Reference: [Road To Mekkah - Auto biography of Muhammad Asad]
Muhammad Asad having a discussion with his western friend. Muhammad
Asad is of the view that westerners take Islam as alien because of their lack
of insight towards Islam, it’s the same Graeco-Roman mode of thought which
divided the world into Greeks and Romans on one side and 'barbarians' on the
other was still thoroughly ingrained in the Western mind that it was unable to
concede, even theoretically, positive value to anything that lay outside its
own cultural orbit
'Naturally,
such a narrowed angle of vision is bound to produce a distorted perspective.
Accustomed as he is to writings which depict the culture or discuss the
problems of his own civilization in great detail and in vivid colors, with
little more than side glances here and there at the rest of the world, the
average European or American easily succumbs to the illusion that the cultural
experiences of the West are not merely superior but out of all proportion to
those of the rest of the world; and thus, that the Western way of life is the
only vivid norm by which other ways of life could be adjudged - implying, of
course, that every intellectual concept, social institution or ethical
valuation that disagrees with the Western 'norm' belongs to a lower grade of
existence'.
'Granted,'
he said, 'the ancient Greeks and Romans were limited in their approach to
foreign civilizations: but was not this limitation the inevitable result of
difficulties of communication between them and the rest of the world? And has
not this difficulty been largely overcome nowadays with what is going on
outside our own cultural orbit. Aren't you forgetting the many books about
Oriental art and philosophy that have been published in Europe and America
during the last quarter-century… about the political ideas that preoccupy the
minds of Eastern peoples? Surely on couldn’t with justice overlook this deside
on the part of Westerner to understand what other cultures might have to
offer?'
'To some
extent you may be right', I replied. 'There is little doubt that the primitive
Graeco-Roman outlook is no longer fully operative these days. Its harshness has
been considerably blunted - if for no other reason, because the more mature
among Western thinkers have grown disillusioned and skeptical about many
aspects of their own civilization and now begin to look to other parts of the
world for cultural inspiration. Upon some of them it is dawning that there may
be not only one book and one story of human progress, but many: simply because
mankind, in the historical sense, is not a homogenous entity, but rather a
variety of groups with widely divergent ideas as to the meaning and purpose of
human life. Still, I do not feed that the West has really become less
condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has
only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam - only toward certain
other Eastern cultured, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the
spirit hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western
world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.'
'What do
you mean by that?'
'Well, ' I
answered, 'when a Westerner discusses, say, Hinduism or Buddhism, he is always
conscious of the fundamental differences between these ideologies and his own.
He may admire this or that of their ideas, but would naturally never consider
the possibility of substituting them for his own. Because he a priori admits this impossibility, he is able
to contemplate such really alien cultures with equanimity and often with
sympathetic appreciation. But when it comes to Islam - which is by no means as
alien to Western values as Hindu or Buddhist philosophy this Western equanimity
is almost invariably disturbed by an emotional bias. Is it perhaps, I sometimes
wonder, because the values of Islam are close enough to those of the West to
constitute a potential challenge to many Western concepts of spiritual and
social life?'
And I went
on to tell him of a theory which I had conceived some years ago - a theory that
might perhaps help one to understand better the deep-seated prejudice against
Islam so often to be found in Western literature and contemporary thought.
'To find a
truly convincing explanation of this prejudice,' I said, 'one has to look far
backward into history and try to comprehend the phychological background of the
earliest relations betweem the Western and the Muslim worlds. What occidentals
think and feel about Islam today is rooted in impressions that were born during
the Crusades.'
'The
Crusades!' exclaimed my friend. 'You don’t mean to say that what happened
nearly a thousand years ago could still have an effect on people of the
twientieth century?'
'But it
does! I know it sounds incredible; but don’t you remember the incredulity which
greeted the early discoveries of the psychoanalysts when they tried to show
that much of the emotional life of a mature person - and most of those
seemingly unaccountable leaning, tastes and prejudices comprised in the term
'idiosyncrasies' - can be traced back to the experiences of his most formative
age, his early childhood? Well, are nations and civilizations anything but
collective individuals? Their development also is bound up with the experiences
of their early childhood. As with children, those experiences may have been
pleasant or unpleasant; they may have been perfectly rational or,
alternatively, due to the child's naïve misinterpretation of an event: the
moulding effect of every such experience depends primarily on its original
intensity. The century immidiately preceding the Crusades era, might well be
described as the early childhood of Western civilization...'
