SURVEY: ISLAM AND THE WEST The next war, they say Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition Are Muslims and the people of the West doomed to perpetual confrontation? Not if they both see that this is a moment for change, argued Brian Beedham in 1994 THIS survey is different from most surveys in The Economist. It is not about a country, an industry, a financial organisation or anything else that can be described and measured with some degree of precision. It is about an idea: perhaps the only idea of its kind in today's world. The idea, Islam, ignores the frontier that most people draw between man's inner life and his public actions, between religion and politics. It may be the last such idea the world will see. Or it may, on the contrary, prove to be the force that persuades other people to rediscover a connection between day-to-day life and a moral order. Either way, it denies turn-of-the-century western conventional wisdom. This survey is an exploration of the misty territory of religio-political conviction. If that sounds dreamy, think again. One of the commonest prophecies of the mid-1990s is that the Muslim world is heading for a fight with other parts of the world that do not share its religio-political opinions: above all, worry nervous Europeans, a fight with Europe. On current evidence, this is by no means impossible. In Europe, Bosnian Muslims have for more than two years been brutally harried by Serbs who are theoretically Christians. On the border between Europe and Asia, Christian Armenians have thumped Muslim Azeris, admitted with rather more provocation, and Jews and Muslims still shoot each other in Palestine. Farther east, Muslims complain of the Indian army's brutality to them in Kashmir, and of Indian Hindus' destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in 1992. Such experiences tend to make Muslims think the world is against them. If it is, then they are against the world. Hence the xenophobia that gets foreigners murdered by Koran-quoting terrorists in Algeria and Egypt. Islam, as Samuel Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, has put it, has bloody borders. It was Mr Huntington who provided the intellectual framework for the fear of a confrontation between Islam and the West. In a widely read article about a coming "clash of civilisations" in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993 he argued, correctly, that the nation-state is no longer the primary unit of international relations. Just as correctly, alas, he assumed that competition and conflict are not about to disappear from men's relations with each other. So the competition and the conflict will have to be worked out at another level—chiefly, says Mr Huntington, among the larger units known as cultures or civilisations, each consisting of groups of countries. Here comes the contest of the giants. As a general thesis, this may be true enough; but, of the eight civilisations that Mr Huntington lists, four or five do not really fit his definition. Latin America is not fundamentally different from the western culture that brought it into being, as both parts of its name suggest. The same can be said, with little more hesitation, about the Slavs of the Orthodox Christian tradition, who are admittedly different from the Protestant and Catholic West but probably not enough to be called a separate civilisation. With one more degree of hesitation, that also applies to Japan and its connection with the Chinese culture to its west. The culture of India's Hindus is indeed sui generis, but Hinduism is not—and probably never will be—a player on the world stage. And Africa, as Mr Huntington himself seems to admit, is not really in this league. The three prime numbers There are in fact only three reasonably clear contenders in Mr Huntington's advertised clash of civilisations. The first is the West, the Euro-American culture that is the product of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and is the begetter of modern capitalism and democracy. The second is the Confucian culture, the body of ideas that has grown up around the Chinese language and the habits of public life that are said to belong to the Chinese region. But this has its qualification. Those supposed Confucian habits of public life—a cheerful respect for authority on the part of the governed, based upon the assumption that Confucian governments honestly use their authority for the benefit of those they rule—may be no more than a polite fiction. The history of the Chinese-speaking world contains at least as much selfishness and brutality on the part of the rulers, and at least as much dumb suffering on the part of the ruled, as the history of any other part of the globe. The idea that there is today a special understanding between governors and governing in eastern Asia is largely self-protecting propaganda by the men in power in Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere. The third contender is Islam. This does genuinely stand alone. There is good reason why the culture of the Muslim world is regarded by many people as the West's only real ideological competitor at the end of the 20th century. Unlike the Confucians—and even more unlike Latin Americans, Slavs and Japanese—Islam claims to be an idea based upon a transcendental certainty. The certainty is the word of God, revealed syllable by syllable to Muhammad in a dusty corner of Arabia 1,400 years ago and copied down by him into the Koran. As a means of binding a civilisation together, there is no substitute for such a certainty. Moreover—and this is not happening anywhere else—new recruits are flocking to join this claim to certainty. Whether it is because of the repeated defeats inflicted upon Muslims by the outside world, or because of the corrupt incompetence of most of their own governments, the past 25 years have seen a huge growth in what outsiders call Islamic fundamentalism. Muslims themselves hate the phrase, but it is not inaccurate. A large number of people who feel ashamed of the past few centuries want to show they can do better. To do that, they need to rediscover a sense of identity. And to do that, they turn back to the Koran. You can call it a revival, or a resurgence; but it is also a return to the foundations. This is what has set scalps tingling in other parts of the world, especially among Europeans. They see the Last Ideology on the march. A Muslim crescent curls threatening around the southern and eastern edges of Europe. A new cold war could be on the way. And it may not stop at being a cold war. The writer of this survey is not convinced. It is true that some Muslims are behaving ferociously these days, and that on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, in particular, some ugly things are taking shape. It is also true that Europe and Islam have had a rough time together in the past. That rough time included two penetrations by Muslim armies deep into Europe, the largely incompetent European counter-attacks called the crusades, and the absorption of virtually the whole Muslim world into various European empires in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not a good-neighbourly story. But past enmities and present bad temper need not be the premises of a syllogism that is bound to end: therefore, new war between Islam and the West. For one thing, these two civilisations have more in common with each other than either has with the Confucian world or the Hindu one, or most of the rest of the Huntington culture collection. Both have their origins in religions that believe in a single God (and any westerner who asks what that has to do with modern life needs to think about what made the West as it is today). Few westerners believe that God dictated the Koran, and no Muslim believes that Jesus was the son of God. Those are important disagreements, but they sit alongside a large number of shared convictions. A Muslim and a westerner both believe, more clearly than most other people, in the idea of individual responsibility. They can exchange opinions about the nature of good and evil, or property rights, or the preservation of the environment, in something like a spirit of brotherhood. It is even tempting to wonder whether Islam's bloody clashes with Europe in the past could have been avoided had geography and history been a little kinder. Of course, religion was one of the things that drove these two peoples into battle with each other, especially in the early days when the Arabs pushed up to Poitiers and the crusaders lumbered to Jerusalem. But religion was never the entire explanation for such clashes. These were two young cultures, full of energy and eager to show what they could do; and in the world of that time, between Muhammad's death in 632Ad and the capture of Louis IX of France in Egypt during the seventh crusade in 1250, they had nobody to unleash their zeal on but each other. The rest of the world was still largely a blank to them. Had they lived in today's many-peopled world—or been separated from each other by sea or desert, so that they could not so readily march and counter-march—their religious differences might not have had such bloody results. But self-assertion and propinquity did their work, with the usual results. The difficulty with neighbours The trouble is that propinquity and self-assertion are still at work today. The proposition of this survey is that there is no insuperable reason why Muslims and westerners cannot live peaceably with each other. It will take sensible handling