WHEN THE WEST WANTED ISLAM TO CURB CHRISTIAN EXTREMISM
The Washington Post
Oct 16 2014
By Ishaan Tharoor
The tiresome debate over whether Islam is somehow more violent
than other religions unfortunately won’t go away. Recent spats
between outspoken commentator Reza Aslan, TV host Bill Maher and
neuroscientist Sam Harris — who said on Maher’s show that Islam was
“the mother lode of bad ideas” — have launched a thousand blog posts
and vitriolic tweets.
Writing last week in The Washington Post’s opinion pages, Fareed
Zakaria acknowledged the existence of an unpleasant level of
intolerance in some Muslim-majority countries, but stressed such
societal ills can’t be laid at the feet of a whole religion. “So,
the strategy to reform Islam,” Zakaria asks Maher, Harris and their
supporters, “is to tell 1.6 billion Muslims, most of whom are pious
and devout, that their religion is evil and they should stop taking
it seriously?”
The backdrop to this conversation is the U.S.-led war effort
against the extremist militants of the Islamic State, as well as
the continued threat of terrorist groups elsewhere that subscribe to
certain puritanical forms of Islam. Their streak of fundamentalism
is, for the West, the bogeyman of the moment. But many argue it has
little to do with Islam, writ large.
In any case, Islam and those who practice it were not always perceived
to be such a cultural threat. Just a few decades ago, the U.S. and
its allies in the West had no qualms about abetting Islamist militants
in their battles with the Soviets in Afghanistan. Look even further,
and there was a time when a vocal constituency in the West saw the
community of Islam as a direct, ideological counter to a mutual enemy.
Turn back to the 1830s. An influential group of officials in Britain —
then the most powerful empire in the West, with a professed belief in
liberal values and free trade — was growing increasingly concerned
about the expanding might of Russia. From Central Asia to the Black
Sea, Russia’s newly won domains were casting a shadow over British
colonial interests in India and the Middle East. The potential Russian
capture of Istanbul, capital of the weakening Ottoman Empire, would
mean Russia’s navy would have free access to the Mediterranean Sea–an
almost unthinkable prospect for Britain and other European powers.
And so, among diplomats and in the press, a Russophobic narrative
began to emerge. It was ideological, a clash of civilizations. After
all, beginning with the Catherine the Great in the late 18th century,
the Russians had framed their own conquests in religious terms: to
reclaim Istanbul, once the center of Orthodox Christianity, and, as
one of her favorite court poets put it, “advance through a Crusade”
to the Holy Lands and “purify the river Jordan.”
That sort of Christian zeal won little sympathy among other
non-Orthodox Christians. Jerusalem in the 19th century was still
the site of acrimonious street battles between Christian sects,
policed by the exasperated Ottomans. Russian Orthodox proselytizing
of Catholics in Poland infuriated European Catholic nations further
west, such as France.
Baron Ponsonby, the British ambassador to Istanbul for much of the
1830s, decided the job of thwarting Russian expansionism was a “Holy
Cause.” An article in the “British and Foreign Review” pamphlet,
circulated in Britain in 1836, saw the Ottomans as “the only bulwark
of Europe against Muscovy, of civilization against barbarism.” Russia
represented, in some accounts, a backward, superstitious society where
peasants still labored in semi-slavery and monarchs ruled as tyrants,
unchallenged by parliaments and liberal sentiment. The Ottomans,
who were embarking on their own process of reform, looked favorable
in comparison.
David Urquhart, an enterprising agent who served a spell with Ponsonby
in Istanbul, became one of the most energetic champions of the Ottoman
cause and Islamic culture in British policy circles. His writings
on the threat of Russia shaped the opinions of many in Britain at
the time, including a certain Karl Marx. And Urquhart’s time spent
among the tribes of the northern Caucasus set the stage for decades
of romantic European idealizing of the rugged Muslim fighters in
Russia’s shadow.
Urquhart returned from his travels in Turkey and elsewhere convinced
that the Ottoman lifestyle was better for one’s health. “If London
were [Muslim],” he wrote, “the population would bathe regularly, have
a better-dressed dinner for [its] money, and prefer water to wine or
brandy, gin or beer.” He would later launch a largely unsuccessful
movement to bring the culture of Turkish baths to the cold damp of
Victorian Britain.
Casting his eye to the territories the Ottomans controlled, Urquhart
praised the empire’s rule over a host of Christian communities
— for example, the warring Druze and Maronites in the Levant,
or feuding Greek Orthodox and Armenians. In a passage cited by the
historian Orlando Figes in his excellent history of the Crimean War,
Urquhart credits Islam under the Ottomans as a specifically “tolerant,
moderating force”:
What traveler has not observed the fanaticism, the antipathy of all
these [Christian] sects – their hostility to each other? Who has
traced their actual repose to the toleration of Islamism? Islamism,
calm, absorbed, without spirit of dogma, or views of proselytism,
imposes at present on the other creeds the reserve and silence which
characterize itself. But let this moderator be removed, and the humble
professions now confined to the sanctuary would be proclaimed in the
court and the military camp; political power and political enmity
would combine with religious domination and religious animosity;
the empire would be deluged in blood, until a nervous arm – the arm
of Russia – appears to restore harmony, by despotism.
Flash forward to 2014, and the conversation has curiously flipped:
Pundits bluster about the centuries-old war between Sunnis and
Shiites. Christians are a persecuted, beleaguered people in the Middle
East. Without ruthless strongmen aligned with the West, we’re told,
the Muslim world would descend into a chaotic bloodbath where terrorist
organizations would gain sway.
The history lesson above is not meant to denigrate the Russians and
praise the Ottomans, an empire that was guilty of many of its own
misdeeds and slaughters. Urquhart himself had plenty of detractors
and opponents back home, particularly those who wanted Britain to be
less openly antagonistic toward Russia. (Russia, the Ottoman Empire,
Britain and France eventually engaged in the largely pointless and
very bloody Crimean War in the 1850s.)
But it goes to show how much the politics of an era shape its
conversation about cultures and peoples. That’s no less true now than
it was almost two centuries ago.
Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post.
He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong
and later in New York.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/15/when-the-west-wanted-islam-to-curb-christian-extremism/