Provocative Essays Reflect Diversity of Images and Assessments of Islam

For a few months after Sept. 11, Americans were eager for information about the non-Western world, much as they had been spurred to greater international awareness by the Cold War. Books, newspaper stories, magazine articles and television shows reflected this surge in interest.

Yet, almost as quickly as it crested, public curiosity seems to have receded--supplanted by the furor over the economy and the misdeeds of corporate America and the anticipation of midterm congressional elections.

“Inside Islam,” edited by John Miller and Aaron Kenedi, is a compilation of essays on Islam, some of which were written just after Sept. 11, and reminds us how vital it is for Americans to have a greater understanding of the international environment.

The collection is a good introduction not just to the variety of religious experience in the Muslim world, but also to the political dynamics that help fuel fundamentalist hatred of the West in general and of the United States above all.

Many Americans believe that Islam is, at base, a violent faith. After all, there are only a few million Muslims in the United States; most people don’t know any Muslims; and the only images they see are of bearded criminals accused of terrorism.

Dispelling that myth, Thomas Cleary, in an essay about the Koran, writes that “Islam does not demand unreasoned belief.... [The] connection between faith and reason enabled Islamic civilization to absorb and vivify useful knowledge ... whereby it eventually nursed Europe out of the Dark Ages.”

The same culture that nursed Osama bin Laden also embraced science and learning while Europe was mired in superstition, and had it not been for Muslim translations of the works of the ancient Greeks, the Renaissance as we know it may never have happened.

Other essays show the variety of religious and cultural experience in the Muslim world, which stretches from Morocco to Indonesia and includes more than 1 billion believers.

Michael Wolfe, an American convert to Islam, writes beautifully of his pilgrimage to Mecca as “an act of love,” while Huston Smith (in an essay written in the 1950s) says simply that “Islam unrolls before us one of the most remarkable panoramas in all history.” Geneive Abdo describes the Islamic revival in contemporary Egypt as a moderate, quietist crusade for social justice, more like the progressive Christian reformers of early 20th century America than the thuggish, ignorant Taliban so deliciously skewered in William T. Vollmann’s travelogue of his time in Afghanistan in early 2000.

And in a related vein, Geraldine Brooks writes of her mixed emotions about the place of women in Muslim societies, as she celebrates the unique privacy and intimacy of women’s lives and mourns the inequities and the indignities of life behind the veil.

Sadly, as Fareed Zakaria reminds us, as a result of the utter political failure of Arab regimes, in many places “the rich, colorful, pluralistic, and easygoing Islam ... has turned into a dour, puritanical faith, policed by petty theocrats and religious commissars.” The most provocative essays analyze what Bernard Lewis controversially called “the roots of Muslim rage.”

Lewis is one of the most eminent scholars of Islam, and in a 1990 essay, he argued that there is a bona fide “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, at least insofar as radical fundamentalists see the West as a cultural and religious threat.

That argument was also put forward by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and in spite of the claims of the Bush administration that the adversary is terrorism and not Islam, there is a widespread feeling that the enemy is, in fact, Islam.

That is a dangerous, and potentially self-fulfilling, analysis, and it gives terrorist groups exactly the legitimacy they crave.

Groups such as Al Qaeda can justify themselves only on the premise of a war between religions and between civilizations; take that away, and they are nothing but murderous conspirators with a hollow ideology.

If we treat them as criminals and rogues, and recognize that they no more speak for Islam than white supremacists or Timothy McVeigh speak for Christianity, we deny them a potent weapon.

But if we mistakenly treat them as representative of a billion Muslims, we shouldn’t be surprised if a considerable portion of those billion lean toward them and turn against us in righteous indignation.