by both sides, and some re-examination by both of their present ideas about the world. In particular, Muslims will need to find a way of adjusting their habits to three specific requirements of modern life. There is no fatal obstacle to this; nothing in the essentials of either civilisation to make harmony impossible. The hope contained in that proposition has even survived the Iranian revolution of 1979. Iran is the chief home of the Shias, the always quarrelsome 15% minority of Muslims who broke away from the Sunni majority way back in the early days of the faith. Iran's revolutionaries started out as snarling enemies of the West. They can still growl, and bite. But time, and the sobering experience of government, have made them noticeably milder in their foreign policy as well as in what they do at home. They do not destroy the belief that, in the long run, Islam and the West can co-exist. Unfortunately, in the shorter run—meaning within the next year or so—something may happen in North Africa that could throw at least a temporary spanner into the works. This is the highly probable collapse of the present government of Algeria, and its replacement by a singularly intransigent bunch of Islamic rebels, fundamentalists of the most bloody-minded sort. A series of mistakes—first by the generals running Algeria, then by most of the West's governments—seems likely to bring to power in Algiers a group of men who will, for a time, be very hard to deal with. They are for good reason angry both with the corruptly authoritarian regime they will be replacing and with the West for having supported that regime, even when it had plainly been rejected by the Algerian people. If this happens in Algeria, the effects will spill over into other parts of North Africa, and maybe even farther into the Islamic world; and a familiar cycle will begin all over again. Anti-western anger on one side of the Mediterranean will provoke anti-Muslim resentment on the other, which will further feed that anti-western anger. Europe and Islam will, for a period, be at it again. Three articles later in the survey will look at the three things Muslims need to do (and in some countries are already doing) to move confidently into the 21st century. They are, in rising order of difficulty, coping with a modern economy, accepting the idea of sexual equality, and, hardest of all, learning to absorb the principle of democracy. But first a closer look at that swelling thunder-cloud on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. A hand grenade in mid-flight Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition The next few months could bring an unnecessary but devastating clash across the Mediterranean IN THE middle of March something happened in the hill country of eastern Algeria that may have settled that country's fate for the rest of the century. It also tossed a hand grenade into Europe's relations with the western part of Islam. On March 10th the Islamic guerrillas who have been fighting Algeria's government since 1992 broke into a prison near Batna, probably with the help of some of the guards, and freed more than 1,000 captives. The military regime responded with an attempt to stamp out opposition once and for all. The civil war's death toll, previously running at an average of around 200 a month, shot up to 300 a week, not counting the large number of people whose throat-slitting, hand grenading or shooting in the head never gets reported. Briefly, things went better for the government; but by May the usual logic of wars of this sort had reasserted itself. Take an opinion poll in Paris and London among the people whose job it is to follow events in Algeria, and you will find few who will bet on General Liamine Zeroual and his soldiers staying in power much beyond the end of this year. The security forces nominally command 200,000 men, but can trust only about 40,000 of them. (A French army of 400,000 men in the 1950s could not hold an Algeria that then had a population little more than a third the size of today's.) The rebels continue to win recruits, and to get arms either through Morocco or by capturing them from the army. Their methods are horrible. Girls have been shot for not wearing the Muslim head-scarf; foreigners are indiscriminately murdered. The relatively restrained Armed Islamic Movement now counts for less than the super-brutal Armed Islamic Group. The insurgency has spread from its original centres around Constantine and Algiers into the west of the country, which used not to be an Islamic stronghold. The police cannot operate in much of the country by night, or in some small towns and city suburbs even during the day. The judicial process works at best spasmodically; the rebels have taken over the tax collectors' job in some places. The structure of the state is visibly fraying. The French government, which placed its bet wrong in 1992, is now desperately trying to rescue Mr Zeroual and his government. Its hope is that economic revival can prevent political disintegration. The Zeroual regime recently reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, and now promises to do some of the things the IMF likes—cutting subsidies, opening up foreign trade, closing down uneconomic factories. This has cleared the way for the Paris Club of Algeria's creditors to postpone the $ 4 billion-5 billion of debt-servicing that Algeria was due to pay this year and next, which in turn has enabled France to offer more money, and to urge the European Union to do the same. A devaluation has boosted the domestic value of Algeria's oil earnings. It is unlikely to work. The new money and the waiving of the debt payments will enable Algeria to increase its imports, putting some nice things in the shops and, more important, getting some of the idle 60% of Algerian industry back into operation. But this will take time. Meanwhile the subsidy cuts have put prices up sharply (and the fact that they were timed to coincide with the end of Ramadan, when prices always go up anyway, will not have deceived many Algerians). The closure of loss-making state firms throws even more people out of work. And the devaluation has sliced those planned new imports. The hope in Paris is that Algeria's GDP, which shrank last year, will grow by 6% in 1995. But who will be running the country by then? No attempt to imagine an alternative to a rebel victory looks very plausible. It is now almost inconceivable that the army can put the Islamic guerrillas down and keep them down. The hope of a compromise between moderate soldiers and moderate Islamists is fading as the fighting grows more savage, and fury pushes moderation aside. Algeria has no visible equivalent of Poland's General Jaruzelski, a man ready to open the door politely to the inevitability of change. Many Algerians dislike both the present military regime and the sort of Islamic one that seems likely to replace it; but nobody is offering them a third option. This is the price being paid for the mistake of 1992. The Algerian government, having surprisingly allowed the first round of a free election at the end of 1991, cancelled the election's second round early in 1992 when it saw that the Islamic party was heading for a clear victory. The French government decided to back that decision, after a Gallic shrug of puzzlement from President Mitterrand. Most of the rest of the West went along with the French. It did not work. The rebellion expanded, and as so often in these circumstances grew angrier and more vicious. One or two dominoes will be enough If Algeria now falls to the Islamic rebels, there will not necessarily be a rippling collapse of dominoes across the width of North Africa. Islamic movements in the five countries between Casablanca and Cairo share a common desire to get back to the roots of their faith, a destination of the governments they live under, and a hot dislike of what they think of as western policy. But each has its roots in the particular circumstances of its country; and those countries vary greatly both in what history has done to them and in the temperament of their people. An Algerian is as fiercely different from an Egyptian as a Prussian is from a Provencal, or a Yorkshireman from a Tuscan. There is, as yet, no international Islamic revolutionary organisation run by an Islamic Comintern. But it would also be a mistake to swallow the counter-domino theory. Some people think that, if Algeria's rebels win, the other North African governments will hasten to mend their ways, and their peoples will recoil in horror from what they see happening in Algeria. This is almost certainly wishful thinking. More likely, the other governments will grow even more repressive, thus pushing even more of their opponents into armed revolt; the sight of an Islamic victory in one country will hearten Islamic rebels elsewhere; and something like an Islamintern will indeed begin to emerge. An Algerian upheaval will certainly make it hard for the present regime in Tunisia to survive. Tunisia's economy is not as badly off as Algeria's, mainly because its former government got population growth under better control; but its politics have lately followed much the same path. The loose-wristed incompetence of recent Tunisian governments led to the rise of a commendably mild and pluralistic Islamic composition (it claimed no monopoly for instance, over the interpretation of Islam), then to a military crackdown, then a rigged election. Tunisia is fragile. There are other fragilities both farther