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TO THE EDITORS:
What does Roger Scruton (“Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation,” AZURE 35, Winter 2009) say are the main contrasts between Islam and the West? He neatly sums them up as subjection vs. citizenship, religious conformity vs. nationality, shari’ah (religious) law vs. secular law, Islam vs. the Judeo-Christian tradition, solemnity vs. irony, dogmatism vs. self-criticism, submission vs. representation, and grim abstinence vs. the joyful drinking of alcohol. Despite what he says about the essential differences between Christianity and Islam, I cannot help thinking that he is contrasting what is really a secular view of the way that the world should be with a religious approach. After all, many Christians and other believers also think that their religion should determine the parameters of the state in exactly the same way that many Muslims today call for theocracy. I am sure I am not alone in finding Scruton’s grand statements about a particular faith and its defining principles inaccurate in defining that faith. Although theologians often try to reduce their religion to a few basic ideas and truths, if it is possible to differ on such issues then issues of difference exist, and the attempt to extinguish them by insisting on defining principles will be a vacuous one.
One of the interesting features of Scruton’s account is that he takes the way many Muslims see their own position toward the secular world—as the only serious opposition to the materialism of the state—at face value. We are told that, in contrast to other religions, Muslims do not differentiate between the state and religion, and insist on the latter’s informing the former, as though all other religions fail to take a serious attitude toward the state and reserve their injunctions for the private sphere. Only Islam, Scruton claims, really wants to embody its faith in public life; thus, only Islam has a comprehensive view of how faith should impact on politics and, indeed, daily life. But even to say this shows it to be false. All faiths have views on the nature of public as well as private life, although they often have internal disagreements on the subject. And here is the problem with Scruton’s argument: So does Islam. Different Islamic groups also argue and debate about what form of government and what political structure is appropriate for them. There are a wide variety of states that call themselves Islamic, but few of them are regarded as Islamic by other Muslims. There is just as much debate and argument in the Islamic world as there is everywhere else—and always has been.
We do have a tendency to define ourselves in terms of what we are not, and this comes across quite well in Scruton’s argument, in which the West is regarded in a very positive light, as a site of decent values and critical thought, while Islam, in its traditional form, is portrayed as quite the reverse. Any traditional form of thought would do here, though, and the same negative features Scruton finds in Islam can be discovered in many varieties of Christianity. We need to make a firm distinction between a religion and the culture with which it may be associated. The sort of irony that Scruton sees as native to Christianity is, in fact, only an aspect of some of the cultures that have adopted Christianity. In the southern United States, where I live, there is nothing ironical about the views of the Baptist Church.
Many of the major architects of classical liberal thought were opposed to civil rights for Roman Catholics, on the grounds that they took their orders from Rome and so owed no basic allegiance to the state. The modern version of this doubt is directed toward Muslims, with the idea that they take their orders from an imam, or some other religious figure, and have little regard for civil institutions. This is certainly correct to a degree, in the same way that some Jewish sects take their voting instructions from the rabbis heading their communities, and church members do the same from their ministers. Muslims in the West are now undergoing the difficult but familiar process of coming to terms with the culture of their new country while trying to hold on to some of their distinctive cultural values. It is, of course, very difficult to get this balance right, and some go too far in the direction of assimilation, while others turn away from modernity and try to return to the spiritual certainties of the past. There is no neat and tidy resolution of this dilemma, as many other religious and ethnic communities have discovered, and seeking to damn an entire religion and its followers as if they constituted a uniformly hostile bloc does not help us reach one.
Oliver Leaman
University of Kentucky
