Letter: Islam and the West

Tue, 11/03/2009 1:07 PM  |  Reader's Forum

Ambassador Nikolaos Van Dam offers in "Islam from a Western perspective" (The Jakarta Post, Oct. 30 and 31) an interesting analysis. He touches on a range of issues, such as colonial legacy, immigration, modernity, secularism, imperialism and radicalism.

In the end, Van Dam calls on moderate Muslims to speak up and on the West to listen. Unwillingly, the article leaves the reader with the impression that there is one single Islam and a presumption of cultural incompatibility.

The same presumption that has, unfortunately, provided the dominant motif for story-telling about Islam and Western civilization.

The reader is also left with two unanswered questions: Which Islam? Which West? Just as there is no single America or Europe or the West, there is no single place or uniform culture called Islam.

The Muslim world stretches from Africa to Asia and is internally pluralistic, containing multiple groups who might be considered to represent various Islamic norms in each Muslim country.

The West, which is by no means a finished project, needs today to recognize that it has built its identity on a set of implied contrasts with other stories: stories of the "rest". The story of Islam, for example, is often in opposition to the stories of the West.

Thus the identification of the West as "essentially" democratic, modern, and civilized requires the narration of Islam as "essentially" authoritarian, traditional, and barbaric. Both Muslims and the West need today a brand new story premised not on ideas of cultural superiority and "integration", but on mutual respect and openness to cultural eclecticism.

A story where the so called Islam's silent majority will be listened to not because it embraces modernity as defined by Western values but because it can enrich history and cooperation in the pursuit of human values.

Ait-Allah Mejri
Jakarta

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.