east and farther west. In Libya, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is lucky to have a country with few people and plenty of oil, but his grip on power is increasingly unsure, and the leading contender for the Libyan succession is a party of Islamic fundamentalists. In Morocco, the durable King Hassan still looks fairly secure; but the king is 65, and his crown prince does not look anything like as durable. One of the biggest question-marks hangs over Egypt, where an Islamic rebellion has got the army on the defensive in the south of the country and the rebels have picked up the Algerian rebels' habit of murdering foreign visitors. This does not mean that Egypt is doomed to go Algeria's way. But there are some worrying similarities. Egypt's economy cannot keep pace with the growth of its population, and the vital money it used to earn from tourism has been halved since holiday-makers found themselves getting shot. The Egyptian government, though wilier at handling its opponents than Algeria, is is far from popular: here too, corruption and a clumsy bureaucracy have taken their toll. If Egypt's rebels did win their war, the country's position at the hinge of Asia and Africa would make this an even more momentous event than Algeria's fall. The possible consequences of an Algerian collapse could reach still farther east, into the oil countries along the shore of the Gulf. One gloomy assessment puts Saudi Arabia as the third-likeliest country, after Tunisia and Egypt, to experience a revolutionary change of government if Islamic guerrillas fight their way to power in Algiers. If even a couple of these countries go under the Islamic wave, the internal consequences will be spectacular. The new regimes will have scores to settle, and their early grapplings with the business of government will be as messy as those of Iran's revolutionaries in the first years after 1979. But there will also be external consequences. There is the optimist's view about these, and the pessimist's. The optimist (if that is the right word) reckons that the effect on Europe of this North African earthquake will be confined to Europe itself. There will be a lot of refugees, especially into France from still heavily French-flavoured Algeria. The refugees will reignite political quarrels among the European Union's 10m Muslims. This will inflame right-wing nationalists in the places where the trouble is worst. It will be distinctly unpleasant. But it can be contained, and eventually things will calm down. Nonsense, says the pessimist. The mess inside Europe is almost bound to become a trans-Mediterranean mess. The Europeans will want to limit the flow of refugees, and if its gets too bad they may try to send some of them back. The newly Islamic countries will not like this. Their excitable new governments, already bubbling with anti-western indignation, will try to retaliate with the weapons of trade or possibly (remember the methods already used by Iran, Libya, Syria and the Palestinians) terrorism. They will be in the market for the medium-range missiles with chemical or nuclear warheads that will quite possibly become available in the next decade or so. In the worst hypothesis—an alliance between a new Islamic power and the re-emerging power of China, which Mr Huntington and others seem to think possible—this could provide the chief global crisis of the 21st century. It is idle to hope that so spectacular an upheaval on the other side of the Mediterranean—no farther from Spain than Granada is from Seville, and no farther from Italian soil than Milan is from Siena—will have no foreign-policy repercussions. As Islamic victory in Algeria will at the very least delay the reasonable sorting out of relations between Muslims and westerners which this survey believes to be possible. Sooner or later, though, that sorting out has to be attempted. It requires new thinking on both sides. The West must re-examine several of its current assumptions. And there will have to be some even harder self-interrogation by the Islamic radicals, the people who wish to turn back to the foundations of their faith. In particular, they will need to ask themselves how the words Muhammad bequeathed 1,400-odd years ago square the wellbeing of today's Muslims in the matters of economic organisation, the rights of women, and the basic question of who rules a country. The next three articles try to address these questions. The cash-flow of God Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition Islamic economics is not so special; but it has one insight other people may find valuable TO MOST readers, these three articles may have a curious flavour, as if they came from the pen of a medieval scholar writing about the religion and politics of his time. That analogy is telling; for it is precisely how the articles have to be. What is happening in the Muslim world today—a revolt against its own decay and humiliation—has taken the form of a return to the roots of the Muslim religion. This religious revival may prove to be no deeper and no longer-lasting then the Christian revival in Victorian England (though that lasted two-thirds of a century, and helped to build a British empire). But, while it lasts, Islam's revivalists will try to justify almost everything they say about politics and economics by quoting from the Koran and the stories of Muhammad's life; and those who argue with them had better be able to counter-quote. Curiously, counter-quoting comes easiest in the field of economics. For the claim that there is a distinctively Islamic view of economic life, morally superior to but no less efficient than anything offered by the decadent, materialist West, does not—with one possible exception—stand up to examination. In the general outlines of what they want, most Islamic economists say things quite similar to the sort of thing that is starting to be said by the people building a post-Marxist left in the West. The basic organisation of an economy should be left to the market. Both the Koran and Muhammad himself assumed a system based on individual enterprise and individual reward (the command economy, after all, was not going to be intended for another dozen centuries); the Prophet has nothing against profit. The role of the state, subsequent Muslim scholars have more or less agreed, should be limited to matters the market cannot really cope with—the broad direction of the economy, natural monopolies, sorting out the knots the market so often gets itself tied up in, and so on. The good Muslim businessman should, however, be guided by his conscience—and by God's written instructions—to do the right thing by other people. He should pay a reasonable wage, charge a fair price, and be decently restrained in the way he spends his profits (which, the shrewd Islamic economist points out, ought to be good for investment and healthy counter-inflationary). He should also take care of the environment, God's handiwork around him. "Do you see how God has put all that is in the earth under your command?" There are obvious difficulties in this. Who decides what a reasonable wage is, and where God stands in the choice between leaving a field under wheat and building a computer plant on it? How do you prevent a company that charges fair prices and looks after its workers from being bankrupted by a ruthless rival, unless there is a way of insisting that the rival becomes less ruthless? But these difficulties are not peculiar to Islamic economics. They are shared by the people in the West who are trying to construct a new socialism, a de-Marxified alternative to the politics of pure individualism. These westerners also accept the market as the essential driving-force of any economy, but they too wish to set it within a moral framework that will ensure support for the weak through the compassion and self-discipline of the strong. What communism tried and failed to achieve through the state, one Islamic economist has written, "is to be established through the agency of man himself." It would be a good slogan for the possible new socialism of the 21st century. Nor does the institution called zakat justify Islam's claim to economic superiority. Zakat is the word for charity, almsgiving, the means by which rich men become better men by helping the poor. The voluntary provision of charity is economically an excellent thing, since it reduces the need for public welfare organisations that usually cost more to run. But Muslim countries discovered long ago that voluntary zakat does not get you far, especially as people move out of villages into the anonymity of big cities. Some of them have therefore imposed a zakat tax. Unfortunately, the tradition-bound nature of Islamic economics complicates the calculation of zakat. The percentages fixed in Muhammad's time applied only to mining and agriculture (and, agonised one early caliph, were pomegranates exempt?). Only recent have two or three countries tried to apply the tax to companies as well as to individuals. And there are all sorts of ancient opt-outs people can appeal to. The result is that the tax raises very little money—less than 0.5% of GDP even in Pakistan, probably the most efficient country in this matter. It can cost a lot to administer; in one recent project, the zakat collectors were authorised to give themselves almost a quarter of what they collected. Worst of all, it often does not do the intended job; a Malaysian scheme taxed bone-poor rice farmers, while ignoring the city rich. It would seem hugely more practical, in the modern world, for the government to extract money as precisely as it can from the rich and use the proceeds for the welfare of the poor. That could be called zakat. Alas for the pride of Islam, it would be indistinguishable from what is done, with varying degrees of efficiency, through tax systems all over the West. The case for sharing the risk The one possible exception, the area where Islam may have something distinctively useful to offer, is in the monetary system. This arises from the Koran's prohibition of riba, generally translated as "interest". There are all the usual scholarly disputes about this. It is argued by some Muslims that the Koran's main reference to riba is in Chapter 3, Verse 130—"Believers! Do not live on interest, doubled and redoubled!"