1. On what basis is the concept of 'the West' constructed and on what historical, cultural, and theological foundations are Western perceptions of Islam constructed? In what ways does this perception continue today?
The Middle East and the Muslim world as a whole is facing various political, social, and economic stalemates including war interventions (and the “Muslim world” is a very problematic concept that was created as a matter of fact in the 18th century). These are also the result of foreign powers’ involvement into the region for the last couple of centuries. The the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often being designated as a “sectarian” region. Europe, on the other hand, is facing new influxes of migrants coming from MENA, an aging population, and political and academic circles are at times linking these processes with racism and Islamophobia between the two worlds that have been historically interpreted to be on opposite sides, namely the Islamic and the Western. In the very notion of these two designations, we are using two opposite or unequal terms, one allegedly belonging to a historical-geographic, other to religious-exotic realm – the Muslim world and Europe; Islam and the Euro-America.
According to the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, comes out of this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses”, Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims. And even this would be a simplification, because in the middle of the 8th century much of Europe was not yet fully Christian.
As for the concept of the West; it is very difficult to discern its spiritual/metaphysical from its geographical meaning, since it came to be used after the Christian-theological paradigm was displaced by the more secular understanding of modernity and its scientific progress. The natural contrast was not between Islam and the West, but between Christendom and the abode of Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief. The very idea of the “west,” doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader relevance only in the 20th century.
What we by the common denominator call the Muslim world – which again is deeply problematic bcs it stems from the colonial period, sees Muslim-majority countries as a cultural-political unit – managed to continuously preserve social processes within a cultural (not necessarily theological) Islamic framework. It is not surprising therefore that numerous Western scholars have theorized Islam in their discourses as a religion and religion only, according to the prevalent Christian or even more specifically Protestant understanding of the term.
2. Although the foundations of the natural sciences were laid by Islamic scholars, why has a similar scientific and intellectual modernization not occurred in the Islamic world? What are the historical, theological, socio-political, or epistemological reasons for this?
It is safe to state that it is impossible to write a general history of humanity without the contributions of Islamic culture and philosophy and the impact they have had on the knowledge production in early modern Europe.
Examples of communal prayers between Christians and Muslims in 7th century Damascus, translation processes of 9th century Baghdad between various denominations that managed to preserve the great works of Ancient philosophers, and the learning centers in Andalusia, whereby Jewish students worked under and alongside with their Arab-Muslim teachers, as well as the late Ottoman system that managed religious and ethnic communities under a policy of cultural diversity, are worth looking into.
Between 9-12 centuries, more works were written in the Arabic language in the field of religion, philosophy, science, medicine, and arts, than in any other language at the time. The Arabic language was not only used by Arabs, but also in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkey, and beyond, including the South Europe, Malta, Sicily and the South of France. According to the historian Muhammad Sharif, the most notable contribution of the Islamic civilization was that of science and arts which were brought to the doorsteps of the modern West. Briffault in “The making of Humanity” states that
The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in sterling discoveries of revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The ancient world was, as we saw, pre-scientific. The astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. The Greeks systematized, generalized, and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient classical world. What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of enquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the methods of experiment, observation, and measurement, of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.
The rediscovery of Greek philosophy and arts in pre-modern Europe occurred at the translation centers where texts by Greek philosophers were translated first into Arabic and then centuries later into Latin. As a matter of fact, the majority employed in the so-called “House of wisdom” (bayt al-hikma), managed by the Caliph al-Ma’mum in Baghdad, were Arab Christians who translated Greek and Aramaic treaties on philosophy and medicine into Arabic. In this sense, the philosophy of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Aviccena), Ibn Hazm, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Suhravardi, al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Attar, Rumi, and others, is important also for the understanding of modern Western philosophy, since Arabic-Islamic philosophy was one of the main channels through which the whole opus of Aristotle arrived in Europe.
The reasons for scientific decline are several, however, most notably political and economic, if we take into account the Mongol invasion and the fall of Baghdad in 1258 as one of the most important center of Islamic learning, and the subsequent shift of economic routes. And as we very well know nowadays, without stable and robust economy, there is no investing in arts and sciences. But this is only one part. Second is also the rise of religious orthodoxy related to the increased political power of religious leaders (ulama) who promoted a more conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam. This shift discouraged critical thinking and engagement with secular knowledge, philosophy, and logic. In part, ideas became more regulated by authorities, leading to a climate where challenging prevailing ideas or conducting independent research was difficult, and the dismantling of scientific institutions. Important centers of learning and observation were actively shut down, most notably the great observatories in Samarkand (1490) and Istanbul (1580). Such policies are connected to a shift in educational focus, if we think of the educational reforms by influential figures like Nizam-ul-Mulk, which directed university (madrasa) curricula toward religious studies, thereby possibly sidelining the teaching of science and philosophy. Finally, the already mentioned political and economic instability, in that the external pressures, such as the Mongol invasions and the Crusades, led to the destruction of cities like Baghdad and the fragmentation of the Islamic world into smaller political entities. This instability and the subsequent colonial era disrupted economic prosperity and security, which are vital for scientific progress.
