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© Journal of Islamic Studies 10:2 (1999) pp. 109-125
ISLAM, THE WEST, AND THE WORLD
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IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
Bmghamton University
My title, 'Islam, the West, and the World', has two geographic terms
in it, so I think it best to start by taking a look at the geography. There
are three so-called world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—
that have their historical origins in the same rather small area of the
world, the south-western corner of the Asian continent. They all claim
some special relationship to this region, which is seen as their spiritual
home. None of the three religions, however, remained localized in
this region.
As a result of their being conquered and the destruction of their
states, Jews were relocated (or relocated themselves) to Egypt, then to
Babylonia, then in Roman times to various parts of the Mediterranean,
then later throughout much of Europe, finally in modern times to the
western hemisphere and to many other zones of the world. All of this
created what is called a diaspora. And, as we know, in the twentieth
century, many Jews returned to the original area and a new political
structure was created, the state of Israel, which asserts itself to be the
reconstructed homeland of the Jewish people.
Christianity started as a religious movement among the Jews in this
home area. Relatively soon, however, the Christians cut their ties with
the Jewish community and proselytized among non-Jews, primarily
within the then extensive Roman empire. A mere three centuries later,
Christianity had become the state religion of the empire, and in the
succeeding 500—700 years Christians pursued a policy of conversion,
primarily throughout the continent of Europe. Later, the construction
of the modern world-system involved a so-called expansion of Europe,
one that was simultaneously military, political, economic, and religious.
Within this context, Christian missionaries spanned the globe, but were
noticeably more successful in parts of the world that were not dominated
by so-called world religions. The number of converts in largely Islamic,
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A lecture delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on 21 October 1998.
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IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian-Taoist zones were relatively few, and
particularly few in Islamic zones.
Finally, Islam appeared in the same home area some six centuries
after Christianity. It too was a proselytizing religion, and spread very
rapidly throughout what we now call the Middle East, North Africa,
and the Iberian peninsula. In the sixteenth century it was pushed out
of Iberia but simultaneously penetrated what we now call the Balkans.
Meanwhile, it had been extending its geographic zone eastward towards
South-East Asia and southward into the African continent. In the twenti-
eth century the process of spread continued and eventually, by migra-
tion and conversion, reached into the western hemisphere and west-
ern Europe.
I have not done more than summarize some schoolboy knowledge. I
have reviewed this geography in order to point out that, despite the
fact that all three religions, and particularly Christianity and Islam,
are worldwide in scope and claims, we tend to think and to speak of
Christianity as the 'West' and Islam as the 'East'. To be sure, there is
no doubt some geographic basis for this shorthand, but less than we
assume, and diminishing. Hence, we have a question as to why we
insist on using this geographical shorthand. It obviously has more
political than geographic meaning.
We have had some answers recently that are well known to you.
Samuel Huntington sees the West and Islam as two antithetical 'civiliza-
tions' in long-term geopolitical conflict. Edward Said sees Orientalism
as a false construct erected for ideological reasons by the Western world,
and both pervasive and pernicious in its effects. I prefer to approach
the question another way, and ask the question, why is it that the
Christian world seems to have singled out the Islamic world as its
particular demon, and not merely recently but ever since the emergence
of Islam? Actually the reverse has probably also been true, that Islam
has regarded Christianity as its particular demon, but I do not feel I
have the competence to discuss the question of why that is so or the
degree to which it is so.
Although my emphasis will be on the modern world, I do not believe
we can explain what happened without some reference to the European
Middle Ages, for it is out of this period that we have derived our
mythologies about this relationship. As we all know, Christianity and
Islam encompassed at that time large zones which more or less bordered
each other. Although each zone was rent with internal strife of multiple
kinds, each zone appeared to regard itself as a cultural unit, and one
in conflict primarily with the other. In part, the reasons for this lay in
the dominant theologies, the sense of each that it incarnated the entire
and only possible truth, and probably also the very fact that they had
ISLAM, THE WEST, AND THE WORLD
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both originated in the same small area. The Christians claimed that
they had fulfilled the Jewish law and therefore supplanted it with a
new and final revelation. The Muslims in turn claimed that they had
built on the wisdom they had inherited from Jews and Christians with
a new and truly final form of commitment to Allah. So, one part of the
quarrel was an intra-family quarrel about heritage and truth. This is
the kind of quarrel that has often turned out to be the most divisive,
the most bitter, because in some sense the most filled both with affection
and with competitiveness.
There was another part to this quarrel, one less about ideas than
about resources and power. In the rolling back and forth of conquests—
the eighth-century Umayyad thrust into Iberia and France, the Christian
Crusades into the Holy Land, the Saracen pushback of the Christian
conquests, the Reconquista of Spain, the expansion of the Ottoman
empire, the eventual pushback of the Ottomans—it is true that the
Christian world and the Islamic world were struggling over the control
of vast areas of land, their resources, and their populations, and that
for each the other represented the main military threat. To be sure,
both were faced at specific points in time with other conquering groups
from northern Asia. However, not only were these other conquerors
eventually forced back, but many of these conquering groups were
converted religiously and thus tamed as a cultural menace.
All this set the scene for the modern world-system, where a capitalist
world-economy came into existence in western Europe and began to
expand its economic frontiers to encompass more and more of the
world. The core of this system was (western) European and Christian.