—and that this refers not to interest in the modern sense of the word but to uncontrolled usury. Christianity also prohibited usury, which is why rich Christians in the Middle Ages went to Jewish money-lenders. Some modern Muslims accept the interest-usury distinction. The present mufti of Egypt has issued a fatwa declaring that interest can sometimes be perfectly legitimate. Be that as it may, Muslim theoreticians and bankers have between them devised ingenious ways of coping with the interest problem. One is murabaha. The Koran says you cannot borrow $ 100m from the bank for a year, at 5% interest, to buy the new machinery your factory needs? Fine. You get the bank to buy the machinery for you—cost, $ 100m—and then you buy the stuff from the bank, paying it $ 105m a year from now. The difference is that the extra $ 5m is not interest on a loan, which the Koran (perhaps) forbids, but your thanks to the bank for the risk it takes of losing money while it is the owner of the machinery: this is honest trade, okay with the Koran. Since the modern communications with bank's ownership may last about half a second, its risk is not great, but the transaction is pure. It is not surprising that some Muslims uneasily sniff logic-chopping here. A more honest way of using the fact that risk-sharing is acceptable, though interest is not, comes in the practice known (confusingly) as mudaraba, and its variant musharaka. The bank, instead of lending money at interest to an entrepreneur, as it does in the West, in effect buys shares in his enterprise. If he does well, the bank gets an agreed share of his profits. If he flops, it shares the pain. The bank is an investor, not a lender. This has its clumsinesses. The bank may know less about the business in question than the entrepreneur does, so it can be taken for a ride. Moreover, the depositors who in the first place put into the bank the money it invests are also deprived, under this system, of a guaranteed return on their money. They too have to take a risk, which is not much fun if you are an old-age pensioner; and, if this deters them from putting their cash into the bank, there will be less money to invest all round. Despite this, some people in the West have begun to find the idea attractive. It gives the provider of money a strong incentive to be sure he is doing something sensible with it. What a pity the West's banks did not have an incentive in so many of their lending decisions in the 1970s and 1980s. It also emphasises the sharing of responsibility, by all users of money. That helps to make the free-market system more open: you might say more democratic. The other big supposed disadvantage of an interest-free monetary system can also be exaggerated. How can a country control its money supply, it is asked, if it cannot use the interest-rate weapon? The answer is that its central bank can still change the reserve requirements it imposes on commercial banks, and influence the volume of cash in the economy in other ways. The government's budget surplus or deficit is another big influence on the rate of monetary expansion. None of these instruments, perhaps, is as handy as the short-term interest rates, that are at the command of the Bundesbank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve (although these bodies have little practical control over long-term rates). But a purely Islamic economy would by no means be helpless in dealing with the money supply. The economics of Islam, in short, is not as special as its enthusiasts claim; but neither does it deserve the usually rather ignorant sneer it gets from many non-Muslims. As one bright Malaysian banker says, "If the scholars of the Koran had economics degrees, they would understand what we are trying to do." And if western economists knew more about the Koran, so would they. In the name of Eve Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition What Islam has to do for its other half IF YOU are in Kuala Lumpur, it is a good idea to call on a group of women who call themselves Sisters in Islam. Two things immediately become apparent. One is that there is no such entity as "the Muslim world"; you may find women like this in Malaysia, Turkey and a few other places, but they are inconceivable in present-day Saudi Arabia or large stretches of the rest of Islam. The other is that the widespread belief that women have no hope of self-expression in a Muslim country is not true. And, even in those countries where the belief still is true, women can look forward, on the evidence of the Sisters, to better days. There were in April eight Sisters in Islam: a lawyer, an artist, a theologian, a journalist, a sociologist, a social worker and two researchers: all working women; all serious Muslims; some married with children, some not. Since 1987 they have been harrying the Malaysian conscience about the troubles of Muslim women less fortunate than themselves. They raise money to publish pamphlets ("Are Muslim men allowed to beat their wives?"); they organise symposiums; they write muscular letters to newspapers. Muslim businessmen have provided them with money. They get telephone calls, most quite amicable, from Muslim men. The married ones' husbands seem to take it all in their stride. Apart from the odd head-scarf—and the subject that brought them together—these women could in dress, manner of speech and look-you-in-the-eye directness be a group of professional women in London, Paris or New York. It is perfectly true that the condition of most Muslim women is not good. Except in a few unusual groups, such as the bedouin of the Arabian desert and some matrilineal villagers of South-East Asia, the great majority are economically and physically subservient to their menfolk. If they are struck by their husbands they tend to be told that it is on God's instructions. In Egypt, Sudan and Somalia many still submit to one or other of the three main forms of circumcision, a description of the mildest of which would make most men go green. It is hard to imagine Muslims and non-Muslims feeling easy with each other in the 21st century if this were to continue. But at bottom such things do not happen to Muslim women because of what either the Koran or the Prophet said, one particularly awkward quotation apart. They happen because of the pre-existing habits of the people among whom Islam first took root; because the economies of most Muslim countries have for most of the time not been conducive to a relaxed life for women (as they were not in the West until fairly recently, and still are not in many parts of the Muslim non-West); above all, because in Islam's first two or three centuries the interpretation of the Koran was in the hands of deeply conservative male scholars, whose decisions—"Here is what God meant!"—it is still not easy for good Muslims to challenge. This is not primarily a problem of religion. It may therefore be curable. The Koran is better about women than is generally realised. In the beginning of things its Eve was not, as for Christians and Jews, the belated product of Adam's rib; the two were born equal, "from a single soul". It was Adam, not Eve, who let the devil persuade them to eat the forbidden fruit. Post-Creation Muslim women are instructed to be modest in their dress, but only in general terms (and men are told to be modest, too). The top-to-bottom sheeting of women, and their physical seclusion, are later male inventions. The Koran, by the way, loved the Queen of Sheba, a fact frequently remembered by the women who are now prime ministers of Pakistan, Turkey and Bangladesh, three countries with a combined population bigger than that of the United States. The Koran admittedly permits a man to have up to four wives, but the permission is given in a distinctly if-you-really-must fashion, and many people think this was Muhammad's way of cutting down the previously unlimited Polygamy of Arabia. It does not carry enough authority to prevent several Muslim governments from having prohibited or restricted polygamy. It is also true that men outrank women in the Koran in other ways—they can inherit more, and their testimony is worth twice as much in a court of law. But most of the legal discrimination against women starts with those male, post-Koranic interpreters of the good book. Verse 34, alas The one seriously awkward bit of the Koran is Chapter 4 ("On Women"), verse 34. The Koran is written in the compact, allusive phrases of seventh-century Arabic, much of it more like poetry than prose. It is consequently open to widely differing interpretations. Click to enlarge The hard-nosed version of verse 34 has God saying that men "have authority" over women, and that if the women cause trouble they should be beaten. A gentler translation