bluetree/religion

Prof. Ahmed is a great scholar; nice interview...

Five Years After 9/11, 'Dialogue' with Islam Cause for Hope
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Bethesda, Maryland

A native of Pakistan who served as his country's high commissioner to Great Britain, Akbar Ahmed offers the unique perspective of an anthropologist who has lived in and studied both Islamic and Western cultures. The BBC has described him as "the world's leading authority on contemporary Islam." He is the principal investigator for the "Islam in the Age of Globalization" research project at the Brookings Institution, with support from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and American University.

The central thesis of Ahmed's work is that dialogue is required to reduce conflict between the U.S. and Islam. For his traveling dialogues with Judea Pearl, the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Ahmed was nominated as a 2005 finalist for Beliefnet's "Most Inspiring Person of the Year" award.

Ahmed, 63, was interviewed in the living room of his home, just outside Washington, D.C.
...
This is the 10th anniversary of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's influential book, The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted increasing conflict between civilizations, most notably Islam and the West. You have rejected his thesis, and co-authored a book, After Terror: Promoting Dialogue among Civilizations. In light of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, conflict in places such as Lebanon and the anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric we are hearing from the president of Iran, do you still reject the clash of civilizations paradigm?

I am a scholar. I don't look at what is coherent, strong and historical, which is the idea of the clash of civilizations, and simply say it doesn't exist, because that would not only be inaccurate and untrue, but it would not be cognitive. We have to take an idea and grapple with it, understand it, engage with it. The clash exists because it has existed for a thousand years, exactly as Huntington has stated. We have had the centuries of the Crusades and then of European colonization spanning over a thousand years of history, which has made for a complex and difficult relationship between Islam and the West.

But we have also had -- this is my criticism of Huntington, because he leaves it out -- great periods of harmony, cultural synthesis and interaction of ideas. For example, the entire corpus of Greek thinking of the great philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, lay unknown and forgotten until the Muslims translated them in Muslim Spain a thousand years ago and allowed Europeans to discover them in Arabic, translate them into Latin and from Latin they were translated into French and then English. Over the centuries, the process of rediscovering the Greeks came to Europe via the Muslims. This cycle, in turn, triggered the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment. When you talk about Jeffersonian ideals of the Enlightenment and Jefferson's Greek heroes, we invariably omit the Muslim contribution to this cycle.

There was also the development, which Huntington missed in his thesis, of the mass migration of Muslims to the West in the past couple decades. I'm not talking about a couple thousand immigrants; I'm talking about millions of Muslims actually living, interacting with and becoming citizens of the West. For example, the United States has several million Muslims. It has included American and Muslim icons, such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. Rumi, the 13th century mystic poet, born in Afghanistan, is the number-one, best-selling poet of the United States. Americans love his mystic poetry of compassion and acceptance...
pewforum.org/events/index.php [pewforum.org/events/index.php]