Graham avoided discussion about the more visible role of Islamist groups in Egypt. (Photo credit: Harvard Gazette) |
Ideas that history is increasingly being determined by a clash of civilizations and that Islam is theocratic are a “big myth” according to the Dean of Harvard Divinity School (HDS).
“This clash is touted as an explanation for the violent conflicts already occurring around the world in our new century, in particular the post-9/11 tensions and conflicts between – in the terms of this myth – Christian civilization and Islamic civilization,” assessed William A. Graham, head of the non-sectarian school attached to Harvard University. “Sadly, many American politicians and strategists seem to have bought this big myth, and in their uncritical acceptance of it lies the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy. If we act as though the myth is true, we may make it so.”
The seminary leader’s words directly challenge claims of increasing conflict between the Western and Islamic worlds, citing incompatible worldviews or differing concepts of governance and religion as flash points.
Graham spoke in May before the City Club of Cleveland. A Protestant whose religious beliefs do not match up with any one denomination, Graham is a specialist in comparative religion and early Islamic religious history. He is the first person without ministerial training known to lead the school, according to a 2002 profile in Harvard magazine.
In the profile, Graham said that the study of other religions introduces “a certain degree of relativism in one’s own self-understanding of what faith is about.” Noting that he has “some difficulty with organized religion in general,” Graham said that he does not see one tradition having a monopoly on truth.
“I’m enough of an historian to feel that religious communities and theologies are humanly conditioned efforts to apprehend whatever is beyond our apprehension,” Graham told Harvard magazine.
The “Big Myth”
Graham described “big myths” as “those things that try to give you simple explanations for complex things” and arouse anger, fear and “often irrational attitudes that brook no compromise.”
“Big myths mislead: they serve political and other agendas, but not truth or reason or moderation, let alone understanding or compassion,” Graham alleged. “Nowhere today do we see some of these big myths more persistently deployed and pursued than with respect to Islamic religion and Muslims, both at home and abroad.”
Graham said this was evident in the myth of an “imagined monolithic Islamic civilization set over against an imagined monolithic Christian civilization feeds American xenophobia, extremist Christian and even Jewish zealotry and most dangerously, the anti-Muslim bias of radical American and Western policy makers.”
“Ironically enough, it also feeds Muslim extremist thinking and zealotry, itself,” Graham added.
The HDS dean reported that the other group that had embraced this myth was “the cohort of extremist Islamist movements” that have been calling for or attempting attacks on Americans and the West.
“They too believe, or at least want Muslims to believe, that Islam is fated to clash with Christianity forever,” Graham declared, explaining that such groups see themselves, though small in number, as the only true spokespersons for all Muslims worldwide.
“Thus we have an unholy alliance between non-Muslim and Muslim ideologues,” Graham judged. “Both have an interest in the big myth of civilizational clash, because it justifies their own political agendas. Both hope, but for very different reasons, that if they keep repeating this myth, they act again and again as if it were true, it will become true.”
Dismissing Claims of Islamic Theocracy
Graham said that at the heart of the myth of monolithic civilizational adversaries was another myth — accepted in the media and occasionally in the academy — that in Islam, politics and religion are so inseparable that the only truly Islamic form of government is a theocratic state.
The Islamic historian dismissed this viewpoint, noting that in early years, Muslims largely rejected successionist and Shia camps, instead adopting a third view that called for the most capable leaders, rather than supposed descendants of prophets, or the most pious. Graham also argued that from the ninth century onward, the figure of the Caliph was merely a figurehead of an Islamic unity that did not actually exist on the ground, and that he rarely wielded much in the way of political or religious power.
“The myth of theocratic rule, as the Islamic norm, or of the caliphate as have existed as a theocratic single institution in Islam all the way down to the fall of the Ottoman Empire is truly a myth. It’s simply not historical fact,” Graham argued, largely glossing over Mohammed’s combined religious and political leadership in his lifetime. Graham argued that the concept of a single theocratic institution ignored that through the centuries, kings or governors in local regions may have claimed to be pious Muslims, but rarely claimed religious authority, in Graham’s determination.
“They paid lip service to the caliph as commander of the faithful, but they ruled on their own authority,” Graham said. “The split between religious and political authority not only started early, it endured.”