changes the first part of that to say that men are women's "protectors" or "guardians" (partly because seventh-century Arabian men earned all the money). As to beating, the gallant Sisters in Islam say God just meant a single blow, though it is not clear exactly how they manage to confine it to the singular. Some other people explain that the verb in question is reassuringly mild, really meaning something like "strike" as in "striking a coin": gently impressing the offending female, as it were. None of this is entirely satisfactory. Verse 34 remains an eyebrow-raiser. Even so, most of the disabilities Muslim women suffer from are nothing to do with the Koran. They come from the humdrum circumstances of time, place and economics. The Muslim religion was born in the Arabian desert, in a tribal society of pastoralists and traders who were also part-time warriors. Such a society is almost always run by men. Islam then exploded into the Byzantine and Persian empires, some of whose social habits it picked up and distorted to the subsequent disadvantage of its own women. The conquering Muslims found in occupied Damascus rich women who wore veils to show that they were ladies of leisure. Before long, scholarly Muslim men were saying that no Muslim woman could reveal any part of herself to anybody except her immediate family. Much of the later spread of Islam was into cultures that were equally patriarchal and martial in their habits. It was only when it reached South-East Asia that it ran into a softer climate. Things might have got easier, sooner, for Muslim women if the men of Islam had found them economically indispensable. Women everywhere in the world tend to have a hard time of it, and get clumped when they complain, until their independent work becomes necessary for the standard of living the men are coming to expect. Alas, the economy of most of the Muslim parts of the world—farming for the rural majority, trading for the urban minority—has not been conducive to female economic independence. Only in a few Muslim countries have factories and offices recently started to bring a fair number of women a chance to break free from that seventh-century assumption of economic dependence. The breaking free will have to happen soon, or Islam may find itself isolated. Of all the social revolutions that were supposed to have come bursting out of the West in the past couple of centuries—the French one in 1789, the Russian one in 1917, even the student explosions of 1968—the revolution that may endure longest has been the reordering of male-female relations. Women now stand on their own feet in most of the western world. There is no obvious reason why the Confucian and Hindu parts of the world should not move in the same direction, let alone the Latin America and Slav cousins of the West; indeed, it is already starting to happen. Unless Islam follows, it will feel lonely; it will remain internally divided; and it will be using only half of the economic energy available to it. The change requires a much livelier economic performance than most Muslim countries now manage; that is not impossible, for all the nail-biting about riba. It also requires more open-minded governments. But most of all, perhaps, it requires a transformation of the institution that has done most to hold Muslim women back. The scholars of Islam, the ulema, the tiny, all-male, more or less self-selected bunch of learned fellows who claim the right to say what God means: these are the people who made the mistake about women all those centuries ago, and by and large are still making it. For Eve's sake, the Islam of the 21st century needs to improve on the figures in the previous page's table. It has to get a great many more of its women into the higher levels of education, and allow a great many more to take senior positions in industry and professions. They deserve in practice the equality that the Koran, give or take a verse or two, gives them in principle. If Islam is to do this, it will have to take a new look at the powers of the ulema. And if it gets to grips with the ulema, it will also find it easier to deal with the question of democracy, the subject of the next article. The trickiest one of all Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition The chief obstacle to a democratic future for Muslims THE biggest test of Islam's ability to give its people more of the advantages of the modern world is also the hardest. Of the 39 countries this survey is talking about, only seven can in one degree or another even hesitantly be called democracies. There is Turkey, where the habit of regular elections open to more or less everybody seems to have survived three rather half-hearted military seizures of power between 1960 and 1980. There is Malaysia, ruled by an apparently everlasting coalition of middle-of-the-road Malays and Chinese, and pretty mean to its Islamic opposition, but still faithful to the practice of multi-party elections. Apart from that, it is to be hoped that Pakistan and Bangladesh, now roughly where Turkey was in the 1960s, may smoothly proceed to where Turkey is now. Cross your fingers for Lebanon's post-civil-war grope back towards democracy. The hat can be tipped to Jordan's King Hussein for letting his Islamic opposition have a voice in parliament (and in the process showing that a tolerated voice may become a quieter voice). And surprised respect is due to the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran for holding freeish elections that have produced a parliament happy to argue with the government. The other 32 countries, with only a faintly hopeful question-mark over recent elections in Senegal, Niger and Mali, are all, alas, various shades of authoritarian. Yes, Islam has a democratic deficit. Not by shura alone There are the predictable explanations. It is unfair to rebuke Muslims for not having been democrats in the Middle Ages, when nobody else ever had been except for ancient Athenians and a subsequent handful of Swiss. Later on, after North Americans and non-Swiss Europeans started on the long road to democracy about 200 years ago, much of Islam was soon swallowed up into the 19th century's European empires. When it was regurgitated, some after 1918 and the rest after 1945, it passed into the hands of men who thought that nation-building was more important than political freedom. Most of the Muslim politicians of recent times have been hard-nosed nationalists or semi-Marxist demagogues, or just men out to fill their pockets. Democracy is not made by such people. The economic backwardness of most Muslim countries has been another obstacle (though it is fair to point out that their economic performance could have been a lot better if their politicians had been more economically literate or more honest—or, preferably, both). All this is true, but it does not really answer the question. The democratic deficit remains embarrassingly large. Nor is the Muslim counter-argument about democracy very convincing. Muslim intellectuals will tell you that the Koran provides its own machinery for discovering the will of the people, and that this machinery will start smoothly rolling into operation once the unfortunate impediments of the past two centuries are out of the way. Unfortunately, the machinery audibly creaks. It is claimed, for instance, that Muslims have an equivalent of democracy in the concept of shura, "consultation". The government is obliged to consult the people about the policies it is to follow. What could be more democratic? In fact, the Koran has only two fragmentary things to say about shura. Men "who conduct their affairs by mutual consultation" are one item on the list of those who, according to Chapter 42, verses 36-39, will receive God's blessing. That is good, if less than thunderous, in its commendation of the idea that governments exist to serve the will of the people. But what exactly does "consultation" mean? "Consult them in the conduct of affairs. Then, when you have taken a decision, put your trust in God," is the brusque explanation of Chapter 3, verse 159. This is consultation as practiced by the better sort of medieval baron, or by a modern army commander. He asks the others what they think, and then makes up his own mind. There is not much comfort for democrats in shura. Nor has ijma more to offer. Ijma means "consensus". "The community of God will never agree upon an error," Muhammad is supposed to have said. If the community agrees what is the right thing to do, then it should be done. That sounds democratic enough. The trouble is that ijma was hijacked centuries ago by the scholars who claim to have the right to say, on so many things, what the community thinks. The rest of the community has not yet summoned up the nerve to say them nay. Is there hope to be found in the fact that there are four different schools of scholastic thought, whose opinions vary on some interesting points? Not really. One of the most gently broad-minded of the scholars this writer talked to—a man from the relatively relaxed East Asian part of Islam, not the harsher Arab part—explained that educated men might choose which scholastic school they wanted to belong to, but "the masses are urged to follow" the one the learned think best for them. Here is the heart of it all. As that gently broad-minded man went on to say, "You see, Christianity is a religion of love. Islam is a religion of rules." To non-Muslims, the Koran is a splendid mixture of poetry, exhortation and commination, all the manifest