The Impact of Western Hegemony on Muslim Thought
By Yusuf Progler

About ten years ago, I saw Dr Kalim Siddiqui on a documentary on Canadian
television, with a typical title like 'Holy Terror' or 'The Sword of Allah'.
A journalist asked him, 'Do you think Islam can ever be tolerant of the
West?' Dr. Kalim replied, 'We wear your clothes, we eat your food and go to
your schools, we drive your cars and work in your shops, we watch your
television shows...' and he rolled off a litany of things that Muslims do in
Western societies - complying with virtually all its laws, regulations,
customs, and habits. And then he asked, 'what more do you want?' Met by the
journalist's puzzled silence, Dr. Kalim pointed out 'it is you who are
intolerant.'

This story illustrates a non-hegemonic way of thinking. People who think like
this operate outside the usual assumptions. The usual reaction would have
been to apologize. Instead, Dr. Kalim questioned the question, trying to
address its underlying assumptions. In this spirit, I want to help you get
underneath some things that are now going on in the world.

One hears a lot of talk about "the millennium". There's a daily countdown -
one can buy watches that number the days. And there are numerous academic
conferences involving Muslims in programs like, "interfaith dialogues for the 
new millennium" or 'new thoughts for the new millennium.' There is a plethora
of events, papers, speeches, and special programs, about this millennium. And 
although many of them involve Muslims, they emanate from the dominant Western
culture, through its media, politicians, corporations, and churches.
Everyone's got '2000' attached to something. In American education reform,
for example, we find 'Goals 2000', 'Education 2000', 'America 2000.' Pretty
soon, they'll have 'Pepsi 2000.' Everything must have this magic number
attached to it.

But there's only one question: whose millennium? A quick look in the history
books provides clues for an answer. Virtually no other civilization that
keeps a calendar has any corresponding significant date. The Muslims' year is 
1420. On the Chinese calendar, it's 4607 and for the Jews it will be 5760.
For the Zoroastrians, 2000 corresponds with 1368, and for the Hindus with
5101. So we are all thinking in terms of the Western Christian calendar.

This millennial hoopla serves a definite purpose. It imposes the destiny of
the West over our destiny, demanding that we join with it and celebrate,
implying that this joining will bring prosperity and the good life. In other
words, the millennium is a hegemonic ploy on the part of Western
civilization. Everybody in the West believes in this millennium, and
advertisers and politicians manipulate this. But should we cooperate? We have 
a couple of choices: we can just try to forget about it, but of course if you 
have a television or satellite or you go to school or you have a job or you
read the newspapers, it's going to be pretty hard to ignore. Alternatively,
one can try to survive with some kind of cognitive dissonance by saying,
"okay, I know it's not my millennium but I'll go along with it anyway".

Neither option seems a logical or dignified way to live vis-a-vis this
hegemonic operation, so I propose something else. We ought to use this event
to take stock of the legacy of Western civilization in its millennium, on its 
own terms. Let's see what it's done over the past thousand years, and what is 
cause for celebration.

In religion, Western Christianity starts out with a flawed conception of God
and the Divine. There's a Jewish idea of God in the Bible that says that
God's hand reached out to create the world and then slipped back into its
sleeve. As the Qur'an says, 'they say that Allah's hand is chained.' This
concept of Divine Majesty limits the power of Allah to the moment of
creation. Their theology based itself on pinpointing this exact instant in
which the Divine Majesty of God could be observed, after which it receded
back into the sleeve.

There's also a form of negative theology that emerged in the West during
these thousand years, ascribing to God only that which the human mind cannot
comprehend. In early times, God caused everything, supposedly because people
understood nothing. In this negative theology, as human ignorance receded so
does God. So we have this negative theology and this moment of creation:
they've already begun to strip away the Majesty of the Divine from their
daily lives and from their theology.

Along with this, over this same thousand years, the Church began to play with
its texts, with its beliefs, and its rituals, and made up a lot of dogma:
simony and celibacy, for example. These things and other have very little to
do with the practice of Jesus and less to do with Christianity as Muslims
understand it. The Church developed a number of self-serving doctrines
that replaced the message of Jesus, however corrupted that was, in their
texts.

They developed doctrines that were tied up with male privilege,
property-ownership, and all sorts of xenophobic and violent practices, which
they then presented as 'Christianity.' Divinity comes through the Church,
salvation comes through the Church alone. People who denied this contrivance
were tortured, burned or driven out. The institution itself, of course, was
based on innovation, which many people realised; so the Church had to use
violence to impose innovation which drove many people away (Much like
Kabbani sufis).

Then there was the Reformation, which removed some of the Church's power but
kept a lot of its innovation and enforcement. Then leads to an Enlightenment'
and on into the end of the nineteenth century when a philosopher like
Nietzsche, could claim that "God is dead!" In a sense, they killed God - it
took about a thousand years or so, but, in their minds, astaghfirullah, they
killed their deity. Deicide is one of the legacies of Western civilization.

In fact, we should call this the "millennium of murder." Remember this the
next time you think about the year 2000, and someone says, "march along,
folks!"  The road they are marching was paved during the millennium of
murder. A few examples will make the point. Look, for instance, at ecocide:
killing the environment. The Church tried to eradicate paganism, but they had 
a flawed text and a flawed understanding of monotheism and tawheed. They also
misunderstod the concept of shirk, and so they associated polytheism with the 
natural world. Anything in the natural world became suspect.

