About anti-Western and anti-Islam feelings and discourses
timucin (no login) Posted Dec 31, 2001 8:34 AM
Ceyhun,
Unfortunately, most of the time I write without realizing that I am keeping out quite a lot by concentrating only on one aspect of the problem, and it looks like I did this also in this post.
My purpose was not to say that this is a Muslim fault only, and I agree with everything you wrote in your post. However, I also think that this is not a religious thing only. The unequal distribution of wealth between countries that are inhabited mostly by Christian believers and the ones by Muslim inhabitants has a lot to do with the present day hatred. Had the case been that most of the countries around the world were more or less equally sharing the wealth that was being produced there would probably not have been much hatred between these two religious groups.
I understand we can take the origins of this animosity all the way to the time of the Crusaders. I am not so sure if the hatred that might have existed between these two groups at that time was the same kind of hatred that emerged later on. I think the first one was the kind that operated totally in religious terms, that people hated each other just because they considered each other infidels. The second one was, however, constructed very much by Europe’s anxiety that “coincided with the cultural and intellectual dislocation produced by the encounter with the racial and religious Other” (Matar, 1999:16) as it started marching into the modern period. In my opinion, as Europe started entering the modern period, certain modes of behavior and thinking started becoming simply improper. These improper attitudes and ideas were simply made the qualities of the already existing religiously shaped Other, of Muslims and their main representative, the Turks.
With the decline of the Ottomans, and therefore Muslims, these anti-Muslim and anti-Turk discourses reached their highest point. Then comes the hegemony and superiority of Europe over the Muslim world. And, now, we have the intensification of the economic inequality between the Christian and Muslim worlds. The anti-western feelings of the majority of the Muslims are probably caused by economic difficulties and political frustrations, which are being channeled into religiously articulated popular discourses. As there starts appearing more Muslims in the Christian West and as these people start taking jobs and opportunities from the natives there appears more problems; the old Christian anti-Muslim discourse start becoming the voice of these newly deprived and frustrated groups. We need not think this only in economic terms, but the same thing operates also in social terms, as there starts appearing in these countries socially more successful Muslim individuals, who cause further frustrations and deprivations among the natives.
The whole thing is rather a mess. What can be done is actually everyone’s guess. As religiously and culturally mixed habitats start appearing, I expect that the problem will start disappearing at least in the western countries. Since there are no significant Christian groups in the most of the Muslim countries the same thing will not work on the other side. There will be need to devise different kinds of solutions for the Muslim countries, which are not only more under the control of the radical anti-Western groups and discourses, but are also more deprived of the positive fruits of the Western economic and intellectual advancement.