Vision:

By Zoheir Salem*

Islamists and the West

The enemies despite their will

In brief: researchers, scholars, and westerner decision makers classify (Islamists) in the position of hostility to the West. This is usually followed by policies, decisions and attitudes that neither serves the truth nor serves the mutual interests between the people of our Muslim world and the western world in its multi horizons.

The title of (enmity to the West) is vague and confused concept and it takes a lot of fallacies, contradictions, and paradoxes. Is it real that Islamic World in general and the holders of the Islamic project in particular are (enemies of the West) altogether?

It does not affect in the hearts and minds of the holders of this belief that Islamists are all agreed to appositive attitude toward the civilized Western project. As they look at the civilized Western project, since Refa'ah AL Tahtaui, as a successful and guide project, and as an exemplary experience in many fields. They are trying to follow the practical western experience in its bases and structures in order to transmit it to their governed with failure factors worlds.  The whole matter is that Islamists adhere to their right, just as westerners, in distinction between what is accepted and rejected, and they emphasize that they have their own rules by which they distinct the beautiful and the ugly. They always complain that their countries are deprived of the positive western information by an actor and a decision. Islamists are the forerunners, as they think and emphasize, to state the necessity of admitting and respecting the humanistic, civilized, and religious other, as the beliefs, thoughts, sects, and creeds wave under the political banners of Islam at the time the religious wars and Inquisitions were prevalent in the civilization and the world of the West.

The Islamists, on this level, believe in the necessity of keeping the civilization windows opened among the humans on the base of the unity of human origin, and the sharing in human dignity, and that the wisdom which is the comprehensive title for all the beneficial and useful, is the aim of every reasonable and wise person, wherever found should be sought after.

On these bases the Islamists and the peoples of the whole Islamic geography who supports them do not hide (hatred), (evil), or (spite) for the people of any culture, race or religion in their abstract human description, which is according to the Islamic faith is the focus of the human race dignity in its absolute (We have honored the sons of Adam ..)

Islamists do not reject any of the human values of freedom, justice, equality and cooperation, compassion and the pursuit for achievement; but they are the advocates for that and the forerunners, and if there is a disagreement in some of these conceptual values then it is a difference based on the environmental conditioning on having more than being based on an abstract theoretical concept.

Islamists regard the cognitive project of the west in its both humanitarian and technical dimensions. They often blame their leaders and governments for the default that takes roots in their worlds in the fields of scientific research, and the enabling the human of knowledge that will help him to be a civilization maker rather than just a consumer of the achievements of other human beings.

Islamists do not disagree with Westerners in their project to honor, liberate, and empower women, but they have their own concept of honor, liberation, and empowerment. A Concept that does not bear the brunt of the historical reality experienced by Muslim women in this age certainly, nor does it bear the brunt of the closed interpretations issued by some speakers on behalf of Muslims, or their political representatives, but the existence of such interpretations, is a physical evidence of the open-mindedness of Islam. Islamists wonder why Westerners do have the right to organize the rules of social relations in their communities, but do not recognize such right for Muslims. Does anybody, in the level of civilization based on dialogue and respect, has the right to impose oneself on the world as the perfect and the most beautiful on every level!!

Islamists in many of their own countries have declared their admiration for political mechanisms, attained by the West to regulate the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, and setting the bases of modern state, in terms of freedom of choice, and the rules of transparency and regular inquest, mechanisms of the peaceful transfer of power, equal access to opportunities, as well as the bases to build free pluralistic societies which consider citizenship conditional for rights and obligations that gather everybody evenly.

Islamists consider the experience of Western civilization on more than one level as a model; they are always able to compare with their historical model that is still alive in their souls. Perhaps this combination or comparison does not harm the fact of the project. We believe that the Western man is in a state of maturity that makes him higher than being stuck to the narcissism of the situation of the braggarts’ calls.

However, westerners insist on classifying Western Muslim communities and the Islamists in particular as enemies of the West!! They are enemies despite their will.

Where is the problem then?!

Does the problem lay in the history; the history of Western man who used to look at the Islamic map as the homeland of the enemies?!
Is the problem in Western entity, which was built on the historical rejection and ostracism of others and the tries to eradicate them? We stop at the raising slogans and recall the relationship between the nature and the assimilation.

Is the problem in the need of the historical Western context to a contrast or political enemies to give the historical Western movement its meaning, so as this movement would not besieged at the deep end of history, as Fukuyama one day decided, especially after American capitalism has resolved the Western interior contradictions of after the fall of the of the Soviet Union.
Is the problem of political context that reflects the fact of its reality? The fact that the West wants in Islamic geography (followers) do go on command, say its words, and secure its interests...
The problem might be a mixture of all that, but Muslim peoples and Islamists do not carry the responsibility of this fact. The Islamists are not the enemies of truth and justice, as some Westerners and their recruits in Muslim countries try to represent them, nor the most important enemies of knowledge and progress, or the most important enemies of goodness and beauty. They introduce themselves to the world, just as Westerners, as messengers of love and goodness, civilization makers, and partners to carry the responsibility of human happiness.
They think they are capable to pair what they have of civilization and cultural background, and what they benefit of sciences and modern experience to make the world, not just their own countries, more secure and prosperous, and to keep control on human relations with more clemency. It is only when a Westerner the project of domination or control, the Islamists are the head of the rejectionist and resistant, just as every civilized honorable Westerner does when its country aimed by such a project.

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*Director of The Arab Orient Center

00447792232826

zuhair@asharqalarabi.org.uk