But here we have to observe that the European geographic focus
changed. The initial expansion of Europe in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries tended to jump over the Islamic world, or at least its
Middle Eastern core. European powers went west, they thought to
India, but came instead to the Americas. And they circumnavigated
Africa, again to reach out to Asia. In part, this was because they
sought what they thought to be the wealth of Asia. But in part this
was because it was easier. The Islamic world seemed a hard nut to
crack, particularly at that moment, at the height of Ottoman power.
In any case, it is as though there was a hiatus, a break in the centrahty
of the medieval Christian-Islamic struggle. The struggle was not
forgotten, but it seemed to take second place for the time being in
west European concerns in terms of their immediate geo-economic and
geopolitical projects.
If we look at the history of the modern world-system from its
beginning in the long sixteenth century to the start of the twentieth
century, we shall observe that European dominance sometimes took the
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IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
form of direct colonial rule and sometimes took a more indirect form,
one that has sometimes been termed the establishment of semi-colonies,
by which has been meant an economic subordination mixed with polit-
ico-military intrusions that stopped short of establishing actual imperial
rule. Once again, a quick overview of world geography would be useful.
The colonized areas were the Americas, most of Africa, most of South
and South-East Asia, and Oceania. The main areas that were not fully
colonized were eastern Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East. This
is of course a very crude summary, and needs to be specified and
nuanced in many ways.
There is a series of very obvious explanations in each case why full
colonization was neither sought nor possible in these regions, and why
it was sought and was possible in the others. I shall not review what
led to the difference in European attempts to control different regions,
but rather ask what was the difference in the consequences for the
peoples of any given region of the fact that their relationship with
Europe in the modern world has been one of being colonies as opposed
to one of being semi-colonies. (Of course, as of the late nineteenth
century, the term Europe should be considered a cultural term and
should be understood to include the United States.)
For the moment, I restrict myself to observing that the fiercest political
conflict with Europe in the twentieth century has come exactly from
the three regions that were only 'semi-colonized': the Soviet Union, the
Chinese People's Republic (and North Korea), and 'Islam'. Of course,
'Islam' is not a state, but Iran, Iraq, Libya only begin the list of states
which have been in fierce conflict with the pan-European world. Since
these are the three regions which have been in sharpest conflict with
Europe, it is quite comprehensible that, in the imaginary of European
discourse, the demons have been located there: Communism, the Yellow
Peril, Islamic terrorism. Today, of course, in the West, the demon of
Communism seems a historical memory, China a difficult but cultivated
friend (even ally). There remains primarily Islamic terrorism—a demon
much discussed and much feared in the West, but essentially an impre-
cise construct representing a blurred vision of reality.
How did so-called Islamic terrorism become such a central image in
the world today, and especially since the collapse of Communism in
1989/91? As we know, for several decades now, there have been
important social/religious movements in Islamic countries which are
often labelled 'Islamic fundamentalist', and somewhat more rarely
'Islamic integrist'. These labels are not, to my knowledge, self-
designations, but are those used in the Western world and in the
media. In Islamic countries these movements are more likely to be
called 'Islamist'.
ISLAM, THE WEST, AND THE WORLD
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Where do these Western designations come from, and to what do
they refer? Note that the two terms used originate not in the Islamic
sphere but in the Christian world. Fundamentalism is a term derived
from the early twentieth-century history of Protestantism in the United
States, where certain groups, particularly within Baptist Churches,
called for a return to 'fundamentals'. By this, they meant that they
believed that various modernist, even secularist, ideas had invaded
Christian theology and practice, leading it astray. They called for a
return to beliefs and practices of an earlier era. Integrism as a term
derives from Catholic history in western Europe, particularly France,
and referred to a similar call for the 'integral' faith, without dilution
from modernist and/or nationalist views and practices.
So, by analogy, Islamic fundamentalism (or integrism) became the
label given to those groups in the Islamic world who feel that modernist
views and practices have led the faithful astray, and call for a return
to older, purer, more correct views and practices. The main target of
so-called fundamentalists is always those who bear the same religious
label but who either are totally secular in practice or observe what the
'fundamentalists' consider to be a diluted and distorted version of the
religion. Historians of religious ideas constantly point out that 'funda-
mentalist' groups never represent with full accuracy what were the
supposed older, purer, more correct versions of belief and practice.
These historians have no trouble demonstrating that these so-called
fundamentalist groups always reinvent the tradition with numerous
differences, sometimes considerable ones, from the actual beliefs and
practices of yesteryear.
But, of course, these movements are not groups of Rankean histor-
ians, searching for religious truth
wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.
They
are movements of the present putting forth a claim that everyone should
believe certain things and engage in certain practices. And pedantic
exercises of the verisimilitude of their historical claims are of no interest
to them whatsoever. Nor are they of very much use to those others in
the present, not members of these groups, who wish to understand
what they are doing and proclaiming, and why.
The fact that the terminology in use derives from Christian religious
history gives us a first clue to what is going on. Whatever it is, it is not
peculiar to Islam. In the twentieth century we have had not only
Christian and Islamic 'fundamentalists', but Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist
versions as well, and they all seem to share certain common features—
the rejection of 'modernist', secularist tendencies within the group; the
insistence on a puritanical version of religious practice; a celebration of
the integrity of the religious tradition, and its eternal, unchangeable
validity. But they share a second feature, even in their Christian versions:
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