Beyond the Clash of Civilizations: A New Cultural Synthesis for Muslims in the West

By Mohamed Wa Baile

In todays ever-changing and often uncertain world, encouraging healthy dialogue between all cultures and religions is vital. In Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, Mohamed Wa Baile carefully explores how Muslims and people of other faiths can achieve a peaceful coexistence instead of being victims of conflict.

Wa Baile, a follower and practitioner of Islamic religion, has had the privilege of unconditional access to study Muslim communities in Switzerland. There, for the past ten years, he has examined the interactions between Muslims and the complex, introspective issues that often plague both individuals and families. Through attending hundreds of congregational prayers and interviews with Muslim leaders, Wa Baile shares his thoughtful observations as he seeks new meanings and alternative ways of thinking that will help all Muslims understand and assess the real challenges that lie ahead.

It is up to the current generation to seek practical solutions and peaceful resolutions, rather than insist on the narrative of one insular side or the other. Beyond the Clash of Civilizations encourages a new respect for Islam with the hope of changing long-held perceptions of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462034215

Mohamed Wa Baile

Mohamed Wa Baile studied his bachelor’s degree in Islamic studies at the University of Berne, Switzerland, and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, United Kingdom. He holds a master of advanced studies degree in peace and conflict transformation from the University of Basel, Switzerland. He lives and works in Bern, Switzerland.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- 1 –

Who Are the Muslims of Switzerland?

- 2 -

In the Name of Civilization:

Islam and the West

- 3 -

Is Islam Antipathetic to Peaceful Coexistence?

- 4 -

Getting Our History Straight:

Islam Is Part of Europe

- 5 -

Four Pivotal Events

- 6 -

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom

- 7 -

Switzerland

- 8 -

Caught in the Crossfire

- 9 -

Toward a Helvetius Muslim Identity

- 10 -

Elements of Internal Muslim Dialogue

- 11 -

From Multiple Views of Islam

to Universal Islam

- 12 -

Nurturing a Swiss Muslim Tradition:

‘Amal Ahl al-Helvetia

- 13 -

The Reformist Voices of Muslims

- 14 -

What Is Wrong with Switzerland?

- 15 -

Switzerland’s Dilemma

Bibliography

For my beloved Afropean-Euromuslim daughter, Rahima

Acknowledgments

While working on my master’s thesis, upon which this book is largely based, several families trusted me enough to open their homes so that I could learn about their way of life. Their generosity both touched me and was immensely beneficial. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

I fondly remember many of our discussions, especially with the sons and daughters, whose frankness and honesty extended to difficult, sensitive, and sometimes confusing issues of identity. I would like nothing more than to get together again with these dear friends for more conversation and reflection.

I am forever indebted to my wife. Stephanie has done far more than accompany me along this difficult journey, as inestimable as that has been. She has challenged my thoughts and assumptions about Muslims living in the West and on Islam in general. Stephanie’s intelligence has, over the years, been stimulating, to say the least, but she offers it with unstinting love and compassion.

I wish to acknowledge several scholars whose achievements have inspired me from a distance to reflect deeply about the society I live in and to which I seek ways to contribute. I am thinking particularly of Ali Mazrui, Edward W. Said, Johan Galtung, John Esposito, Fatema Mohamed Arkoun, Tariq Ramadan, and Shireen T. Hunter. They have all written important if not seminal works on the question of Islam’s relationship with the West, democracy, and modernity. Their output has helped shape not only my thinking, but my way of life.

Finally, the book you are about to read, would not have seen the light of day without my teachers and fellow students. I have learned from them and from the many debates in which I have been privileged to take part. To all I owe a deep debt.

I would like to thank the members of the Swiss Center for Peace Studies, at the World Peace Academy in Basel.

While studying for my master’s degree at the Center, I participated in several seminars, worked part time, and took time to be with my lovely daughter. At times it was a harrowing experience from an organizational point of view. But that was a unique time for us that will not return. Life is hope. Looking back, the fruits of my labor confirm to me that the experience was worth every minute and every hardship I endured!

To God Almighty belongs the praise. I ask him to give me the strength to desegregate the multiple identities I have accumulated along my journey, for I am African, a Muslim, and a Kenyan and Swiss citizen. I am a son, brother, friend, husband, father, and, above all, a human being.

This work does not lay claim to the right version of Islam, nor do I pretend to judge what a right Muslim should be. All I seek is God’s guidance for my own path as a Muslim living and examining his life in the West.

In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God,

Lord of the Worlds.

The Merciful and Compassionate.

Master of the Day of Judgment.

You alone do we worship,

And from You alone we seek help.

Guide us to the straight path,

The path of those You have blessed,

Not those who are stricken with wrath,

Nor they who are lost.

Amen.

Mohamed Wa Baile

Bern, Switzerland

Summer 2011

Introduction

In the beginning was the Word …

Although we have been speaking words for untold millennia, this scriptural reference has to do with the Word of God, the Creator. It signifies the divine truth behind all that which he has created.

Human speech is completely different. It is a natural human faculty. Yet even in this mundane sense, our utterances endow us with a strange kind of power possessed by no other living species on earth. I deliberately use the word power.

Power is not only about coercion or the use of brute force to make others behave as we want them to. Even in a context of fierce geopolitical rivalry, soft diplomacy can be a powerful tool. And what is soft diplomacy if not persuasion, the success of which ultimately hinges on effective, peaceful dialogue in place of violence?

Words are powerful also because they give us the capacity either to heal or to injure our fellow human beings. We applaud a great speaker for his or her skillful deployment of words and the meanings they convey. Words have the power not only to divide us, but to bring us together as human beings, even across seemingly unbridgeable divides.