This was extended much farther into a general alienation from the natural
world, from creation, to the point that in Christian theology there emerged a
belief that the human being is a partner with God (astaghfirullah) in
changing the world. Human beings, instead of being part of creation, became
partners of God. Shirk became institutionalized. Things became even worse
when this thinking carried on into the scientific and industrial revolutions,
because human beings obtained the tools with which to increase the illusion
that they are godlike.

This led to the development of exploitative and destructive relationships
with nature because it was thought to be inherently evil and dirty, and at
best something to be dominated and used. With this attitude, a driving force,
the West developed industries, economies, and cultural practices that are
completely destructive. They have forgotten survival is a partnership with
the natural world. All this can be seen in the wasteful habits of use, and
the culture of consumerism that emanates from America. The American legacy to 
the world at the end of this millennium is wanton consumerism writ large,
wasteful of the environment - a form of ecocide institutionalized into the
culture.

Then, in European history, you see fratricide - killing one's brother. This
starts with the Church eliminating heresy after institutionalizing its
innovations, by enforcing them with violence and then destroying those
Christians who denied the Church's innovations. Christians who walked in the
sunnah of Jesus, upon whom be peace, as best they could with the texts that
they had, were murdered by the Holy Roman Church as they enforced the
Trinity. The best-known example is the Albigensian Crusade, but there are
several other instances of such fratricide, first in a religious context but
then as petty princes and secular rulers begin to jostle for Europe's land

All this leads to the West's horrid legacy of feudal warfare: the hundred
years' war, the fifty years' war, the thirty years' war, the twenty years'
war. Watch the History Channel on your satellite dish - it's all about war,
because that's what the West has done best. And a lot of that war was
fratricidal war, within its own society, its own civilization, over religion,
ideology, and land. Then the millennium of murder marches on into genocide.
Women constitute the first wholesale victims of genocide in Western
civilization. In America, they make fun of the witch-hunts, with a holiday
called Halloween. But it's not so much fun when one realises that they
murdered millions of women in Europe in this millennium. This was really the
first holocaust of Western civilization. Eventually, the genocidal mentality
flows out of the West with the age of expansion, and begins to engulf
millions of Africans dumped overboard from slave-ships or worked to death in
the colonies: another form of genocide. 

They needed so many Africans to work in their plantations because European
conquest and disease wiped out the Indians. Such genocide continued into
the twentieth century with the legacy of minorities in Europe being wiped
out, which is continuing to this day. Deicide, ecocide, fratricide, and
genocide... the millennium they want us to celebrate is a millennium
of murder.

We can go on by talking about homicide. Since the great achievement of the
West is in warfare, the culture is infused with violence, even down to an
individual level. People have their own wars on the street with each other,
drug wars and gang wars. Then there's infanticide, which the Qur'an forbade
1400 years ago. There's a sex-obsessed culture in the West that makes forms
of infanticide seem like a rational choice. So I put it to you that this
millennium is one of murder and mayhem, and that you should bear this in
mind when next you hear someone proclaiming that we must join hands to march
into the next one. With that kind of legacy I'd be pretty scared as to where
they're going to lead me.

Western civilization reached out to the world during the millennium of
murder. Part of what they did was to exterminate - as they exterminated
religious heresies in-house, so they began to seek out ways to exterminate
heresies outside of its house. First, there were Christian heresies but soon
Islam becomes a sort of Christian heresy in the west. Look at what Pope Urban
II said in his famous speech at Clairmont in 1095: the faithful Christians
must 'exterminate the vile races' of the Turks and the Muslims from the face
of the earth. The effort failed, but the mindset  continued. And Western
civilization institutionalizes this extermination by developed unprecedented
war-machineries. Remember -- the Chinese had gunpowder long before Europe,
but they didn't develop weapons of mass-destruction.

But the ethos of extermination had a catch. They couldn't exterminate
everybody because people resisted being exterminated, and because that would
leave no slaves to rule over. When extermination was not an option, the
second choice was to domesticate. One of the major theological debates in
Christianity, sparked by Columbus' misadventure in the Americas, was between
Las Casas and Sepulveda. They debated whether the Indians are inhuman (and
therefore should be exterminated) or human (and therefore should be
domesticated).

At first, domestication got intertwined with slavery. The West believed that
they were helping people by enslaving them. In the time of chattel slavery,
missionaries began to redefine local cultures. Later on, colonial education
carried on the work of dismantling and redirecting local forms of thinking
and acting, which was another form of domestication. Of course, for those who 
resisted domestication, there was always the convenient option of
extermination. This two-prong effort served the west for centuries.

One of the goals behind the extermination and domestication movement in the
West is to liquidate people's assets, be they cultural, land or natural
resources. The assets of exterminated people could simply be confiscated,
whereas domestication usually resulted in people giving away their assets. A
later version of Las Casas/Sepulveda debate involved Thomas Jefferson and
other framers of the US Constitution, revolving around whether the Indians
were rational and therefore able to sell their land, or irrational and
therefore not entitled to own land. 

A later version of this choice, extermination or domestication, faces
colonized people around the world at the end of the millennium of murder. The 
damage is both bodily and intellectual, and both need to be healed. This is
an immense project, and can only be sketched briefly in the context of this
article. In short, however, the situation calls for the development of
non-hegemonic ways of thinking and acting.