product of the seventh century, when it was written. To the Muslim—especially the Muslim consciously returning to the roots of his faith, the Islamic radical of the 1990s—it is the definitive word of God. The word of God quite often needs explanation. So far, the explanation comes only from a small group of men who are certain they are competent to provide it. Islam is still living in the age of oligarchs, because it still believes in certainty. From the eating of an apple Democracy arose out of the renunciation of certainty, or at least the renunciation of the idea that one man could impose his certainty on another man. Democracy is the child of the Reformation, that great change within the Christian world which began at the start of the 16th century. The Reformation declared that every individual was responsible before God for the way he lived his life. Priests might say what they thought God wanted, but in the end it was the individual who decided. It took almost three centuries for that proposition to work its way through into the realm of politics, but when it did the result was, literally, revolutionary. Kings and oligarchs had to cede their claim to decide which was best for the people they governed. It was the people themselves who would decide. Each man and woman would have an equal voice in making the people's decision. That is democracy; and democracy, which first took widespread root in North America and Western Europe, has, since the death of the Marxist claim to certainty, faced no serious intellectual challenge anywhere in the world. Except, perhaps, in Islam. The Koran does have one or two apparent assertions of the primacy of individual responsibility: "No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another." But it turns out that this is not quite what a modern westerner means by responsibility. The dominant mood of the Koran is determinist. God decides, man accepts. From the same chapter as that previous quotation, ten verses earlier, comes: "God lets anyone he wishes go astray." "Islam", after all, means "submission". There may be a profound difference between the way Muslims have learnt to look at the world and the way the Christian-rooted West looks at it. To go back to those rival accounts of the beginning of everything, the story of Genesis, the Christian version makes it clear that what Adam and Eve did when they ate the forbidden fruit was to discover how to tell right from wrong. To have eaten fruit was Original Sin. But it also brought great responsibilities: "You shall be as gods," the serpent said to Adam and Eve, as the story is told to Christians, "knowing good and evil." The Koran's version has none of this. This eating of the fruit is just the breaking of a rule; God ticks Adam off, and that is that. There is no Original Sin, and no acquisition of the power to tell right from wrong. But many people would argue that that power is the basis of free will. Only when you can tell the difference between good and evil do you start to have the possibility of choosing between them. And from the concept of free will comes the idea of individual responsibility; and from that, through the curlicues of history, the practice of democracy. If readers are starting to murmur that this is high-faluting stuff, and The Economist ought to rename itself The Theologist, let them turn their minds back to the original problem. It is highly desirable that as many Muslim countries as possible should become democracies, both for the satisfaction of their own peoples and to improve the chances of Islam and the West living peaceably together. One large obstacle to this desirable outcome is the power of the scholars, that oligarchy of learned men who claim the right to decipher God's will. There is a whiff of the Pharisee about many of these people. They thank the Lord they are not as other men are. They like to announce their own certainty, and then expect everybody else to accept it. The chief weapon of the scholars is ijtihad, which means "interpretation" or "independent judgment". The Koran may be the voice of God, but only about 80 of its 6,000 verses lay down rules of public law, and not many of those 80 have obvious application to today's world. Interpretation is needed. Unfortunately, most Muslims are still willing to leave interpretation to the little band of self-appointed experts, and to believe that only their judgment is truly independent. It does not quite add up to a total monopoly. The scholars can, and often do, disagree among themselves. This can make it possible for governments to extract from the scholastic community the sort of decision they want. The Malaysian government plays the market between two scholarly institutions, Pusat Islam and the Institute of Islamic Understanding; in Cairo the liberal mufti of Egypt has his office almost next door to the more conservative sheikh of Al Azhar. But this does not solve the underlying problem. It moves the final decision-making power upwards, to the political bosses, not downwards, to the people, where it should belong. The scholars must de-monopolise To change that, something much more serious than playing off one scholar against another has to happen. It has to be accepted that every sane adult human being possesses independent judgment, and should be allowed to use it. The responsibility of the individual needs to be given its proper place: every man must indeed carry his own burden. It will take time for this to happen; no great shift in ideas comes overnight. But already a number of forward-looking Muslims are starting to argue the case for an opening up of Islam's thought-process. Abdullahi An-Naim, an adventurous Sudanese lawyer, put the point lucidly at a recent seminar in Kuala Lumpur. Muslims must start thinking of ijtihad, he said, not as the special right of a scholastic elite, but as a function of the whole people. The scholars must make themselves accountable to the people. The people have to be able to exercise the right to independent judgment, to the interpretation of what God permits and does not permit. To move into the world of democracy, in short, Islam needs its Reformation. Is there any reason to think it could be about to have one? Printable page E-mail this SURVEY: ISLAM AND THE WEST It is now the year 1415 Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition "And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done." —Kipling, "The Dawn Wind: the Fifteenth Century" AS IT happens, a Muslim called Jamal al-Din al-Afghani said more than a century ago that Islam needed its own Martin Luther, in order to break free from the dead hand of the scholars. Al-Afghani was a wild fellow, an early fundamentalist of the prickliest sort who irritated many of his fellow Muslims; so they did not pay much attention to his Luther idea. Yet he may have been prophetic. The more you look at Islam's 15th century, which on the Muslim count began a few years ago, the more it seems to have in common with the Christian 15th century, the period Europe went through shortly before the Reformation. History does not proceed by crude imitation, to be sure; but there are enough similarities to make a thoughtful observer start feeling hopeful. The Reformation check-list Item one: a simultaneous disillusionment with both the religious and the political apparatus of the old order. The great pre-Reformation wave of discontent in Europe was chiefly directed at the corrupt worldliness of the Catholic church, but it also had a political target. Economic misery and the growing high-handedness of government had lately produced Wat Tyler's rebellion in England and the Jacquerie in France. The resentment would not fade; disorder continued. The present wave of Islamic discontent is chiefly aimed at corrupt politicians who have run out of new ideas, but it also has a religious target. The official structure of the Muslim religion has grown dusty and quibbly, and too much of it backs those corrupt politicians. Some Muslims will tell you there is no comparison between the two periods, because Christianity and Islam are different in the way they are organised; Muslims have no priests, and nothing like the multi-layered hierarchy of the medieval church. They are right about the difference but wrong in the conclusion they draw form it. Islam's organisation is indeed much looser than that of most Christian churches, except perhaps among its 15% Shia minority. But in its imams and muftis and ulema it does have an official structure. To radicals longing to revive the old vigour of Islam, much of this structure seems weary, compromised and contemptible. Item two: an almost cosmic sense of despair. In Europe's early 15th century this was a result partly of the Black Death, which had recently killed a third of the population without warning or explanation, and partly of the disintegration of the Catholic church, which had two rival popes in Rome and Avignon. In Islam's early 15th century the causes are different. The reasons for despair come mainly from abroad—a long history of international defeat and humiliation, the current harrying of Muslims by so many of their neighbours, a growing sense of isolation. But the result is the same. Something, it seems, has gone appallingly wrong. The world has come to pieces. When people feel like that, they can do foolish and dangerous things. Item three: a powerful desire to put things right by going back to the roots of the faith. For the enthusiasts of Islamic revivalism, as for men