam and Christianity that are contrasted or the West and the East, but Islam and the West, a religion and a geographical area." The comparison is simply incongruous. Bernard Lewis too has noted the asymmetry of using a geographical label for one group but a religious one for the other, adding, "the term Islam is the counterpart not only of 'Christianity' but also of 'Christendom'-not only of a religion in the narrow Western sense, but of a whole civilization which grew up under the aegis of that religion."
The language and reasoning behind the "miscomparison" have their roots in the Cold War period, which created what Hippler and Lueg call the "necessary enemy."
We no longer have the Soviet Union or Communism to serve as enemies justifying expensive and extensive military apparatus. It was in the mid-1980s at the very latest that the search began for new enemies to justify arms budgets and offensive military policies, at first as part of the Communist threat and then in its place.
Huntington tries to make sense of predictions for the post–Cold War period by identifying Islam as the new enemy of the West that replaces the old, an identification that infected the thinking of other intellectuals, such as Francis Fukuyama. Others, like Fred Halliday, have sought to refute the notion that there should be such a thing as a "necessary enemy." "Western society as a whole and Western capitalism in particular," he said, "has never `needed' an enemy in some systemic sense."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond the Clash of Civilizationsby Mohamed Wa Baile Copyright © 2011 by Mohamed Wa Baile. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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