A good example of the power of words is the historic speech that United States president Barack Hussein Obama delivered in Cairo, Egypt, on June 4, 2009:

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings … There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.[1]

Echoing inside one of the world’s oldest universities, al-Azhar, his words were crafted to convey positive signals about American intentions to more than 1.5 billion concerned Muslims. He reminded his audience of what connected human beings. This is typical of Obama, who is known for the inclusiveness of his political vision.

He knew that the pursuit of peaceful relations was foremost on everyone’s mind, his and his audience’s, so he focused on relations between Islam and the West and proposed a new and peaceful beginning. He received long and heartfelt applause on that important day, because everyone felt the power of his words. Far from threatening, his language induced people of goodwill everywhere to give him and the nation he represents the benefit of the doubt. As a result, the perception of America began to undergo significant change, at least compared with the period when his predecessor, George W. Bush, had occupied the helm. Since then, this perception has largely eroded, of course, but the fact remains that for a brief moment he succeeded where others have not.

Did he pull it off because of the content of his message? Or was it just his elocution?

Obama’s great eloquence had been widely recognized even before his election to office. But there are as many interpretations of his performance as president as there are political views. Back home he is routinely vilified as a foreign-born terrorist, the Arab in the White House Obama, the anti-colonial Mau Mau sympathizer. Or, Obama is bad for America because he is not white enough—or, conversely, not black enough. Despite his being demonized, he has never lost the unifying approach he has been honing for years. He insists on speaking plainly to his fellow Americans about their primary concerns. As battered as they are by the failing economy, many are willing to listen. They too long for national unity, which their country’s seemingly intractable problems had shattered.

It is no surprise then that Muslims outside the United States, though living under different conditions, equally understood the unifying thrust of his speech. The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he insisted, should not signify a Christian or American crusade again Islam. They were merely part of America’s war on terror. He sent the same message that the United States is not at war against Islam when he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Bush used to say the same thing, but somehow it took a man like Obama to persuade enough skeptics to give America another chance. His dialogical approach in the public arena clearly distinguished him from his predecessor. If the polls are correct, Bush scored a positive impact immediately after 9/11, but this rapidly gave way to a consistently negative image both among American voters and abroad. The effect of Obama’s language, by contrast, continues to elicit a positive, if rather puzzled, response from large numbers of Americans and those quarters overseas that are still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

How words divide and injure

Words are indeed powerful. A mere few pages of Samuel P. Huntington’s article The Clash of Civilizations? have caused so much ink to be spilled in a full-blown academic debate that it boggles the mind.[2] And then it was one written word in passionate refutation of another. The running debate became so intense that it spilled far beyond academia into soul-searching about foreign policy, immigration, democracy, and so on.

The Satanic Verses is a great example of how the written word can inflame opinion, where language inflicts injury. Salman Rushdie’s fiction managed to provoke a radically different response from Huntington’s academic-but-specious arguments. It created suspicion, hatred, destruction of property, rioting, and death.

Now, consider Mein Kampf. What does this book mean to Jewish people? To Russians? Christians? Atheists? Those who have never read the book?

Given the horrors of the twentieth century, one might think that our loftiest task would be learning to use the power of words to enhance rather than diminish human value or inflame passions with abandon. What is it that makes us human? This is the question we ought to ponder more deeply, exactly the one that has inspired this book.

I will not pretend that the ideas I present here have never been argued before. But it has to be done more purposefully, with more focus, and repeated again and again, because every generation has to learn how to uphold anew the best that lies inside each of us.

The new divides

The past few decades have seen radical changes. True, a fraction of human beings are fabulously wealthy and getting wealthier while whole populations are mired in disease and hunger. The rest of us are somewhere in between. Technology has given this division a wholly new dimension, and there are growing concerns about a digital divide. If the previous divisions had to do with having or not having enough food, medicine, and so on, the talk of the town now is about computer haves and have-nots. This is where the struggle for empowerment is taking shape today.

We are constantly asked to think like a global village; we are told there is no other way to understand either the present or the future—with stress on the future. Poor nations are told that globalization offers them the best hope for gaining some of the prosperity already enjoyed by wealthy states and some emerging economies. True, globalization—evolving for almost two millennia—has reached a new threshold. We are so interlinked today that we affect each other in ways never before possible. One repercussion of this is that the poor affect the rich as much as the affluent affect those who live on next to nothing. Although overcoming material poverty is clearly still part of the challenge, communications and technology have completely reshaped how we go about it.

Look around you. We have information, products, and services at our disposal, everything at our fingertips. Which products strike your fancy? Here is how you can own this look or self-image right now! Being skinny is no longer a sign of destitution. A thin female body is an object of beauty, unless you happen to prefer the full, buxom look. If this is the image you are pining for, then here is how you too can be sexy, and these are the products and the information you will need to buy sexiness—ANONYMOUSLY. Models are skimpily dressed because they have to match the sensuous ambience of the marketer in the mall, on the Web, or inside the catalogue. It almost makes no difference what is being advertised. Skinny sells. Half naked sells. If they stopped selling, then some other lure to our base impulses would have to be invented to maintain the all-consuming reality of choice.

Never mind that those skinny models you see all around throw up their meals just to live up to the body size on which their careers depend. And who defines their careers? Marketers again, of course—for our benefit. The same people who impose unlikely criteria for acting and living sexy are telling us that being sexy is within everyone’s grasp.

Clearly, not all the developments we have seen, especially in the postwar period, have been healthy. They have led to hyper-consumerism, the depletion of the earth’s resources, and climate change. Today, the sheer variety of choices before us, the alternative lifestyles, and the means to their realization is unparalleled. However, the presence of choice on this scale is not a particularly good measure of freedom, which the West purports to uphold. Having to choose between this and