Islam versus the West: A historical overview.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the upcoming Anglo-American attack on Iraq unfurling the last act on a long (and painful) drama, I thought that it might be worthwhile to post the following, which should hopefully provide a wider perspective on the events which are about to unfold:
--------------------------------------------------------
ISLAM AND THE WEST. (From S. P. Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order', pages 209 - 211.)
'Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity. At times, peaceful coexistence has prevailed; more often the relation has been one of intense rivalry and of varying degrees of hot war. Their "historical dynamics," John Esposito comments, "...often found the two communities in competition, and locked at times in deadly combat, for power, land and souls." Across the centuries the fortunes of the two religions have risen and fallen in a sequence of momentous surges, pauses, and countersurges.
The initial Arab-Islamic sweep outward from the early seventh to the mid-eighth century established Muslim rule in North Africa, Iberia, the Middle East, Persia and northern India. For two centuries or so the lines of division between Islam and Christianity stabilized. Then in the late eleventh century, Christians reasserted control of the western Mediterranean, conquered Sicily, and captured Toledo. In 1095 Christendom launched the Crusades and for a century and a half Christian potentates attempted, with decreasing success, to establish Christian rule in the Holy Land and adjoining areas in the Near East, losing Acre, their last foothold there, in 1291. Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks had appeared on the scene. They first weakened Byzantium and then conquered much of the Balkans as well as North Africa, captured Constantinople in 1453, and besieged Vienna in 1529. "For almost a thousand years," Bernard Lewis observes, "from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam." Islam is the only civilization that has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice.
By the fifteenth century, however, the tide had begun to turn. The Christians gradually recovered Iberia, completing the task in Grenada in 1492. Meanwhile European innovations in ocean navigation enabled the Portuguese and then others to circumvent the Muslim heartland and penetrate into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Simultaneously the Russians brought to an end two centuries of Tatar rule. The Ottomans subsequently made one last push forward , besieging Vienna again in 1683. Their failure there marked the beginning of a long retreat, involving the struggle of Orthodox peoples in the Balkans to free themselves from Ottoman rule, the expansion of the Hapsburg Empire, and the dramatic advance of the Russians to the Black Sea and the Caucasus. In the course of a century or so "the scourge of Christendom" was transformed into "the sick man of Europe." At the conclusion of World War I, Britain, France, and Italy administered the coup de grace and established their direct or indirect rule throughout the remaining Ottoman lands except for the territory of the Turkish Republic. By 1920, only four Muslim countries - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan - remained independant of some form of non-Muslim rule.
The retreat of Western colonialism, in turn, began slowly in the 1920s and 1930s and accelerated dramatically in the aftermath of World War II. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought independence to additional Muslim societies. According to one count, some ninety-two acquisitions of Muslim territory by non-Muslim governments occurred between 1757 and 1919. By 1995, sixty-nine of these territories were once again under Muslim rule, and about forty-five independant states had overwhelmingly Muslim populations. The violent nature of these shifting relationships is reflected in the fact that 50 percent of wars involving pairs of states of different religions between 1820 and 1929 were wars between Muslims and Christians.
The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict lie not in transitory phenomena such as twelfth-century Christian passion or twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them. Conflict was, on the one hand, a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar. The conflict also stemmed, however, from their similarities. Both are monotheistic religions, which, unlike polytheistic ones, cannot easily assimilate additional deities, and which see the world in dualistic, us-and-them terms. Both are universalistic, claiming to be the one true faith to which all humans can adhere. Both are missionary religions believing that their adherents have an obligation to convert nonbelievers to that one true faith. From its origins Islam expanded by conquest and when the opportunity existed Christianity did also. The parallel concepts of "jihad" and "crusade" not only resemble each other but distinguish these two faiths from other major world religions. Islam and Christianity, along with Judaism, also have teleological views of history in contrast to the cyclical or static views prevalent in other civilizations.'
---------------------------------------
ISlamic Spy Abu Jahal-007
http://pub6.ezboard.com/fhinduunityhinduismhottopics.showMessage?topicID=13256.topic