Europe has for 13 centuries been in hot and cold wars with the Muslim world

All things considered, the Islamophobia that rose and spread since those fateful days in September 2001, was not new, nor was it unique. The European world has always assumed to be superior to everyone and anything outside its boundaries.

By DR ISMAIL LAGARDIEN

CONVENTIONAL wisdom suggests that Islamophobia increased globally after the attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11, 2001.

This has drawn attention, somewhat expediently and disingenuously, to a sudden rise of ‘the Muslim threat’ to the world. This is the picture that takes shape, if you get all your news from the European world through the news and information published or broadcast by Western states and corporations.

The overt messages and trends of the past two decades are part of only the most recent phase of historical Islamophobia, with the (purported) threats that Islam and Muslims represented to the relatively unchallenged dominance and control of the world by Europe and its offshoots in North America and the antipodes. This ‘threat’ is not so much religious as it is part of challenges to dominance and control, and of the panic at the fin de siècle of the West.

What we may do, here, is reflect, on long-run history of European dominance and control, a complete hegemony that determines everything in our daily lives, from the times to which we set our clocks to the calendars we use, to the pervasiveness of ‘Western cultures, beliefs and values’. All of which has rested on at least two things.

One is the quite wilful concealment of the intellectual contributions to knowledge about statecraft and society, and to the arts and sciences. Closely related to this, the second, is the historical framing of Muslims (along with other societies outside the European world), as somehow less civilised or ‘traditional’ – as opposed to being ‘modern’.

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Islam has been present in Europe since the eight century, and there have been waves of resistance and accommodation, at least until ‘the European Enlightenment’ and ‘the Renaissance’, when, somewhat paradoxically, the Church (Christianity) played a lesser role in society, but Christianity remained the major influence in the arts and culture, literature and society, in general.

Such was the dominance of Christianity in Europe that by 1910, at least 70% of the world’s Christians lived in Europe for a thousand years. Anything else, as far as Europeans were concerned, was presented as ‘others,’ who had to be contested, and fought back from the gates.

Muslim World as Europe’s ‘other’

Although I have reservation about civilisational discourses – they tend to be toxic and destructive – in one iteration, societies outside the European world (this ‘world’ comprises continental Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand) are considered to be irrational, backward and inexorably tied to ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-modern’ ways. In the same vein, ‘non-European’ societies have for centuries been considered as ‘mired in religiosity and superstition’ and were ‘uncontrollably carnal’. This imaginary of the non-European world –‘the Orient’ – has been linked closely with Islam or ‘the Muslim world’.

In Maxime Rodinson’s seminal work, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, the Western view of ‘the Orient’ is ‘a romantic, civilisational dreamscape’ … characterised by ‘fierce and lavish scenes in a wild array of colours; harems and seraglios; decapitated bodies, women hurled into the Bosporus in sacks; feluccas and brigantines displaying the Crescent flag; round turquoise domes and white minarets soaring to the heavens; viziers, eunuchs, and odalisques, refreshing springs under palm trees; giaours with their throats slit; captive women forced into submission by their lustful captors’.

It is, then, not so much the attacks on New York City and Washington that prompted Islamophobia, than a deep-seated and historical opposition to and distrust of Islam and the Muslim world, among Europeans. Islamophobia is nothing new. It has framed Europe’s view of the Muslim world since (even) before the Crusades.

This contradicts or conveniently glosses over the role that Muslims played in the Renaissance, which Europeans consider to be the pivotal era between the Middle Ages and modernity, and the rise and spread of arts, culture, literature, philosophy and science.

By many accounts there would have been no Renaissance, or at least not as we have come to know it, without contributions from the Muslim world.

Islam was, for almost a thousand years a pre-eminent civilisation in the world. By one account, produced in 2012 by The International Institute of Islamic Thought, in Washington DC (of all places), Islam ‘eliminated social distinctions between classes and races, made clear that people should enjoy the bounties of the earth provided they did not ignore morals and ethics, and rescued knowledge that would have been lost, if not forever, then at least for centuries. The genius of its scholars triggered the intellectual tradition of Europe and for over seven hundred years its language, Arabic, was the international language of science.’

All things considered, the Islamophobia that rose and spread since those fateful days in September 2001, was not new, nor was it unique. The European world has always assumed to be superior to everyone and anything outside its boundaries. What is a cause for concern is the panic at the end of Western dominance, and what it means for Europe’s ‘others’. Between NATO and the USA, the European world has bombed, invaded, occupied or overthrown governments in at least 14 countries between 1980 and 2025. There is little to suggest that the Europeans will stop their assault on the Muslim world – not unless the BRICS countries adopt the NATO policy of an attack on one member-country is an attack on all…

Dr Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. His main interests are in global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism, and he has designed and taught a course in Islam and the Muslim World in International Relations.