3. Within what boundaries do Western democracies and secular systems position or define Islam’s public visibility and its religious freedom? For example, is there an aim to construct a form of localized versions of Islam, such as a “French Islam”? How do Muslim individuals raised under secular cultural influences navigate the balance between privacy, the public sphere, and aspirations for an “Islamic state”?
Indeed, each country has its own specificities when it comes to political structure and cultural norms construction, however, we often label Europe as being predominantly secular. Nevertheless, it is impossible to talk of one single expression of secularism in all European countries, precisely because of their different cultural and political histories.
Further, it is important to note that when we talk about Muslims in Europe, we should be cautious how we define Europe first. Often, we talk about Muslims and (Western) Europe, which shifts the discourse, portraying Muslims as labor migrants and refugees. If we consider Eastern Europe, then we discuss also indigenous Muslim communities who have lived in Europe for centuries (Tatars in Russia and Poland, Muslims in Albania, Bosnia & Hercegovina, and Muslims communities in the Caucasus, etc.).
Second, Muslims in Europe are very active in how they “produce” Islam, from minority fiqh, to theology of Islam in the context of religious plurality, led by religious intellectuals, such as Tariq Ramadan (at least until 2017), Tareq Oubrou, Halima Kraussen, Tim Winter/Abdalhakim Murad, in addition to other scholars who were active in the European context, such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Muhammad Arkoun, Bassam Tibi, etc.
Third, if we think cities such as London, Paris, Berlin as intellectual capitals of the Arab or Muslim communities in Europe in terms of literary production and the number of books written in Arabic or European languages that have been increasing since 9/11, the image of what is European Islam or who is a European Muslims changes. Moreover, considering the development of modern Islamic religious educational institutions, trainings for imams, interreligious dialogue platforms, television programs and websites across Europe as Muslim transnational public space, as well as the political impact Muslim residents and citizens in Western democracies have had on their countries of origin, means that Muslims are an active part in European politics and not only passive subjects who – according to right wing politics – rely on social support. All of these activities and contributions signal a change in the traditional center–periphery dynamic of what constitutes the classical center of the “Islamic world.”
4. To what extent does the discourse that Western societies have largely detached from religious beliefs and practices and become secular reflect reality? In this context, has secularization eliminated religious understanding? How might the religious revivals and New Religious Movements that have emerged in the West be explained within the context of secularization? And what role does Islam play within these revivals?
Given that both worlds – “European” and “Islamic” – have been interconnected, it is almost impossible to speak of or conceive a single layer, one-dimensional European identity. The fact that Aristotle and Plato cannot be fully understood without knowing also the classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy of Ibn Sina or the great commentaries of Ibn Rushd, and that the merging of Neoplatonism and the idea of the Oneness of God (tawḥīd) is manifested in scholasticism, confirms the point that Aristotle and Plato, due to the immense influence they had on Muslim philosophers, are from a philosophical point of view, also Islamic thinkers. And the other way around – the scientific paradigm of Muslim scholars, who introduced the scientific method and Islamic scholasticism in the Middle Ages contributed to the emergence of humanism and the renaissance. Europe is therefore very much entangled into the scientific-philosophical structures of Islamic thought.
Europe as a civilization was formed before the industrialization, which was, in the words of Hisham Jait, neither a quantitative category nor a creation of a particular worldview. The universality of Europe is displayed in the idea that a human life is a value in itself, which comes with certain rights and liberties. Reason as a universal category, which liberated the human being from the shackles of ideology is nonetheless the same reason which took stock in the antonymies of the cartesian principle and Enlightenment. This has had repercussions also for the colonized world, especially the Middle East and North Africa. Modernity and the nation-states are hence closely tied to expansionist colonial policies that in part grew out of the early modern Europe. In other words, Europe solidified its place in the world through its problematic relationship with the “external other,” namely Islam and the Muslim world.