like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus in the years before the start of the Reformation, going back to the roots means a return to the presumed simplicities of the early days of the religion, a new embrace of the religion's first writings. But it also means something else. The pre-Reformation period in Europe brought into being a multitude of sects, many of which saw it as their duty to preach and work among the poor. Now too, the Islamic revival has produced a large number of more or less autonomous groups, many of which make it their job to provide health clinics, canteens and basic schooling in the slum-suburbs of the big Muslim cities. A return to the roots includes a return to the idea of good works, of caring for the unfortunate: charity, zakat. Item four: an enriching stimulus from outside. The likeness here is remarkable. It deserves more attention than it usually gets. Jorgen Nielsen, the director of the Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations centre at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, England, points out that the Reformation was helped to its birth by two things which came to Europe from the outside world. One—nice irony—was Europe's cultural intercourse with the Arab empire, which brought Europe back into contact with its intellectual roots in classical Greece (and also brought the bonus of an introduction to the Arabs' own achievements in science and the arts). That helped to produce the Renaissance, which itself helped to bring about the Reformation. The second stimulus from outside was the discovery of America in 1492, and the import soon thereafter of American gold and silver, which destabilised the existing European economy but also offered the possibility of a much richer one. Both sorts of stimulus have their equivalent in today's Islam. For the gold and silver of the early 1500s, read oil. Massive purchases of Arab oil by the industrial world, especially after the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, have both destabilised much of Islam's existing economy and provided it with the possibility of greater riches. And for the medieval cultural inflow into Europe from the Arab empire—admirable counter-irony—read the inflow into Islam now of modern western culture and technology. In this combination are the possible makings of a great change. But good grief, say the sceptics, even if four similarities do make an Islamic Reformation, which is by no means certain, it will take far too long. From Renaissance to Reformation in Europe took roughly 150 years, from Reformation to the serious growth of democracy another 300. We cannot wait so many years. The answer is that we shall not have to. Things happen hugely faster these days. Ideas that in the Christian 15th century had to travel by sailing ship and horse, often getting twisted on the journey, now go zip from screen to screen. Even better, the people of today's Muslim countries are on the whole much readier to absorb new ideas than were 15th-century Europeans. A lot more of them have had an education; most have access to television; all of them know there is another world out there. And where would it come from? Which is where the eye turns back to Algeria, and that looming trans-Mediterranean mess. If things go badly wrong in North Africa, the hope of a more relaxed Islam and of a better understanding between Muslims and westerners will have to be postponed for years, perhaps for decades. But, if the worst can be avoided on the southern side of the Mediterranean, the prospects brighten. There is as good a chance that the hoped-for change within Islam will come from its revivalist radicals as from the emirs and generals and spent, second-rate politicians who still control too many of its countries; perhaps, indeed, a better chance. The angry men who made the Reformation in the West's 15th century thought they were turning back to the origins of their religion, when in fact they were creating something radically new. The same may prove true of the angry Muslims now calling for a return to the roots of their faith. There are two things to note about these people. Compared with the conservatives they oppose, these are for the most part men and women of modern education. A surprising number have university degrees, mostly in the physical and social sciences. In several countries they control many of the professional associations of doctors, engineers and so on. Second, these people seriously believe that they are in politics to help the man in the street. It is a not unhopeful combination. Of course, it does not guarantee that they will turn out to be good democrats. The Marxist-Leninist movement contained a lot of educated people who wanted to help the man in the street, and look where that ended up. But most Islamic radicals seem, on the admittedly limited evidence available to outsiders, to be considerably less rigid in their attitudes than Lenin's Communists ever were. Their parties are not built around the concept of "democratic centralism", which for Communists meant that the Politburo decided and the rest did what they were told. The members of Islamic parties can, and do, go on arguing with each other. And in several countries—Turkey, Jordan, Pakistan, Malaysia and to some extent Egypt—Islamic parties have been prepared to share the political system with non-Islamic parties, not (as Communists would have done) as a prelude to destroying them, but just to get as much of an Islamic flavour as possible into the country's life. Certainly, these people can sometimes be brutally intolerant, especially if they are arguing with guns in their hands; but their intolerance is not the systematised, more coldly thought-through kind the Communists perfected. Rashid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's Islamic movement (his party's name translates into English as "Renaissance Party"), is specific about his commitment to democracy. When his movement comes to power, as he expects it to do pretty soon, he promises that it will submit itself to a multi-party election within five years of taking office. Whoever wins the election will be allowed to become the government, even if the winner wants to overturn what the Renaissance Party has done in those five years. Easy words, perhaps, from a man looking for support in the West; but Mr Ghannouchi spells out why he thinks Islamic radicals like himself have no alternative to going the democratic way. Since the end of the cold war, he says, democracy has been the only coherent political system on offer. It will before long be practised, with varying degrees of efficiency, by most people in the world; and Muslims will feel rather foolish if they exclude themselves. Just as important, democracy will be the rooted political faith of the countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean with which those on the southern side have to do business, exporting their oil and wine and buying the fruits of a technological society in return. Business will be much easier to do if the business partners share the same sort of politics. Above all, countries run by Islamic governments will need democracy for their own orderly development. The governments will have to strike bargains with the doubters among their own people: Berbers in Algeria, Copts in Egypt, the semi-westernised middle class everywhere. Democracy is the only way of striking such bargains and making them stick. To be a successful Islamic radical may thus require being radical about the acceptance of democracy. Mr Ghannouchi is one of the sharper minds in North Africa, but this does not necessarily make his a representative voice. Yet he believes that other Islamic radicals are beginning to think as he does. The Muslim Brotherhood, strong in Egypt and Jordan, published on May 19th the movement's first collective commitment to pluralism, multi-party elections and the desirability of the alternation of government. Even Algeria's fundamentalists, bloodied though they have been by the war in that country, will in his view turn out to be democrats once they have experienced the realities of power. This, at any rate, is the case for wary optimism. Events will soon show whether it is right or wrong. It is now, in the moon-regulated calendar of Muslims, the year 1415. In the Christians' year 1415, at the Council of Constance, the conservatives who were trying to stamp out the beginnings of the Reformation burnt Jan Hus at the stake, and arranged for John Wycliffe's bones to be dug out of their English grave and tossed onto a fire. And yet, by 1436, a Hussite army had forced a first concession out of the conservatives; by the 1470s the printed bibles made possible by Gutenberg's press were spreading through Europe; by 1506 Zwingli was preaching in Switzerland; and in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. And, remember, things go much faster now. The hidden hand and the Hidden Hand Aug 4th 1994 From The Economist print edition What the West can do to help BUT there is, as ever, the other side of the coin. The previous four articles were about the ways in which Muslims may have to change if Islam and the West are to be reasonably congenial 21st-century companions. The West, however, also has a contribution to make. One part of that contribution is a matter of being clearer-eyed about what Europe and America wish to achieve in their relations with Islam. The other is a possible change in the West's own view of life, a change that would broaden the shared platform of ideas on which