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Over the past decade
religion has come back with a vengeance.
When an American political scientist predicted that the post-cold-war
world faced a clash of civilisations, he saw the struggle ahead largely in
religious terms. Since September
11 2001, many people would now agree with him. Almost entirely neglected as a factor in world politics
before the Berlin wall came down, religion is now invoked to explain most of the
pressing issues of the day - the rise of ethnic conflict from the Balkans to Bombay, for
instance, the emergence of al-Qaeda and the European Union's uncertain
embrace of Turkey.
Yet not everyone's
beliefs, it seems, are equally worthy of mention. Recent discussions of the sources of political instability
in the Middle East talk in terms of a clash between Islam and modernity.
Modernity, note, rather than Christianity.
The west, having woken up belatedly to religion's significance in
international affairs, sees this in asymmetrical terms: Christianity is not regarded as part of the
problem, while Islam most certainly is.
What else can explain the ubiquitous use of that strange and
misleading term "the Islamic world"?
The current
fascination with Islam has not been accompanied by a public understanding of
its influence upon politics.
Muslims live in a huge variety of states and the role of sharia law in these varies widely. The second and third largest Muslim populations in the world are in countries - India and China - where they form a relatively small minority.
In the Middle East, most states have a mixed legal system inherited from colonial
times and in every case the clergy shares power with, when it is not
subservient to, whoever controls the government. Levels of democracy are appallingly low but it is hard to argue that this is
because Muslims live in theocracies.
In many cases, religion has provided an ideology of internal
opposition.
As for the issue of
fundamentalism, this is scarcely the monopoly of any one religion.
A term originally created to account for Protestant theologians'
troubled response to Darwin is now applied too easily to the violence of
Muslim extremists. Yet Islam, a
creed with at least two main branches, multiple established schools of legal
interpretation and no universally acknowledged ecclesiastical leader, would seem in itself to allow as much
latitude for debate about how its theology should be applied to the modern
world as any other main faith.
The real problem is
not so much our exaggeration of the importance of other religions in
international conflicts as it is the invisibility - in our eyes at least - of Christianity and
its legacy on western perceptions and policies. The US's self-definition as "God's own country"
seems as anachronistic as Guizot's belief that Europe was marching in step with the
divine will.
The Enlightenment
equated religion with reaction and obscurantism and accustomed us to a notion
of progress in which the triumph of reason would mean religion's
abandonment. Since the 1950s, an increasingly
secularised west has come to see global change - to put it simply - as a universal process of evolution from
traditional to modern societies.
Given time, luck, good management and some development assistance, even
the poorest countries would eventually be able to effect this transformation.
The inhabitants of the west were assumed to be rational individuals, whose personal
beliefs could have no discernible impact upon the shape of their societies, while more backward societies were defined
precisely through their enslavement to religious faith and collective loyalties rather than individualism.
Culture was what they
had, before they emancipated themselves through force of reason.
The frequently made contrast between Islam and modernity thus turns
out to tell us more about our own expectations than it does about Islam. The problem of why Islam should find
modernity troubling is no more a real problem than that of why Buddhism and
Confucianism apparently do not.
This way of looking
at other people's faiths is in fact not very different from the viewpoint of the
waves of Christian missionaries sent out from the west since the 16th century.
They were convinced of the efficacy of their Revelation and their duty to
enlighten the less fortunate.
What startled those they came to preach among was not their conviction
of superiority - which religion would deny its superiority? - but rather
their arrogance in forcing their views upon others and their willingness
to provoke public disorder by their preaching.
The Boxer Rebellion in China was the best-known expression of native
anger but resistance of one kind or another was widespread.
The direct impact of the missionaries was limited: on the
whole, they converted few souls and alienated their own diplomats as well as
foreigners. But, indirectly,
their effect was unmistakable.
They transmitted models of western learning through their schools that
were then taken up across the world.
And, perhaps even more importantly, they exerted an indefinable but
substantial influence on the way their own countrymen and women viewed the lands they
wrote about. Missionary accounts
of Africa and the Levant left their mark upon late-19th-century Great Power
diplomacy. Gladstone's campaign
to roll back Ottoman rule from the Balkans was largely inspired by his
religious convictions, while during the first world war, the Entente powers
continued their traditional role as protectors of the Ottoman Christians. Their diplomatic protest to the Porte
in 1915 to protest the massacres of Armenians talked at first about
international outrage at these crimes against "Christendom", until
cooler heads prevailed in western chancelleries and the religious note was
replaced by a reference to humanity.
In the 20th century, Christian influence was felt in the League of Nations, and even in the US Foreign Service, which became a home to many
missionaries' sons. Today,
evangelical groups close to George W. Bush, the US president, have their own apocalyptic goals in the Middle East; it would be a
brave man to say they are not making an impression on American policy.
There is no point in
exaggerating. Germany's hesitation over admitting Turkey into the
European Union cannot, for example, be attributed solely or even mainly to
Christian suspicions of a Muslim country. Nor will religion take us terribly far in understanding
current American or British policy in the Middle East: political, economic and strategic
concerns outweigh religious ideology.
But if this is so obvious, let us try to recognise the limitations of
this approach more generally and be a little wary of invoking it as an
explanation for the woes of the world.
If we persist in
referring to the Muslim world, we had best get used to talking about Christendom, too.
But in fact it would be better to drop both terms and start thinking
and talking instead in a more self-aware fashion about what part religion
really does play in global affairs.
The
writer is professor of history at Birkbeck College, London
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