Also the very discovery of the new world by Columbus, who stopped in Granada, can be, in an alternative light, also seen as the culmination of a tremendous cultural and civilizational setback – centuries after the end of the crusades, the Reconquista of Spain resulted in the expulsion of the Muslim and Jewish population from Andalusia and the burning of numerous Islamic books in 1492, the year which is often marked in historical textbooks and academic circles as the beginning of the New world. In other words, religion – or rather dīn – is not something that must be fought again but rather conceptualized as part of our secular imaginaries, in how religion actually feeds into our daily lives, whether in terms of practice, culture, thought, or spirituality.
5. What challenges do Muslims living in the West, particularly second and third generations, face in preserving and representing their identities? How is Muslim identity constructed in Western societies, and how do diaspora and migration experiences transform this identity?
Some of the challenges are certainly the perceived (and at times also factual) issues of integration when it comes to negotiating Muslims’ religiosity with secular social and political structures; socioeconomic exclusion from labor market of a certain segments of the population; and pervasive Islamophobia as anti-Muslim hatred, which has been normalized.
The traditional division of the majority Muslim contexts as the Land of believers/peace vs. the Land of non-believers/war does not hold anymore (some scholars thought of a third category as the Land of testimony or contract). Yet, thinking of Muslim populations as minority, there are three main tendencies: Traditional Muslims, who identify with the old form of Islamic knowledge – the one they come from or inherited. They constitute the most visible Muslim population, and they receive disproportionate media attention. This visibility has sometimes caused incomprehension among the European public, since they strengthen their ties and link to traditional Islamic knowledge by new forms of transnational communication, including through electronic media. Nevertheless, they are not homogenous as they may appear to be, in that they belong to different traditional legal schools. Second are secularized Muslims – a substantial part of the Muslim-background population is simply being (or striving to be) progressively integrated. While they still identify as Muslim, they are not involved in the active search for, and production and transmission of, religious knowledge. Finally, the third category is the New Western Muslims who actively search for new knowledge and interpretative tools, as well as actively promote and produce it, in order to position themselves in the respective national public spheres, also by using the language of the country in they live. This category includes converts and also violent radicals.
6. While secular scientific discourse, with its claim to neutrality, presents itself as universally applicable, why does the Islamic world not question this paradigm?” Does the preference for “objective” expressions instead of faith-centered discourse in theology and the social sciences indicate an epistemological lack of confidence? Is it possible to develop a new Islamic scientific language?
To focus on the final aspect of your question, what Muslims define as properly Islamic is not something that holds general consensus across the Muslim population of Europe. This is due to the structural diversity of classical Islamic thought and Muslim population, which does not believe in any direct intermediaries between God and human beings. If we think of Islam is a living tradition, it includes an orthodoxy and an orthopraxy, emphasizing proper conduct. The idea of living tradition implies differences in views, opinions, and behaviors, since a single, unique, unified, homogeneous, and universally accepted form of Islamic knowledge simply does not exist. Changes in practices do not necessarily, and in any case not immediately, produce changes in its reference to, interpretation of, and deduction from orthodoxy. So, Islamic knowledge might be whatever Muslims (and sometimes even non-Muslims, in conversation with Muslims) consider to be the “correct” Islamic belief and practice in a wide sense. Based on such premise – while rooted in religious sources – new forms of Islamic scientific language might emerge.
7. Could the humanitarian and moral crises of the techno-secular age lead the West to reassess its own values? For example, to what extent might the ‘Aqsa Flood’ represent a turning point in the West’s perception of the Islamic world, as well as in its understanding of moral responsibility? How has the Islamic representation in Gaza influenced Western perceptions of Islam? Is Islamophobia losing ground or gaining strength in new ideological forms?
This is a very complex and multi-layered question. I believe that the “West” – primarily, Europe and the US – has lost its moral ground after the war in Gaza and once again showed its duplicitous character in the face of international law and global politics. In addition, various Muslim and Arab countries have let Gaza and Gazans down as well. And this is not the first time if we think of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the war in Afghanistan, the atrocities happening against Rohingya people, and so forth. Arab-Islamic world is as much at fault as is the “West” when it comes to maintaining standards of justice and wellbeing, since they are very much part of the global neo-liberal world in which we live.
On the other hand, the prevalent depictions of Islam continue to be also stereotypical, often treating Islam – based on historical perceptions – as moral barbarism, religious fundamentalism, or economically-retrograded third world. So, the way how Islam and Muslims are presented has major consequences for the Muslim population in Europe. Reasons why this is the case are historical stemming from a complex perception of Islam as a religion that is different in belief from Christianity. Later reasons could include the history of the crusades, partial or ideological study of the Islamic faith by Western orientalists, and the economic devastation of the Arab world by the colonial superpowers.
