III. Islam and the West : Rebuilding Confidence

Fear is not an instinct, like animals protecting their young. It is not inborn, but it develops with the development of the human mind from childhood. As it develops, it gets differentiated into, for instance fright, panic, scare, phobia, dread, terror etc. Fear means lack of security or sense of security, and as man in his growth may, at various stages of his life, be open to dangers of all sorts and in this danger he feels very keenly that he is in need of security or sense of security against fear, and perhaps his greatest need is security for his life and security for keeping alive. In Islam, security is against hunger and against fear, fear of all sorts, from individuals or from groups. The latter fear includes fear from terror especially if terror is practiced by a state. The pertinent verse in the Qur’an says “They ought to worship the Lord of this holy House who has given them security against hunger and security against fear.”

There is a fear which springs from the feeling that one has no refuge to seek when in danger.

Normally, the ultimate refuge is God. One who is in danger must turn to God to have the assurance that this God is really able to give. Any doubt as to the dependability of this God will force one to depend on oneself or be self-reliant. This is in the case of Judaism and Christianity but not so in Islam. A Jew and a Christian, especially a Judeo-Christian or a Protestant is self-reliant. A Catholic is not as self-reliant as a Protestant, but a Muslim is not equally self-reliant. He may be graded as third in self-reliance with the Jew as first.

Self-reliance has a side-effect. It makes one fearful or rather apprehensive and suspicious. He tends to be always on his guard against everybody; and in consequence he keeps himself apart, and feels safe in his segregation. This breeds hatred, and then grudge and ill-will and a wish to do what he can to keep his adversary in check.

Hence the resort to money-making, and to the accumulation of wealth, making money as the end of the human endeavour. Money became an idol and the prime motive in international relations and interests, like a stranglehold round the necks of the unfortunate nations.

Money acts as an urge to the possessor to try and work for more money, and the urge develops into an avalanche and into a cut-throat competition for making more money through using political influence and even wars. As the money magnates become richer and richer, whole nations become poorer and poorer and have to borrow more and more from the rich countries. Some of those borrowing countries have become bankrupt and unable to pay back their debts. The crisis is aggravated from day to day, and the situation is such that the rich countries will be in a dilemma : what to do?

Along with this state of affairs the world is sharply divided into haves and have-nots, and there will be a race for having more and more lethal weapons in support of money-making. The two parallel drives in the world now will be for money-making and for more arms and the two are inseparable. This is what is happening.

One who is intent on increasing his money and increasing his power, to protect it, will be always afraid perhaps even jittery. One will be afraid that any possibility posing a threat to his life or his money. He becomes more disposed to avoid it or ward it off. He becomes afraid of every possibility of this kind, and develops a sort of phobia which would make him scary and aggressive. The events that happened worldwide after the end of World War I and II, were a prelude to a series of aggressive attacks on positions thought to be dangerous and to pose a threat, like the attack on Hiroshima and Nagazaki, Vietnam war, war in Korea, in Central America, in Chile, in Angola, in the Middle East, and the siege of Cuba. Those attacks and total wars were claimed to be preemptive, but were planned and executed in response to the urge of fear, which was predominant. This fear was sometimes imaginary as when Laos, Grenada, Central America and others were attacked.

This imaginary fear soon turned into hysteria, as happened in the United States in the 1960’s when Joseph McCarthy reigned supreme by arousing hysteria against the so-called danger of Communism to the United States by promulgating persistently lies without evidence, and as happened in Oklahoma in 1996 when a building was blown up by American extremists. The greatest hysteria was in September 2001, when the World Trade Centre in New York was attacked and demolished by an air attack and when the Pentagon was also air raided in Washington. The hysteria that erupted subsequently in the USA was unparalleled. The hysteria soon spread to Europe and to other parts of the Christian world. The wave developed into a war against terrorism without discrimination, except that the Muslims alone were fingered as in the incident in Oklahoma. Even Islam, in mass media in the USA and Europe, was accused of being terroristic, and some voices were raised for a new Crusade against Islam and Muslims are fingered everywhere, especially in the USA, Europe and even in India. Laws have been enacted to curb the activities of minorities, Muslim minorities, even in their philanthropic work. They are under siege

Perhaps a fair-minded onlooker will find all this rather odd when he links this up with what is happening in Palestine where the Israelis fight the Arabs and the Muslims on the pretext that the Palestinians are terrorists, disregarding the question: why and how are the Israelis in Palestine, in the first place, and how are the Israelis able with their army to subjugate the Palestinians the way they are doing now? In answering the question, the onlooker will have to probe the case down to its roots to find that Islam is sinned against rather than sinning, and that the Muslims are the aggrieved party.

But let us go back to the question of fear, especially to its extreme form: hysteria. Hysteria is extreme fear caused by some mental aberration. The extreme fear or panic is not rational, based upon facts. It is also a delusion. It is common in societies where people are prone to believe in fables or in fabulous religious conviction. It is likely to happen in a civilized community under the influence of this religious conviction, especially in the West, in Europe and the United States. Hitler was able to arouse a hysteria in Germany, but recently hysteria was aroused in the USA and in Europe about terrorism. Now any act may easily be fobbed off on people. Hysteria is associated with lying. In human history falsehoods were more effective than truths, like myths, fables, miracles, tales and lies. Religions were founded on myths and fables and yet they were believed in devoutly for many centuries. Islam was rejected out of hand by the West because it was not based on myths, but on hard facts, and the West is more inclined to believe in myths than hard facts. In European culture lies are lubricant. Fear can be aroused and made effective by lies.

