الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

christian-islamic.

During the entire period concerned, there were wars and conflicts, clashes of interest , yes, economic and border disputes. yes. But where all this time were cultural clashes? When, during that long period, did the Christian and the Islamic civilizations clash with each other? Samuel Huntington may be wrong. But he certainly is not stupid. We can therefore safely assume that -while "clash of civilization" may be a misnomer- he referred to something real. In fact, he shrewdly assessed the implications (1) of religious universalism in general and of (2) contemporary Islamic universalism in particular. 1. While polytheism allows every tribe or nation to be content with their particular god(s), monotheism - believing in one God for everybody - is necessarily universal and therefore expansive. Each monotheistic religion is thus a threat to every other religion. Seen under this angle, Islam is a universal religion par excellence. From the Muslim point of view any person who submits to God is a Muslim, and self surrender - al-islam - is the attitude required of-mankind in its entirety. In this sense Islam is God's Own religion: inna ad-din 'aind" Allah al- islam. 13 Others would call this an inclusivist attitude, the position of including for instance all Jewish prophets, from Ibrahim to Jesus, into an Islamic chain. Also in moral terms, Islam does not stop at borders. As a romantic Communist, the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara once said: "We cannot promise not to export our example because it is a moral one, and moral examples do not know any borders." This is of course equally true of Islam because it, too, considers itself an ethical alternative.

13 3: 19.

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