these two civilisations stand. The foreign-policy part consists of swallowing an uncomfortable fact, and then being ready to deal firmly with some problems that may refuse to go away even after the fact has been swallowed. The uncomfortable fact is that much of Islam is about to enter a period of political upheaval. Too many Muslim countries are non-democracies, and too many of these non-democracies have governments that combine being inefficient and unpopular with not really having a grip on the places they supposedly rule. The status quo is not going to last. Awkwardly, the status quo is convenient for the West, especially in western Islam, the region between the Gulf and the Atlantic. Europe and America have their understandings with most of the governments in this region, about oil and other matters, and do not like to think of a changed future. The possible consolation, if the preceding article is correct, is that the force most likely to displace many existing governments—the Islamic revival—could in the long run prove a stabler partner for the West. In the short run, though, the collapse of the status quo is going to produce some angry quarrels. When these endanger genuine western interests—a free market in oil, safe traffic in the air and on the sea, the security of decent allies—the West must be ready to defend those interests. The more visibly determined it is to defend them, the less likely that it will actually have to pull a trigger. But the West should be clear in its mind that, properly handled, these quarrels are merely the usual difficulties of a time of transition; and that the aim, when the transition is complete, should be an easier relationship with a modernised Islam. The need to de-atomise The second western contribution arises from the likelihood that this easier relationship will come sooner if the West can bring off an internal change of its own. This survey began by saying that Islam is not necessarily, as most westerners currently assume, the late 20th century's odd man out. On the contrary, it may contain a concept that encourages the West to rediscover a similar concept from its own past. The section on Islamic economics suggested one aspect of what this might be. A free market, say Muslims, is not a market that can or should operate without any sort of constraint. It has to live within certain non-economic rules. As it happens, some of the thinking now going on in the West is inclined to agree with this. It has become a commonplace to say that the grand idea which defeated communism and won the cold war—free-market democracy—was not after all a single, indivisible idea. It was a coalition between two ideas that were held together by the cold war's discipline but are now, with the cold war over, free to resume their argument with each other. Both ideas accept that individual judgment and individual effort are the necessary starting-point of all human endeavour. But then they diverge. One prefers to leave the energy of individuals as unrestricted as possible, because this maximises efficiency. The other would like to get everybody to accept a set of rules within which individual energies have to operate, so as to encourage people to do things for each other and to protect those who cannot (as distinct from will not) operate as efficiently as others can. Call this the new left. It is the new left that should now be looking to Islam with an interested gleam in its eye. From this point of view, life in the late-20th-century western world seems increasingly atomised. At work, new technologies mean that many people now spend most of their time operating as individual units rather than as members of a team. At home, a steadily growing proportion of the ways in which they entertain themselves are similarly individualised, often in the physical semi-isolation of a personal-stereo headpiece or fiddling with a virtual-reality computer screen. The effects of the atomisation of labour and leisure are magnified by the breakdown of the family—40% of households in the United States now comprise either people living alone or families headed by a single parent—and by the past century's transfer of population from small towns to big cities, which for many people curiously seems to make life lonelier rather than more gregarious. Now new theories of the extra efficiency to be achieved by greater labour mobility may be about to reduce even further the already technology-diminished feeling of companionship that comes from working with the same people for a long time. The price of atomisation is paid, in one way or another, by almost everybody. As time goes by people may gradually adjust themselves to these more individualised ways of making money and spending it; but not many of them have adjusted yet. The effect shows in their relations with each other: in a reduced sense of belonging together. When the sense of belonging together fades, people can grow more callous and more violent. The means of violence, such as guns, are meanwhile becoming more readily available and more affordable. So are the things that tend to reduce self-control, such as alcohol and drugs. Life for most people in the West is in many ways far more enjoyable than it was a century ago, before farm labourers and factory hands had become a vast new middle class. But now this new middle class is starting to suspect that life has suddenly become, in unforeseen ways, more brutal and more hazardous. This is why it is beginning to be argued that the West must find a way of putting individual initiative, the necessary driving-force of progress, within a shaping moral order, which is the only way of defining what the word "progress" means. The shaping force may be a religion, requiring belief in a God, or it may be a purely secular consensus about what is acceptable and what is not. Either way, it has to have the cheerful consent of those who live under it. Something of the sort is essential. Otherwise, the history books will record that the people of the West woke up during the 21st century to discover that the pursuit of efficiency was not the same as the achievement of a happy life. The West, they will say, found itself living in a superbly efficient but, in the end, aimless machine. Easier said than done, of course. The would-be builders of a new left readily admit that they are only at the first stage of the proceedings, which is to define what they think is wrong with the present state of affairs. No matter: that, after all, is how most big changes begin. But they are reasonably clear about how what they are hoping to do will fit into the long cycle of history that began with the Reformation in the early 1500s. The nudge in the ribs The Reformation released the great surge of individualism that created the modern West, including what we now call capitalism and democracy. But for the first two centuries after the Reformation this new dynamo of individualism operated inside a still generally accepted body of Christian discipline. Then, in the 18th century, the era of the Enlightenment, this sort of discipline began to break down. People started to believe that the human mind alone was capable of answering any question. Humankind was self-sufficient. The age of scientific certainty had begun, including Marx's disastrous claim in the 19th century to have discovered scientific certainty in politics. Now the collapse of the Marxist claim to certainty has left the swirl of individual energy without any moral guidance in matters of politics and economics. The task of a new political radicalism, says the new left, is to reinvent a moral order. To much of which Muslims will reply: Welcome back. The distinguishing feature of Islam, which at the moment separates it from all of today's other would-be global cultures, is its belief not only that man's day-to-day visible life is surrounded by an invisible life but also that the two have to be kept in connection with each other. The West held the same combination of beliefs until not long ago; but at some time during the present century most people in Europe, and many Americans, have ceased to make such a connection. If the West puts the two together again, it may have a better chance of solving its own problems. It will also have narrowed the gap between itself and the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. The differences between the two civilisations will still be large. They had their origins, long ago, in conflicting views about the way God chose to introduce himself to man. The paths they have followed since then have often wandered far apart, and sometimes bloodily crossed. They are not about to converge. But the distance between them would diminish, and the risk of misunderstanding be less, if Islam and the West no longer regarded each other as, respectively, amoral and fanatic. And it would be a fine rounding off of ironies if Muslims could claim that they helped to nudge the West back on course. If they did, tomorrow's historians would record, first, that contact with Muslims helped to bring about the West's great leap forward out of the Middle Ages: second, that western influence 500 years later helped Islam to modernise itself; and, final exchange of courtesies, that Islam then reminded the West of the common underpinning of what they both stand for. It would be an apt end to too long a quarrel between cousins. With the very best of good wishes, Musa Amadu Pembo Glasgow, Scotland UK. [log in to unmask] May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. Ameen