Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [181]
This kind of abuse has a different purpose, to define communal differences, between “them” and “us.” They are portrayed as subhuman or not even human at all. We are human, with our roots in higher values. Demonized enemies—whether those of “impure blood” or “sons of monkeys and pigs”—have no part in human society: words or images are used to cut out from the codes and taboos that govern relationships between human equals. No longer human, they are not entitled to humane treatment. These ultimate words of hatred have now become enormously more effective with modern mass communication.11
A HISTORY THAT ENDS IN THE PRESENT IS NEVER COMPLETE. I rewrote this last chapter in the months after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, and it bears the mark of those perfervid days. The lead-up to this book’s publication in May 2003 spanned the war in Iraq; now I am rewriting it again, this time in that war’s aftermath. In a sense, the question “What went wrong,” the headline to Professor Bernard Lewis’s article in the Atlantic Monthly in January 2002, and the title of his best-selling book, has now come to epitomize an era of the immediate past. I say past because the military conquest of spring 2003 has moved us beyond Lewis’s diagnosis, and into unknown territory. Rather as the West’s involvement in the Balkans has produced a plethora of books, articles, television, and movies, so too long-term intervention in Iraq is replicating that process. The reason is obvious. Bismarck once said that Germany’s interests in the Balkans were not worth “the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”12 The daily sacrifice of Western soldiers transforms the nature of any distant conflict, generates a new need to understand.
Lewis’s great strength is his limpid prose and skill in simplifying complexity.13 But it works best on a topic with which a reader is unfamiliar. The more we see and know of the East, the less persuasive it becomes. What seemed clear and unambiguous when viewed from a distance, before 2003, now appears more complex and intricate close up. I have argued in this book that the Western view of the Mediterranean Muslim world was rooted in a distant past, and the consequences of that imprinting still affect Western attitudes today. But I have, correctly, been reminded that this process too alters over time. As John Adamson put it:
Since the Enlightenment … the West has challenged Islam not merely with a different theology but with a wholly different conception of the state: with the principles that the religious and the secular can (and ought to be) wholly separate spheres; that political power ascends upwards from the people rather than some potentate appointed by God; and that even Christian teaching can be countermanded by legislation when they are at variance with the popular will.
Western modernity’s intellectual challenge is therefore qualitatively different from what has gone before.14
Adamson is absolutely right. The challenge of Western modernity produced a remarkable ferment of speculation in the Islamic East, but not in a form that the West has found easy to understand. So “What went wrong” needs to be set in context. For many centuries political and philosophical thought had languished in the East, not least because the Ottoman rulers did not encourage it. As a consequence, the fruits of the European Enlightenment reached the East rather late.15 Thereafter, Easterners sought (and seek), in the eyes of many modern commentators, to acquire the superficial trappings of Western economic and material progress, without recognizing that these develop from a commitment