Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

IAN BURUMA

Enlightenment Wars

See also: Commentary from Mimetic Theory (by Wolfgang Palaver)

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NOTES

1: The Enlightenment has become a staple of political debate and newspaper commentary. Those who believe that multi-culturalism and cultural relativism, espoused by “progressives” over the last four decades, have dangerously undermined “our Western values”, identify those values with the Enlightenment: free speech, sexual equality, separation of Church and State.

Multiculturalism is especially dangerous, in the view of the new conservatives, because it tolerates religious intolerance, and Islamic intolerance in particular. Some go so far as to predict a Muslim take-over of European civilization: “Eurabia”. They will outbreed us, and conquer us, because they are violent and, what is perhaps more important, because they still believe in their values, whereas Europeans have stopped believing in anything.

Furthermore, it is believed, Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy, because Mosque and State are indivisible, and Muslims wish to replace secular laws with the Shariah.

2: The reaction against Islam is particularly strong among members of a generation that rebelled against its own religious institutions in the 1960s. People forget how recent it was that religious institutions dominated social and political life in a country, such as the Netherlands . Whatever one’s views of the Enlightenment, secularism, as the mainstream of European life, has a short history.

The rebels against religion often turned to new dogmas with all the fervor of recent converts: Marxism, Maoism, Third World Liberationism, multiculturalism, etcetera.

In the Netherlands anti-racism and multiculturalism were defended with particular zeal because of what happened under German occupation in World War Two. Two thirds of Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust, the highest percentage relative to the population of any country outside Poland . Residual feelings of guilt and shame have affected political and social debates at least since the 1960s (before that there was a shameful silence.)

3. The split among the progressive elites became acute with the Salman Rushdie affair and, in the Netherlands , the murder of Theo van Gogh. Before the burnings of Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, and the fatwa from Iran against the author himself, intolerance from a poor non-Western community would have been tolerated in name of anti-racism and multiculturalism. With Rushdie, the target of intolerance was himself a member of the metropolitan progressive elite.

Some people on the left blamed Rushdie for provoking the Muslims, wich put them on the same side as some religious conservatives, who had always hated Rushdie. Others, however, joined ranks with secular conservatives in their denunciation of Islam as a threat to Western civilization. It was right to defend Rushdie against his violent enemies, just as it is right to condemn the killer of Van Gogh. But denunciations of Islam per se can become a new form of dogmatism and fundamentalism.

4. The fact that the new conservatives, galvanized by Rushdie and van Gogh, are intolerant of religion in general and Islam in particular, does not create a moral equivalence between neo-cons and radical Islamists. Nor does the fact that Islamists and promoters of Enlightenment values share a universalist view of the world. There is a fundamental difference between those who use or threaten to use violence to impose their universalist views and those who seek to persuade by peaceful means.

Where I differ from the new conservatives is in the belief that we must all “share common values” to live in a liberal democracy. Communist parties were allowed in democracies, even though no one would claim that a Communist shares the values of a conservative capitalist. Ultra-orthodox Jews or indeed orthodox Protestants do not have the same values as secular socialists. The only thing all citizens should be bound by is the renunciation of violence, in political, religious, or social conflicts. Violence should never be tolerated in name of cultural tradition or religious faith.

5. Is this an impossible demand to make of devout Muslims? Can they not abide by secular laws, when it comes to apostates or infidels who have “insulted the faith”? The fact that the majority of Muslims do abide by these laws suggests that they can. Theo van Gogh should have been free to verbally attack Islam, or Judaism, or any other faith, without being murdered. But one might still doubt the efficacy of dogmatic secularism. Claims that “our civilization” is superior to “their backward religion” are not useful if we wish religious citizens to feel that they have a reason to defend our common freedoms.

6. The violent intolerance of political Islam in Europe is not a sympton of a civilizational clash, a la Huntington . For it is not part of the traditional faiths or cultures imported from Morocco and other Muslim countries. It is, instead, a new purist ideology, often dowloaded from Internet sites, that offers a great cause to vulnerable young people born in the West, who feel neither at home in the lands of their fathers, nor yet in the West. How long and how badly this violent cause will threaten us depends partly on the politics in the Middle East , but also on the way new European citizens are treated. The rhetoric of values, “ours” or “theirs”, will be less helpful than more practical measures, such as better employment opportunities, less social discrimination, and better education.

The way to minimize the threat of violent Islamism is to isolate it inside the Muslim world itself, in the Middle East , but also in the West. Without the active help of mainstream Muslims in isolating the revolutionaries, there is little hope of controlling the violence. Muslims must be accepted as fellow European citizens, even if they espouse values that secular citizens do not share. But Muslim citizens must be bound by the secular laws. This a compromise that most Muslims have already accepted. It would be a tragedy to alienate them for the sake of dogmatic secularism.