The Albright Reporter: The Middle East

In such an environment, teaching or studying about the Middle East and Islam is reduced to an exercise in knowing one’s enemy. As valuable as such an exercise is for certain purposes (obviously the U.S. military needs interpreters, intelligence officers, and others with relevant language skills and other specialized training), it should not be the sole or primary focus of academic study of the Middle East, Islam, or any other region or religion. But even if one rejects the idea of a “clash,” it is still misleading to conceive of “Islam” and “the West” as hermetically sealed “civilizations” in isolation from one another. It is perhaps too much to argue as some do for the existence of an “Islamo-Christian” civilization, but certainly Muslim and Christian societies have been in close contact — sometimes cooperatively, sometimes conflictually — for centuries.

To take a familiar example, late-medieval European philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas were frank in admitting their debts to Muslim philosophers, scientists, and mathe-maticians, and it is clear that the transmission of classical learning to Europe by Muslims who built upon the ideas of Aristotle and Galen helped pave the way for the European Renais-sance. Perhaps more practically, if “Islam” were ever separate from “the West,” it is no more, as the estimated six million American Muslims indicate.

These of course are just a few of the common misperceptions about the part of the world I study, and I haven’t addressed at all the equally important issue of Middle Eastern misperceptions of America. But hopefully I’ve identified some obstacles to be overcome in seeking to understand the region.

Once we begin to confront our mispercep-tions, we can begin to move on to wider and deeper understanding.

Geoffrey D. Schad, PhD., assistant professor in history, specializes in Middle Eastern, Islamic and world history. His most recent publication is the essay “Competing Forms of Globalization in the Middle East: From the Ottoman Empire to the Nation State, 1918-67,” in Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local, edited by A.G. Hopkins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Photos: Minarets (shown above) were added to Mosque architecture both for embellishment and for functionality. High up in the minaret, muezzin calls to prayer (adhan) could be heard from much further away.

Photo of Dr. Schad: John Pankratz

Once we begin to confront our misperceptions, we can begin to move on to wider and deeper understanding.

“Islam is the answer” is another common misperception. But despite the rising promi-nence of Islamist political organizations in recent decades, “Islam” is not a monolith and is not the sole cause of actions by Muslims, any more than “Christianity” explains everything that Europeans do or say. In fact, it would be hard for “Islam” to be just one thing, since it is a multifaceted faith followed by more than a billion people worldwide and one which, significantly, lacks a central hierarchy to fix doctrine. As in other faiths, many Muslims are only nominally or culturally so, while others are very pious.

Across this broad spectrum of observance, Muslims disagree about a great many things. Even those who argue for a more prominent public or political role for Islam disagree as to the precise meaning of that call. Many if not most Muslim-majority countries have secular governments or ones that pay only lip service to Islamic precepts. What motivates Muslims are the same things that motivate everyone else. Some Muslims express their grievances and hopes in religious language while others use the rhetoric of nationalism, socialism, or any number of other ideologies.

The focus on Islam (or religion more generally) as a principal or sole motivator for Middle Easterners’ actions, and the notion that Islam or the Middle East is utterly alien, lie at the root of the “clash of civilizations” misperception. Mercifully, few people except those with a vested interest in it (for example, Usama bin Ladin and the al-Qa’ida leadership) seem to believe in it, at least according to a recent BBC poll. But it is perhaps the most dangerous of misperceptions: if “Islam” and “the West” are doomed to fight one another, then there is little point in seeking to avert conflict.