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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
While I have no problem with the realization on the part of Atzmon and Sardar that there is a real problem with how the term Enlightenment is casually flung like a spear against Muslims, this usage typically confuses the European (or Christian Enlightenment), which commences with the publication of Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, with the Jewish Enlightenment (or Haskoloh), which begins around 1780.
The two Enlightenments overlap particularly in the person of Moses Mendelssohn, but the Christian Enlightenment is dead by the end of the Napoleonic wars while the Jewish Enlightenment persists, moves east, incorporates ideas of romantic nationalism as well as radical revolution, and then colonizes in the English-speaking world.
With increasing Jewish intellectual, social, political, economic, and cultural dominance in the West, a Jewish-Zionist or Judaized version of Enlightenment terminology has resurfaced to serve as a club against Islam and especially Western Muslims, but these terms in the mouths of Neocons, Zionists, and most Jewish intellectuals really have little connection to the Christian Enlightenment.
For the record, Gilad's description of Jewish self-affection probably corresponds most to corrupt Jewish social networking in my terminology.
Sardar is not my favorite Muslim intellectual, for not only does he have a tendency to write truly mindless and ignorant nonsense: Some Thoughts on "Islamic Terror" for Professional anti-Islamists like Pipes, but he has practically no grasp on Muslim, Christian, or Jewish intellectual history.
His discourse on the relationship between Deobandism and Wahhabism and Arab-Islamic political thought is childish: The Struggle for Islam's Soul.
While Volney wrote some nasty things about Islam, he does not define the Christian Enlightenment. Voltaire was for the most part an equal opportunity hater with regard to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religion while Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was quite respectful of Islam, Christianity and Judaism as his play Nathan der Weise indicates.
An intellectual history of the European perception of Islam since the Enlightenment would certainly be worth writing. The account would have to take into account
- the Christian Enlightenment's attack on religion including the specific onslaught against Christianity,
- the political confrontation pitting European states -- the Czarist Empire was on the front line -- against the Ottoman Empire, and
- the Jewish use of the Golden Age of Spain as a whip to flay European non-Jewish conceits.
Ziauddin Sardar - The Erasure of Islam (introduction by Gilad Atzmon)
By Gilad Atzmon • Jul 31st, 2009 at 12:11 • Category: Analysis, Culture and Heritage, Gilad Atzmon, Gilad's Choice, Newswire, Opinions and Letters, Our Authors, Religion, Zionism
After a decade of elaboration on Jewish ideology and identity I came to a conclusion that Jewish identity, politics and ideology can be grasped as different manifestations of ‘self love’. The Zionist loves himself being strong and crude (Sabra), the Jewish leftist loves himself being a ‘humanist’ and ‘tolerant’, yet, for some reason, he prefers to operate in ‘Jews only’ cells (Bund, Jews for Palestine, Jews for Peace, Jews against Zionism, etc.). It took me some years to gather that Jewish ideology, politics and identity is not just surrender to self-affection, it is also driven by resentment towards others. It would be correct to argue for instance that the Zionist mantra could be interpreted as “love yourself as much as you hate your neighbour”. Other forms of Jewish ideologies may be slightly lighter on hatred but, generally speaking, they all resemble one another in their positive tendency towards segregation.
Enlightenment that is there to praise ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘reason’ and ‘liberal thought’ is not very different from Jewish ideology once put into political practice. In reality, it is just another form of a self-centred supremacist method of separation between the ‘chosen’ (labelled as progressive) and the ‘inferior’ (labelled as reactionary).
Enlightenment is anthropocentric in its essence, for it regards humans as the ‘universe’s most important entity’. Those who follow enlightenment ideology are basically different breeds of self -lovers. We are basically referring to humans who love themselves for being rational and liberated. We are referring to humans who are convinced that they are at the core of the essence of our cosmos. Bearing that in mind, we may be entitled to regard the last two centuries of Western conflicts as futile battles between different kinds of ‘self lovers’.
Enlightenment was there to invent a dichotomy between the progressive (the enlightened) and the reactionary (the other). Enlightenment thinkers “worked hard to provide a rational justification for colonisation.” Since it is the spirit of Enlightenment that happens to be the driving force behind neo-conservative thought, dogmatic interventionalist secularism and ruthless technology, it would be intelligible to argue that if we want to save ourselves and our planet, we better be courageous enough to face our Enlightenment driven self-affectionate ideologies. It is the Enlightened who puts humanity at risk whether it is nuking other humans, whether it is carpet bombardment, whether it is mass killing in the name of collectivisation, whether it is our ecological disaster and global warming or even killing in the name of democracy or liberation. For some devastating reason, it is always an Enlightened ideology behind all these well orchestrated genocides and human-inflicted tsunamis.
The following article by Ziauddin Sardar is a philosophical attempt to identify the conflict between Islam and lethal Western ideology. Sardar is a leading British intellectual. Some regard him also as a leading Muslim critic of Islam. In the following paper Sardar successfully challenges the notion of the clash of civilizations from the perspective of the other. GA
The erasure of Islam
Written by: Ziauddin Sardar | Appears in: Issue 42Posted by: TPM ⋅ June 11, 2009 ⋅
What Enlightenment? It may have been good for Europe, but for the rest of the world in general, and Islam in particular, the Enlightenment was a disaster. Despite their stand for freedom and liberty, reason and liberal thought, Enlightenment thinkers saw the non-West as irrational and inferior, morally decadent and fit only for colonisation. This legacy is not only with us but is positively thriving in the guise of neo-conservative thought, dogmatic secularism and scientism.
