An old story: Islamic society, not the West, faces the greater test.
Pfaff, William
OF SEVERAL HINDS WILLIAM PFAFF AN OLD STORY Muslim-Western conflict Behind the false idea that Osama bin Laden's attacks on the United States launched a modern war between...
...2001, Los Angeles Times Syndicate International...
...What went wrong...
...There had been a remarkable philosophical flowering, and advanced theoretical science...
...This is the failure that has produced Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda, and it is a failure more dangerous to Islam than it can ever be to the West...
...Arab Muslim power was imposed in Egypt and North Africa, onward to Spain and southern France, and through the Balkans to Vienna...
...It was only after the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I that the Arabs found themselves dominated by Europeans in a series of new states, set up under League of Nations mandates, in the former Ottoman territories...
...In matters of material power, the Europeans passed from crafts and artisanal technology to empirical science, and eventually to industrial technology...
...Islamic society failed to take off economically, falling under the commercial control of Western oil companies, banks, and businesses...
...OF SEVERAL HINDS WILLIAM PFAFF AN OLD STORY Muslim-Western conflict Behind the false idea that Osama bin Laden's attacks on the United States launched a modern war between civilizations is the historical reality of a real war between empires and nations that began with the Muslim conquest of Roman Jerusalem in 638...
...This was the historical basis for the independent speculative life of the West, which gave us the modern world...
...The West had a biblical basis for independent secular political authority in the distinction made by Jesus between the things that belong to Caesar and those that belong to God...
...Efforts to establish an intellectually legitimate nontheological basis for independent state authority have failed...
...Muslim civilization was at that time the equal or superior of Western Europe's by virtually every standard of military, political, economic, and aesthetic accomplishment...
...Islam proved incapable of formulating a modern conception of politics and government, able to cope with a non-Islamic world much more powerful in material means, organization, and science...
...Commonweal 8 November 9,2001 There seem to be two fundamental reasons for this, both of them religious in origin...
...The Crusades were not a one-way street...
...The sophistication of Arab mathematics, astronomy, governmental administration, and military organization was very great at the end of the Middle Ages...
...Caesar was acknowledged the ruler of an autonomous political and social order...
...The Arab empire went on winning that war until the late Middle Ages, and then it began to lose...
...This means that an independent civil society has never emerged...
...They explored the world, establishing global systems of trade, commerce, and intellectual exchange...
...The supposed reformers of the Baath movement turned Iraq and Syria into hereditary dictatorships...
...Culture and intelligence, not power, decide the quality of societies...
...Even though the Arabs were eventually forced out of Spain, and parts of their North African empire became autonomous, they ruled the Balkans, or most of it, until 1914...
...Commonweal 9 November 9,2001...
...They experienced political evolution—sometimes violent—that limited monarchical power, empowered the middle and professional classes, and eventually produced modern liberal democracy...
...The second basic reason the West could create modern society was that from the Middle Ages forward, philosophy was distinguished from theology...
...It remains technologically backward, under the intellectual domination of Western ideas and science on the one hand, challenged by a reactionary and Utopian religious fundamentalism on the other...
...Islam since 1914 has failed to make a serious intellectual response to the modern West...
...Adopting Aristotle's philosophy of natural reason, Thomas Aquinas argued that reason is a source of truth independent of theological reasoning, and authentic in its own terms...
...In 800, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the pope himself...
...Europe's Crusaders took Jerusalem away from the Muslims in 1099, but a century later the city was retaken by Saladin and, from then on, remained part of a vital and expanding Muslim empire that marched on Western Europe and very nearly conquered it...
...Islamic society, the Wesf s equal at the time of the European Renaissance, failed to make the transition to a modern society...
...The independent Arab and Egyptian governments that emerged after World War II proved another defeat...
...Egypt became that anomalous modern phenomenon, the quasidemocracy, or consultative dictatorship...
...They developed institutions of law, adjudication, and contract...
...But they failed to make use of it themselves, as the Westerners did, to reform their institutions and to reestablish the basis of their political and social thought...
...The first was that religious and state authority were never fully separated in Islamic society, as they came to be in the West...
...The Arabs preserved Greek philosophy, transmitting it to Western thinkers...
...Had the French under Charles Martel failed at Poitiers in 732, had the Venetians and Spaniards lost the battle of Lepanto in 1571, or had the Austrians and Poles lost at Vienna in 1683, we might all be speaking Arabic today...
...He said that reason and religious faith are two harmonious but distinct intellectual realms...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
