Posted on January 18, 2015 by GC
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology
at the University of New South Wales. He is well known as a scholar of
South-east Asia, especially the Muslim bits. In the past week he has published
on current events in Europe in an article entitled A rage against historyin New
Mandala, an online publication of the College of Asia and the
Pacific of the distinguished Australian National University in
Canberra, Australia. The ANU is one of the world’s top 50 universities,
according to the Times higher education supplement. It’s an
article well worth reading to see the professor’s account of the source of the
troubles now being experienced in Europe and a possible remedy for it. But it’s
rather long, so I attempt a summary here with selected quotes from the article.
Recent “Islamist” crimes
in Europe and elsewhere have their source within the wounded
soul of contemporary Islamic civilisation and of the modern Muslim
world generally.
This is because, among
other things, Islam sees itself as the successor to and the
completion of the Abrahamic faith tradition of ethical and prophetic
monotheism. To Judaism and then Christianity. And it sees itself as complete because it sees itself (or so its
scholarly traditions assert), unlike Judaism and Christianity, as equipped with
a fully developed social and political “blueprint”, a divinely prescribed plan
for the organisation and political management of society.
However…
… after Napoleon’s conquest
of Egypt the world of Islam was overwhelmed. The collapse and
humiliation of the Islamic world was accomplished by what we now call
“modernity” —— social, economic, administrative, technical, military,
intellectual and cultural. It was defeated and routed by the application of
modern attitudes and techniques, born of the Enlightenment and the new
scientific revolution, that the European powers commanded and developed and
began to deploy ever more thoroughly, and which the world of Islam lacked. That
is how Napoleon and those who followed him succeeded; that is what Napoleon’s
conquest of Egypt powerfully demonstrated and announced.
Today, the radical Muslims, or militant Islamists, do not merely feel the
pain of this deep wound within the soul of Islam. They also seek to act, with
violent means, forcibly to “set things right again”. They are possessed and
driven by a conviction that “history has gone wrong” on them —— that it has
done so wrongly, and so has wronged them —— in defiance of divine historical
assurances and guarantees of political primacy, ascendancy, sovereignty and
success.
And, it will simply not do to cut these violent people loose, allowing them to do as they
please, by saying “what they do has nothing to do with Islam”. It has
everything to do with Islam.
There is no other way to
explain it. It makes no sense without reference to Islam. What the violent
militants do may have little to do with “Islam as decent, progressive people
choose to understand it”. But it exists within, feeds off, and is explicable
only within Islam and Islamic terms, and with reference to the travails of
modern Islamic history generally.
Please read Professor Kessler’s
very thorough article, long though it is, but well worth the effort, if only to
see Professor Kessler’s recommendations, at:
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