الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

Egypt one never has any doubt about being there and nowhere else. Muslim nationalities have successfully integrated much of their previous civilizations into what became their Islamic culture: particular food, dress, social mores, languages. For this reason, a clash may be more likely with one brand of Islamic civilization than another, and can never occur against Islamic civilization as such. b) We must deny even more strongly the supposition that Muslim culture is essentially different from any other culture. Such essentialism is nothing but cultural stereotyping as well denounced by Edward Said in both his books "Orientalism" (1978) and "Covering Islam" (1981). This way of looking at us is of course not new. Ever since Voltaire, Hegel and Max Weber Islam has been defined in terms of deficits and gaps vis-à-vis the obligatory Western model—as if Muslims were unable constitutionally to support individualism, civic sense, or rationality. 6 Oriental despotism was treated by them like a hereditary disease. For Max Weber Islam was a "war religion." For Gustave von Grunebaum Islamic culture was an "entity that does not share our primary aspirations". 7 In more recent times, Islam was made an essentially belligerent religion and the Near East the crisis area par excellence--simply because of the Western focus on oil and on Israel. The 'Oil and Turmoil" area, as Edward Said put it. 8 Arabs nowadays are portrayed as "billionaires, bombers, and belly dancers." 9 This vicious method of casting the other in the mould of permanent, fundamental otherness is "fashionable culturalism". 10 To see the world in dichotomies--and not in similarities--is perhaps reinforced by the

6 Salvatore. p. 73. 7 see under Salvatore pp. 102, 121. 8 Said, 1981, P.15.

9 Shaheen, p. 13. 10 Senocak, p. 55.

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