Alexis Brizzi | 19:13, 25 October 2009

Islam in Europe is a hot topic. The Turkish EU membership candidacy often triggers passionate debates about Islam place in Europe. The headscarf ban in public places in France and some marginal Muslim communities in the UK asking for the Sharia law to be used as the neighborhood’s legal framework have also had their fair amount of buzz and tense debates among the European citizens and elsewhere. Beyond the current debates and the emotional media coverage, this modest article will strive to look at Islam interaction with Europe through the prism of History before considering what is at stake for Europe in (re)-defining its relationship with Islam in the 21^st century.

Part I – How the Islamic Civilization influenced Europe, the asymmetric evolution of Europe & Islam through the ages and the Western liabilities.

Islam has influenced and been part of Europe. Either through the conquest and occupation of territories (Spain, South France, Sicilia, Eastern Europe) or through the spread of knowledge and culture, the old continent partly owes its Renaissance to medieval Islam. For Medieval Islam was all but obscurantist as opposed to medieval Western Europe between the fall of the Imperium Romanum and the 12^th century. At the time of the crusaders it was the Islamic civilization that brought back to Europe the once lost Greek legacy through translations from Arabic to Latin of Hellenist works that were preserved in Persian and Arabic libraries. The likes of Averroes (from Andalusia under the Ummayad Caliphate; 1126 – 1198) and Avicenna (from Persia; 980 – 1037) are the most common examples  to illustrate well documented medieval Islam influence upon Europe. Averroes who is thought as the forefather of secularism in Europe and Avicenna who brought tremendous progress in medicine (The Canon of medicine) produced many “chef d’oeuvre” in various subjects ranging from philosophy to science, theology and arts. Many of these works were translated in Latin and spread throughout Europe. It’s not a wonder that the first hospital to ever exist in Paris came in as an inspiration from the Islamic civilization when Charles IX returned from the 1254-1260 crusades or that the Canon of medicine was used in European universities as late as the 17^th century. In terms of tolerance and cosmopolitanism the Muslim civilization was also much more open than its European peers. While Spain was expelling its whole Jewish community at the end of the 15th  century under the orthodox Inquistion the Ottoman Caliphate sheltered many of them in the Balkans and Greece within a mosaic of numerous religions.

From Copernicus to Newton to Descartes and many others, the knowledge retransmitted and developed by the Islamic civilization held sway in drawing a favorable context for the emergence of the European Renaissance and the 18^th century Age of Enlightenment.

There is an interesting parallel between the ascent of the Islamic civilization while Europe was going through the dark ages and religious austerity on one hand and, the gradual fall of Islam as a leading civilization during the ascent of modern Europe as the gravitational center of the world. While medieval Islam is seen by many as the golden days and the age of enlightenment of the Islamic civilization, today’s Islam as depicted in mainstream Western medias seem lackluster, backwards, heavily politicized and remind us of our own medieval times. Irony is that medieval Islam in essence would certainly appear much more modern and tolerant to nowadays Europeans.

From the 12^th century on the Islamic civilization progressively lost its influence and role as a leading civilization. Bagdad sacked by the Mongols hordes, the fall of the Abbasid and Ummayad dynasties, the gradual gravitational shift of commerce, science and arts center from the Mediterranean basin to the Atlantic side of Western Europe between the Renaissance and modern times and, the fall of the Ottoman Empire which marked the end of the last Caliphate as a result of World War I defeat; All these events contributed to a certain sense of a decaying civilization along with a strong resentment which was first nurtured under the colonial era led by the French and British in North Africa and the Middle East and which culminated through the post world war 2 Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and the Arab repeated defeats and humiliation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the major vector of what is perceived in the Muslim world as the Americano-Israeli bully alliance. Under such conditions, combined to poor education, wide spread poverty, nation states with failed social contract and feeble authoritative kingdoms, political Islam found a benign ground to thrive.

Radical ideologies growth and spread seriously accelerated during the 20^th century.  In 1928 the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, among other groups, marked the rise of radical transnational Islam giving birth to global vocations. Pan Islamism was also a response to pan Arabism in a race to gather transcending momentum across the factitious borders once drawn by colonial powers. The Iraq versus Iran conflict materialized this relentless regional auction of ideologies into a decade long deadly war. On one hand Saddam Hussein the secular head of the Pan Arabic Baath party, on the other hand the Ayatolla Khomeiny and the Iranian Islamic revolution (with an international agenda) enjoying the image of  the liberator of the Iranian people from the Western imposed secular and authoritative Monarchy (previously democratically elected Iranian leader Mosaddeq was toppled by the CIA upon British recomendation in 1953 – The Sha of Iran, more favorable to Western interests, was established and firmly held power until 1979 when the Iranian revolution overthrew him). Long before Iran had its Shia revolution the Sunnis had their radical branch of their own making with Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia. As one of the most radical branches of Political Islam it preaches the Jihad (holy war) and the purge of Islam from what is seen as a decadent moral and political weakness. The oil-rich kingdom openly finances Madrasah (Islamic schools) to spread the Wahhabi ideology all over the Muslim world including the key spots such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As the Franco-Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb puts it in his book La maladie de l’Islam: “If, as Voltaire wrote, intolerance was the great disease of Catholicism, if the Nazi ideology was Germany’s disease, then fundamentalism is Islam’s disease”. Yet while Abdelwahab Meddeb thoroughly traces back the roots of political Islam to the prophet days he also rightly point out the Western liability in the process, thus making the West partly responsible for the surge of Political Islam in modern times. Indeed, in many cases, local radical Islam was a useful pawn of the Western foreign policies on the global chessboard. A blatant example is the Afghanistan war during the 80’s when the USA, via their proxy: the Pakistani secret services, armed and trained the Afghan guerrilla to fight the Soviets occupation. Political Islam was played off against Communism, at that time the Jihad was not a Western concern, rather a useful springboard to stall Communism advance in central Asia. The USA did not know yet that the tactic would ultimately backfire! Another example concerns Indonesia (the most populous Muslim country), during the 60’s right in the middle of the cold war, the CIA organized a coup d’état in Indonesia to topple Sukarno and his left wing allies in order to stop the spread of communism in South East Asia (to avoid the famous “Domino Effect” theory). It was only to replace him with Suharto a pro-Islam military dictator and populist who committed genocide in East Timor. Nowadays, Al-Qaeda – of which some executives were former direct or undirect Western regional allies at the time of the cold war – and its numerous more or less connected mimicking sub-cells represent the essence of the most radical transnational political Islam movement. It is threatening the very unstable crescent region stretching from the South East Asia through the Middle East to North Africa, from Bali to Mumbai to Alger, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.