Graham asserted that jihadist movements in the later 18th and 19th centuries which sought to establish more pure forms of Islam had only limited success in establishing such states, and that even they endured only briefly.
“The conjoined impact of an often militant Christianity together with the militarily and economically aggressive secular West was a powerful and traumatic one in the Islamic world as it was elsewhere,” Graham said. “There was, of course, a certain civilizational clash in this process of Western empire-building, but there was also a powerful co-mingling of civilizations as well.”
The Harvard academic suggested that, before the 1800s, the rivalries of Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire had for 400 years played out between two cultural worlds largely closed to each other. But this changed after 1800 with colonial imperialism and “militant Christian missionizing,” the Muslim majority lands came under a “double cultural attack” from both Christian and secular modernists, as well as a “double political attack” both economic and military.
“The effects were massive throughout the Islamic world throughout the East and West,” Graham concluded.
Islamist Movements
The seminary dean cited two elements — political efforts to modernize, and Islamic reformers adopting a concept of state as a nation of citizens rather than subjects – as developments that continued to shift away from theocracy. The notable exception, he claimed, came in recent times starting with the 1978 Iranian Islamic revolution. Graham said this was a break from the past, as the state was now to embody Islamic norms and principles.
“What is new, at least since the 1970s, are radical activist Islamic movements aimed at a global, idealized Islam that is usually at odds with all existing state orders, East and West,” Graham assessed, adding that such movements demand an Islamic state in all Muslim countries. “They implicitly buy into the myth of Islam as inherently political, not to mention the big myth of a single Islamic civilization rather than a multiplicitous world of Islamic thought and practice that we know is the reality.”
Graham said that such groups gained support through their opposition to the monolithic West, “a myth not unlike the one I am criticizing.”
The Harvard dean suggested that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda were something new and not related to the ongoing power struggles between “entrenched, ruling elites and nationalist reformers and revolutionaries inside almost every Muslim-majority state.”
“Such extremists cannot be seen as true representatives of any traditional Islamic norms or values, no matter however much they may claim to be so,” Graham insisted. “They advocate militant trans-national action as a xenophobic, anti-American or anti-Western agenda, rather than a positive religio-political agenda of reform for a particular Muslim context – a particular nation or region. “
Graham suggested there are many moderate movements in Islam, but that the headlines go to militant groups.
“Even though their ultimate success is unlikely, their recent flourishing can tell us a lot I think about the dangers for today’s world that come when people buy into a myth that pits whole cultures, religions or civilizations against each other in simplistic fashion,” Graham predicted. “This is why big myths are so dangerous: suffering, humiliation, and fear make such myths attractive, but they lead or attempt to lead people towards simplistic and ultimately destructive agendas.”
The seminary official said that in Islamic lands, traditional, typically uneasy relationships between state and religion have been challenged in recent years.
“When modern Islamist activist groups, typically the extremists among them have called for a return to ‘true Islam’ that true Islam is often their own essentialist myth of a theocratic state like that of the prophet Mohammed 1400 years ago,” Graham said. This was a “powerful myth” that feed the bigger myth of the clash of civilizations. Graham said it was not intrinsically Islamic any more than the Spanish inquisition was intrinsically Christian.
Looking Ahead
Graham said that non-Muslim religious or political ideologues, “as well as some so-called experts in the West,” should be opposed. The seminary head said these alleged persons would use myths “to drum hatred for and willingness even to do battle with an imagined evil empire of Islam.”
“Islamic extremists are not in fact the forces that have surged to the forefront in Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East,” Graham claimed. “Such a myth as this one is fed by the real, truly evil things that people have done to other people, as in the long domination of Muslim peoples by our own Western world in its colonial era or in the trauma visited upon Americans by the savagery of the 9/11 attacks.”
Graham did not acknowledge that Islamist groups had taken a more visible role in Egypt following the recent “Arab spring” revolution there, or that a power struggle was now playing out between liberal reformers and Islamist Sufi groups in advance of the country’s scheduled autumn elections.
Saying that the “myth” of Islamic theocracy was “pernicious in the evil it has brought in its wake,” Graham said that any better, more peaceful world “surely lies beyond any imagined clash of civilizations between the Islamic, Christian or Jewish worlds, or for that matter, any other clash between allegedly incompatible civilizational rivals.”
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