Last Saturday at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, presidential candidate Julián Castro said: “Muslim Americans for generations have been part of the fabric of our American family. They have helped make America the great nation it is.”
Every other day, it seems, someone takes it upon himself to instruct the West about what it “owes to Islam.” This is offered in a tone of intellectual reproach: how ignorant and ungrateful of the West not to appreciate Islamic civilization for all the things it has brought us.
Here is one recent example of such articles, by Constant Mews, who is head of the Centre for Religious Studies at Monash University.
Algebra, alchemy, artichoke, alcohol, and apricot all derive from Arabic words which came to the West during the age of Crusades.
What do these five English words, that came from the Arabic, prove? They do not prove any significant Islamic intellectual influence on the West. Algebra originated with Sanskrit mathematicians; Arab mathematicians became interested, and further developed the field; the celebrated mathematician Al-Khwarizmi gave that field its name, al-jabr (“the reunion of broken parts”), which when englished became “algebra.” But use of that word should not mislead us into thinking algebra was a product of Muslim Arabs; Arabs have convinced the world to overlook the Sanskrit mathematicians who preceded them in this area of mathematics.
“Alchemy” (“the transmutation of metals”), and the foods (“artichoke” and “apricot”) and drink (“alcohol”) are all taken from the Arabic, but what does this signify? That our Western civilization was affected because of this handful of words taken from the Arabic? We now have the words “apricot” and “artichoke,” but so what? Far more significant, it seems to me, are the Arabic words which in the last few decades have entered not just English, but all the languages of Europe: Jihad, Jizyah, dhimmi are words that tellingly encapsulate the relationship of Muslim Believer to Unbeliever. The Believer wages constant Jihad against the Unbeliever, as commanded in 109 Qur’anic verses. The Unbeliever in a Muslim land is supposed to pay, as a dhimmi, the Jizyah, a capitation tax, to the Muslim state, in order to be “protected” by the Muslims themselves from their attack; it’s a form of extortion. These three words tell us a good deal about Islam. It’s too bad Mews left them out of his little lexicon, but we know why.
Even more fundamental are the Indo-Arabic numerals (0-9), which replaced Roman numerals during the same period and revolutionised our capacity to engage in science and trade. This came about through Latin discovery of the ninth-century Persian scholar, Al-Khwarizmi (whose name gives us the word algorithm).
Note that Mr. Mews doesn’t dare to call these “Arabic numerals,” but instead calls them “Indo-Arabic numerals.” In fact, these numerals were invented by Hindu mathematicians in the 6th or 7th centuries, and the Arabs only appropriated them, a fact unclear in his telling. He does say they were introduced to the West through the writings of Al-Khwarizmi, but doesn’t explain that this celebrated Persian mathematician was merely the transmitter of the numerals, not their inventor.
This debt to Islamic civilisation contradicts the claim put forward by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations some 25 years ago, that Islam and the West have always been diametrically opposed. In 2004, historian Richard Bulliet proposed an alternative perspective. He argued civilisation is a continuing conversation and exchange, rather than a uniquely Western phenomenon.
The “debt to Islamic civilization” is simply assumed by Mews to have been proven by his pitiful handful of unimpressive examples. What have we been offered as examples of that “debt”? Five words from the Arabic, numerals that turn out to have been invented by Hindu mathematicians, a link claimed between Dante’s Divine Comedy and an Arabic work about Muhammad’s Night Journey that Dante scholars have rejected, and another most unlikely link made between Robinson Crusoe and a 12th-century Arabic novel, when Defoe had before him the real-life example of a castaway in the tale of Alexander Selkirk. Some debt.
Mews misstates Huntington, whose thesis was that the “borders of Islam” were “bloody” everywhere, not just with the West. Islam, according to Huntington, had always been at war with all non-Muslims. The best example of this outside the West is the Muslim conquest of India, which ultimately lead to the deaths of 70-80 million Hindus.
Even so, Australia and the West still struggle to acknowledge the contributions of Islamic cultures (whether Arabic speaking, Persian, Ottoman or others) to civilization.
Australia is mentioned because Constant Mews teaches at an Australian university. When he writes that “Australia and the West still struggle to acknowledge the contributions of Islamic cultures,” he is assuming there is some kind of willful refusal to recognize those “contributions.” But it is much more likely that Western scholars are not going to be railroaded into finding “contributions of Islamic cultures” to the West where there have been none, or what there has been is trivial (like the words “artichoke,” “apricot,” and “alcohol”). They are not refusing to acknowledge what is truly there and significant, but struggling to uphold scholarly standards that are under such constant assault from those who insist, like Constant Mews, that the West owes a “great debt” to Islamic cultures.
In an initial curriculum proposed by the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization, only one Islamic text was listed, a collection of often-humorous stories about the Crusades from a 12th-century Syrian aristocrat. But Islamic majority cultures have produced many other texts with a greater claim to shaping civilisation.
Mr. Mews should have listed a few of those “many other texts” here, just to remind us of how Islam has helped to “shape civilization.” It’s unclear if he means “Western civilization” or some “world civilization” that he now assumes exists. I can think of only one such influential text by Muslims that has helped to shape that “world civilization”: the Qur’an itself. Does Mr. Mews not agree that the Qur’an, which set Muslims on the path of jihad 1,400 years ago, a path from which devout Muslims have not wavered, even though in the West they now use different instruments, ought to be read by Western students? Hasn’t the fear of Islam that Unbelievers acquire from reading the Qur’an, and from the observable behavior of many Muslims, helped — in a negative way — to shape our civiization? Hasn’t the Qur’an caused Muslims to conquer many lands and many peoples? Hasn’t Islamic terrrorism in a few decades managed in a most fearful way to affect our Western civilization? Would Mr. Mews prefer that the Qur’an not be mentioned, for fear that reading the Quran might give non-Muslims the wrong idea about Islam, might mislead non-Muslims into thinking there is something inherently violent about Islam? That would never do.