What the West Doesn’t Owe Islam

Abstract

Globalization has brought more and more peoples and societies around the world into contact with international standards of law, commerce, and communication. That process has also enabled a number of formerly underdeveloped societies to experience extraordinary patterns of economic growth, especially in the last third of the twentieth century. For some scholars the rise of Asian economies during this period has suggested an impending Pacific Century along with the thought that, after all, Asian societies such as China must have hidden cultural resources that enabled them to make the modernizing turn that apparently did not conform to Western models of the past.1 In part, as a reaction to these developments, North America and to some extent Europe experienced the flowering of multiculturalism, which includes the view that all peoples and societies are equal.2 Sometimes this point of view has been taken to mean that all peoples everywhere are the same. One scholar called this uniformitarianism, as it allows little room for alternative life choices and life ways: everyone is deemed to be identical in their habits and wishes.3 From either an anthropological or historical perspective, uniformitarianism is a highly unlikely claim, but it has been assimilated into the multicultural viewpoint. Furthermore, such a perspective has led still others to assume that if Europe was undergoing rapid economic development in the past, a scientific revolution, and an enlightenment, then other parts of the world must have been experiencing similar developments prior to the twentieth century. This is a myth, though prevailing sentiments do not approve of casting a critical eye on those (non-)developments from the seventeenth century onward in other parts of the world. To do so is said to be Eurocentric. But if Asian and South Asian development seems to be real in economic terms, the Islamic world - especially the Middle East - has not shown such a dashing path of development over the twentieth century, either economically or politically. Indeed, the rise of political Islam and its many jihadist offshoots reveals a civilization torn apart, with the spillover bringing serious acts of terrorism to Europe and America. Nevertheless, there are a few writers who manage to see elements of positive development in the history of the Muslim world that may have influenced Europe-inthe-making. If some of these writers do not see major Islamic influences on culture, they at least claim parallel development. Traces and Parallels: An Islamic Legacy? For example, Maria Rosa Menocal finds evidence of poetic influences on European subjectivity and perhaps images of self flowing from Arabic to medieval troubadours.4 However, this debate has raged for centuries. Without examining the details about how this was said to have occurred, it is surely a stretch to imagine that medieval poetry - rhymed or not - contributed anything significant to the political, legal, and scientific foundations of Europe as a civilization. With all due respect to Petrarch and the many other scholars who sought the key to modern Europe in language and poetry, it seems unlikely that the hidden soul of Europe can be found in pre-modem poetry, with or without Arabic influences.5 A somewhat more plausible suggestion has been signaled by the title of George Saliba's Islamic Science and the Making of the Renaissance.6 This 2007 work concerns itself almost entirely with Islamic astronomy and the possibility that Arab astronomers, especially Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375) and Nasir al-din al-Tusi (d. 1274), influenced, rather indirectly, Copernican astronomical models. Some commentators claim that the connection between Ibn al-Shatir' s models and those of Copernicus has been proved, when in fact no one has shown that Copernicus had access to manuscripts written by al-Shatir, nor indeed those of al-Tusi, never mind that Copernicus did not read Arabic. …