Fear also may be the basis of identity, because fear induces segregation in secluded or closed quarters, and this emphasizes the feeling of being different, and this is the basis of identity. This is principally the feeling of minorities generally. But minorities differ in degree of their susceptibility to assimilation. Perhaps the Jews, for instance, are not easily assimilable, and this is what possibly keeps them always apart.

 Fear, if deepened, turns into phobia, permanent phobia which is a psychosis, very difficult to eradicate. A  psychotic fear is most probably hysteric. Some nations may be more prone to hysteria than others, depending upon their religious beliefs, whether they are deep-seated or sitting lightly on the shoulders of the religionists. It depends also upon whether religion tends to instill fear in its religionist or not. That is why a Jew is self-reliant. A Protestant is next to a Jew in self-reliance. Protestantism is thought to be the creator of the Western civilization. It is also thought to be behind the arms race and the cult of superiority and of wars. Since the beginning of the 16th century, the world has entered upon a period of wars and of rivalry among nations, during which everyone was afraid and impelled to seek protection from fear by becoming rich and powerful. This brings me to the question of the origins of wars among Western nations. In this discussion I am indebted to many books on the subject, especially “On the Origin of War” by Donald Kegan (Hutchinson - London, 1995). The emphasis in most of such books is on the material side ignoring the psychological and religious sides. The psychological side is originally religious, specifically in the cult of superiority as embedded in fear.

There is “Science of Power” by Thomas Kidd and a book published by the Philosophical Society in the U.S.A. which I do not possess now. Perhaps “The Conflict of Ideas” may be included, although it is not closely related. These books, and probably many others, stress the fact that the West lives a life of conflict in everything and has reduced the aspect of this conflict to a fine art. And if one wants to describe the West, the best thing he can do is to say that the West is synonymous with “conflict”. The East is different. Therefore, when a scholar tries to understand why the West is always in conflict, he should avoid including the East in his study. He also must exclude the East in his search for the origins of war. But why is the West singular?

To answer this question, I have to spread my net wide, and present to the reader a theory of mine in trying to explain this singularity. One thing in this endeavour, which should be borne in mind, is that the West is like a person suffering from a split in his personality, and the split is manifested when a situation arises and requires a decision on the spot. The Westerner then will have to use his subconscious mind. A Jew, for instance, will always tend to use his subconscious, and that is why he is consistent. A Christian is not consistent. He sometimes uses his conscious and sometimes his subconscious. He is inconsistent. He displays this inconsistency through being ambivalent, schizophrenic and hypocritical. In the Christian West, the behaviour is in the nature of double-speak, double-standard, double-talk, and double-think. A Muslim is always under check lest he should give reign to his subconscious. This subconscious is at least among the Arabs, anti-Islamic and fissiparous. Only the conscious is Islamic, fundamentally based upon equity and symmetrical recognition. In international or intercommunal relations, Muslims are really Islamic and pacifistic, in practice. The subconscious among the Jews and among the Western nations is religious, mainly Jewish, egocentric exclusive and hostile to the outsiders, the Gentiles. In international and in intercommunal relations they are aggressive and hostile. It looks that this hostility and the cult of superiority or chosenness in the West are essential for the psychological stability of the Western person.

There seems to be no doubt that the behaviour of the West, internally and externally, has been impregnated by this subconscious and, above all by fear, fear which helps one to be hostile to an enemy, real or imagined. History can easily prove that this acts as an urge to armament and arms race. Also, there is no doubt that the present dangerous situation in the world, which threatens to be catastrophic, is basically religious, and secularism from outside does not seem to be able to cut at the roots of it for the foreseeable future. Therefore, Muslims who are internally fissiparous, should be educated to learn what Islam is, and the Western nations should be educated to be truly secularist in the depth of their souls.

Those who took upon themselves the task of pinpointing the cause or causes of war seem to agree that war in the Western world is inevitable, but they don’t agree on the cause or causes. However, they seem to point out that the West is acquisitive and has a lust for money. There is also fear and need for security. But I have not come across a scholar who referred to the cult of superiority or chosenness. The pursuit of superiority and the fear to lose it start from fear, which is inherent in the human species, or from fear to lose superiority in theory or in fact. First there is the urge to achieve it and the urge to keep it. For this you need money and more money, and money needs protection. Protection needs power. Wealth and power seem to be interrelated. The Jews for maintaining superiority chose money, and the Christian nations chose power and money. But which is favourable: to feel rich or to feel “Chosen” as a protection?

To illustrate what I am trying to say, I have to offer specimens which are representative. All the Western powers have the lust for money, and also the need for arms and armies. One, among the Western countries, is representative of wealth, power and fear. Israel is a representative of fear, and aggression, in consequence.