For key Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, de Montesquieu, Volney and Pascal, Europe occupied a special place: it was to be the destiny of humanity, construed as Western man. They worked hard to provide a rational justification for colonisation. They rationalised the medieval images, anxieties and fear of Islam and its Prophet – so evident in the sections devoted to Muhammad in Pascal’s Pensées – and presented them as evidence for the innate inferiority of Islam. They deliberately suppressed the Muslim contribution to science and learning and severed all intellectual links between Islam and Europe. Their Eurocentricism thus further locked Islam into an exclusive confrontation with the West, which continues to this day.
For thirteen and fourteenth century thinkers of Christendom, such as Roger Bacon and John Wycliff, Islam was simply a pagan, enemy Empire. To their credit, the Enlightenment thinkers saw Islam as a civilisation. But it was a civilisation grounded in a backward society and inferior political institutions and religious beliefs at its core. In Mohammad and Fanaticism, Voltaire denounced Islam in harsh and hostile terms. Later, in the Essai sur les moeurs, he was a little more restrained, but the judgement did not change. He still saw Islam as an embodiment of fanaticism, anti-humanism, irrationalism, and the violent will to power. But despite this, Muslims did have a few positive aspects. They could move towards greater tolerance thanks largely to Islam’s loose sexual standards, which made it akin to a natural religion. While Jesus was good, Christians had become intolerant. But Muslims were tolerant despite their evil Prophet. Positive development in one case, negative in another. This is how Voltaire reconciled his deep seated prejudices about Islam and Muslims with reason.
For all their sabrerattling against religion, Enlightenment thinkers saw Christianity as the standard of civilised behaviour and norm of all religion. In effect, they further naturalised the natural law theory of medieval Christianity which had always been vague in the sense of never precisely defined, yet also highly specific in being a universalising of Christian norms as the standard for human behaviour. Islam remained the antithesis to Christianity. Thus, in Les Ruines, Volney announced that “Mohammad succeeded in building a political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and Jesus’ vicars.” Or, in the scene where he has an imam speaking about “the law of Mohammad”, “God has established Mohammad as his minister on earth; he has handed over the world to him to subdue with the sabre those who refuse to believe in his law.” Volney described Muhammad as the “apostle of a merciful God who preaches nothing but murder and carnage,” the spirit of intolerance and exclusiveness that “shocks every notion of justice”. While Christianity might be irrational, Volney declared that it was gentle and compassionate but Islam had a contempt for science – a truly bizarre claim since Volney himself, and all his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, learnt most of their science and philosophy from such names as al-Frabi, Ibn Sina and ibn Rushd.
While the Enlightenment may have been concerned with reason, its champions were not too worried about truth when it came to Islam. They not only shamelessly plagiarised philosophy, science and learning from Islam, but the very hallmark of Enlightenment, liberal humanism, has its origins in Islam. It is based on the adab movement of classical Islam, which was concerned with the etiquette of being human. Islam developed a sophisticated system of teaching law and humanism that involved not just institutions such as the university, with its faculties of law, theology, medicine and natural philosophy, but also an elaborate method of instruction including work-study courses, a curriculum that included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, medicine, and moral philosophy, and mechanisms for the formation of a humanist culture such as academic associations, literary circles, clubs and other coteries that sustain intellectuals and the literati. The adab literature and institutions were, in fact, what enlightenment was all about in Islam. One cannot have a revolt on behalf of reason in Islam because reason is central to its worldview: reason is the other side of revelation and the Qur’an presents both as “signs of God”. A Muslim society cannot function without either. While Muslims can hardly be exonerated for the decline of reason and learning in Muslim civilisation, it was colonialism that as deliberate policy destroyed adab culture in Muslim societies.
But Enlightenment Europe swallowed the adab system, including textbooks, en masse. However, since it was a product of an inferior culture and civilisation its origins had to be shrouded. Thus, classical Arabic had to be replaced with another classical language, Latin. This was followed by a systematic expunging of all traces of the influence of Islamic thought on Europe. From the days of Voltaire right up to 1980, thanks largely to the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, it was a general western axiom that Islam had produced nothing of worth in philosophy, science and learning.
The Enlightenment legacy that Islam and Europe have nothing in common, that Islam is only a darker shadow of the West, that liberal secularism is the destiny of all human cultures, is much in evidence in our newspapers and television, literature and scholarship, as well as in our politics and foreign policies. It is the bedrock of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” hypothesis, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisation” thesis, and the neo-conservative “Project for the New American Century”. Voltaire’s Bastards, to use the title of John Ralston Saul’s brilliant 1992 book, are busy rationalizing torture, military interventions, and western supremacy, and demonising Islam and Muslims. The Enlightenment may have been big on reason but it was, as Saul shows so convincingly, bereft of both meaning and morality.
Forgive me if I don’t stand up and salute the Enlightenment.
Ziauddin Sardar is the author of Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience (Granta)
Source: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=288