I proceeded
to remind my friend - himself an historian - that this had been the age when,
for the first time since the dark centuries that followed the breakup of
Imperial Rome, Europe was beginning to see its own cultural way. Independently
of the almost forgotten Roman heritage, new literatures were just then coming
into existence is the European vernaculars; inspired by the religious
experience of Western Christianity, fine arts were slowly awakening from the
lethargy caused by the warlike migrations of the Goths, Huns and Avars; out of
the crude conditions of the early Middle Ages, a new cultural world was
emerging, It was at that critical, extremely sensitive stage of its development
that Europe received its most formidable shock - in modern parlance a 'trauma'
- in the shape of the Crusades.
The
Crusades were the strongest colletive impression on a civilization that had
just begun to be conscious of itself. Historically speaking, they represented
Europe's earliest - and entirely succesful - attempt to view itself under the
aspect of cultural unity. Nothing that Europe has experienced before or after
could compare with the enthusiasm which the First Crusade brought into being. A
wave of intoxication swept over the Continent, an elation which for the first
time overstepped the barriers between states and tribes and classes. Before
then, there had been Franks and Saxons and Germans, Burgundians and Sicilians,
Normans and Lombards - a medley of tribes and races with scarcely anything in
common but the fact that most of their feudal kingdoms and principalities were
remnants of the Roman Empire and that all of them professed the Christian
faith: but in the Crusades, and through them, the religious bond was elevated
to a new plane, a cause common to all Europeans alike - the politico- religious
concept of 'Christendom', which in its turn gave birth to the cultural concept
of 'Europe'. When, in his famous speech at Clermont, in November, 1095, Pope
Urban II exhorted the Christians to make war upon the 'wicked race' that held
the Holy Land, he enunciated - probably without knowing it himself - the
charter of Western civilization.
The
traumatic experience of the Crusades gave Europe its cultural awareness and its
unity; but this same experience was destined henceforth also to provide the
false colour in which Islam was to appear to Western eyes. Not simpy because
the Crusades meant war and bloodshed. So many wars have been waged between
nations and subsequently forgotten, and so many animosities which in their time
seemed ineradicable have later turned into friendships. The damage caused by
the Crusades was not restricted to a clash of weapons: it was, first and
foremost, an intellectual damage - the poisoning of the Western mind against
the Muslim world through a deliberate misrepresentation of the teachings and
ideals of Islam. For, if the call for a crusade was to maintain its validity,
the Prophet of the Muslims (S.A.W.) had, of necessity, to be stamped as the
Anti-Christ and his religion depicted in the most lurid terms as a fount of
immorality and perversion. It was at the time of the Crusades that the
ludicrous notion that Islam was a religion of crude sensualism and brutal
violence, of an observance of ritual instead of a purification of the heart,
entered the Western mind and remained there; and it was then that the name of
the Prophet Muhammad(S.A.W.) - the same Muhammad(S.A.W.) who had insisted that
his own followers respect the prophets of other religions - was contemptuously
transformed by Europeans into 'Mahound'. The age when the spirit of independent
inquiry could raise its head was as yet far distant in Europe; it was easy for
the powers that were to sow the dark seeds of hatred for a religion and
civilization that was so different from the religion and civilization of the
West. Thus it was no accident that the fiery Chanson de Roland, which describes
the legendary victory of Christendom over the Muslim 'heathen' in southern
Franch, was composed not at the time of those battles but three centuries later
- to wit, shortly before the First Crusade - immediately to become a kind of
'national anthem' of Europe; and it is no accident, either, that this warlike
epic marks the beginning of a European literature, as distinct from the
earlier, localized literatures: for hostility toward Islam stood over the
cradle of European civilization.
It would
seem an irony of history that the age-old Western resentment against Islam,
which was religious in origin, should still persist subconsciously at a time
when religion has lost most of its hold on the imagination of Western man.
This, however, is not really surprising. We know that a person may completely
lose the religious beliefs imparted to him in his childhood while,
nevertheless, some particular emotion connected with those beliefs remains,
irrationally, in force throughout his later life -
' - and
this,' I concluded, 'is precisely what happened to that collective personality,
Western civilization. The shadow of the Crusades hovers over the West to this
day; and all its reactions towards Islam and the Muslims world bear distinct
traces of that die-hard ghost...'
My friend
remained silent for a long time, I can still see his tall, lanky figure pacing
up and down the room, his hands in his coat pockets, shaking his head as if
puzzled, and finally saying: 'There may be something in what you say… indeed,
there may be, although I am not in a position to judge your theory offhand… But
in my case, in the light of what you yourself have just told me, don’t you
realize that your life, which to you seems so very simple and uncomplicated,
must appear very strange and unusual to Westerners? Could you not perhaps share
some of your own experiences with them? Why don’t you write you autobiography?
I am sure it would make fascinating reading!'
Laughingly
I replied: 'Well, I might perhaps let myself be persuaded to leave the Foreigh
Service and write such a book. After all, writing is my original profession...'
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