Islam and the West(s)

Last updated on: June 17, 2020 at 12:17 pm by Dan Peterson

Islam and the West(s) 2020-06-17T12:17:35-06:00 Dan Peterson

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I share here, from my notes, a passage that I liked in Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, translated by George Holoch (New York City: Columbia University Press 2007. It is significant, given his themes, that the book’s original 2005 French title is Laïcité face à l’islam:

Islam’s encounter with the West is as old as Islam itself. The first Muslim minorities living under Western Christian domination date back to the eleventh century (in Sicily). Yet the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a distinctively new phenomenon: the massive, voluntary settlement in Western societies of millions of Muslims coming from Muslim societies across the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The West has also witnessed the development of an indigenous trend of religious conversion (as in the case of the Nation of Islam). . . . Socioeconomic problems, cultural issues, and political tensions related to terrorism or the conflicts in the Middle East converge around the question: Is Islam compatible with the West? Of course, this question rests on an essentialist worldview, according to which there is one Islam, on the one hand, and one Western world, on the other hand. From that perspective, the West is allegedly defined by a set of values (freedom of expression, democracy, separation of church and state, human rights, and, especially, women’s rights). But a problem immediately arises. Are these Christian values? Is the opposition between Islam and the West derived from the fact that the West is Christian? Or is it rather because the West is secularized and no longer locates religion at the heart of its self-definition? Is it Christianity or secularism that makes the West so distinct?

The relation between secularism and Christianity is complex. Either one defines the West in Christian terms, or one defines it in reference to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, human rights, and democracy that developed against the Catholic Church, through first the Protestant Reformation, then the Enlightenment, and finally a secular and democratic ideal. If the Catholic Church has always fought secularism and the separation of church and state (at least until the beginning of the twentieth century), Protestantism has played a more complex role by defending a sort of religious civil society in which the separation of church and state is seen as a necessary condition for a genuine religious revival. Secularization therefore proceeds differently in Catholic and Protestant societies — against faith in the former, along with faith in the latter — to such an extent that it is difficult to talk about the West. (vii-viii)

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