‘Islam and the West’?

Abstract

Relations between the Muslim world and the Christian West, led by the United States, are complex and multidimensional. Yet two strong but contradictory views continue to raise serious concerns about the state of this relationship at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and each view comes with varying nuances (for a detailed discussion, see Esposito, 1992; Said, 1997, especially Chapter 1; Halliday, 1995, especially Chapter 3). One view is that Islamic ‘fundamentalism’, as propounded by those political forces of Islam which are contemptuous or distrustful of Western, and more specifically American, values and international behaviour, lies at the core of problems between the two sides. This view presents the phenomenon of fundamentalism as poisonous, and calls for the arrest and if possible the elimination of its influence in international relations. This view, which gained salience in the late twentieth century following the Iranian revolution of 1978/79, still resonates strongly in the thinking and policy behaviour of a number of influential elements in various Western capitals — most importantly, Washington. The emergence on the international scene of such radical Islamic forces as the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, Harakat ul-Ansar and its successor Harakat ul-Mujahideen in Pakistan, a cluster of Kashmiri groups associated with the last two, the Lebanese Hezbullah, the Palestinian Hamas, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the Algerian Islamic League — an outgrowth of the Islamic Salvation Front — has helped to perpetuate this view.