Participants at a recent conference on dialogue between the West and Islam were more concerned with the end result of the dialogue than the conference's agenda. Omayma Abdel-Latif reports on their deliberations in Granada "All lands in their diversity are one, and men are all brothers and neighbours" -- Al-Zubaidi, tutor of Al-Hakam II, who came to power in 961 and created a library of 400,000 volumes An anonymous chronicler once described Granada as one of the few cities "whose history is as powerful as its own reality, leading to the creation of all sorts of myths and legends that end up becoming as real as life itself". Granada serves as a strong reminder of an Islamic civilisation that was in stark contrast to contemporary representations of the Muslim world. Granada is also a reminder of one of the darkest chapters in Muslim history, the beginning of the fall from grace. The history of the relationship between the Muslim world and its Christian neighbours somehow resembles that of Granada itself; it is fraught with legends and myths that ended up becoming as real as life itself. It was precisely for this reason that Granada was chosen to play host last week to a gathering of intellectuals from the "Muslim" and "Western" world to pay tribute to the spirit of Al-Andalus and launch a series of encounters under the title Dialogues: Islam-US- West. The three-day conference, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Brothers fund and the Ellegado Andalusia and organised by World I, a liberal, New York--based, think tank, addressed a range of issues. Despite the significance and timing of the conference, leaders of the Christian right movement in the US, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston, as well as staunch protagonists of the clash of civilisation theory such as Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bernard Lewis, turned down invitations. The Grand Sheikh of Al-Azahar, Mufti of Syria, Ahmed Al-Buti, and Yousef Al- Qaradawi also reacted in the same manner. As one participant said, the conference was boycotted by the two primary antagonists of the relationship. Nonetheless, the meeting brought together almost 70 Muslim, Arab and Western intellectuals and policy makers. Click to view caption The conference tried to avoid the trap of becoming yet another debate on dialogue between Islam and the West. This theme has been exhausted by countless intellectual encounters ever since Samuel Huntington espoused his theory of a clash between Islam and Christian civilisations. Many organisations and international bodies -- including the UN -- have launched their own versions of dialogue between cultures. Perversely, it was due to the 11 September attacks that the "industry of dialogue" came full circle with an unprecedented surge in the number of conferences, seminars, publications and dialogue-oriented activities taking places in different parts of the world. This "industry" is based on an exercise of what one Arab thinker correctly described as "an intellectual enquiry" into Islam's values, history and compatibility with modernity, as defined by the West. In a way, this explains why these encounters have done so little to encourage both parties to improve relations or move beyond a simplified dichotomy of Islam and the West. Therefore, it was hardly a surprise that the primary concern of many of the participants at the Granada meeting was how not to be seen as part of the industry of "dissecting Islam". Those concerns seemed legitimate in light of the fact that the majority of dialogue projects remained a Western-oriented intellectual exercise. But some observers see this as a "normal phenomenon" "These conferences reflect a need in the West to understand what has happened and where the fury is coming from and this is more for the US and less for Europe which has maintained a better relationship with its southern shores," explained Mustapha Tlili, the director of the Dialogues project at the World Policy Institute and organiser of the Granada conference. To put aside those concerns, Tlili went as far as to stress that "we have no hidden agenda. Our only agenda is to knock down the walls of misunderstanding, to revive the old traditions of Islam in Cordoba, Baghdad and Andalusia whose main feature was tolerance and exchange with other cultures. We have no agenda but to educate Western public opinion and policy makers, particularly in the US, that Islam is not a menace and to tell the Muslim world about Western concerns." Tlili also went as far as urging participants that "whatever cultural and intellectual baggage we bring with us, the most important thing is to put everything on the table because this is a genuine effort and it has to be taken at face value." In response, some seized the chance to register initial concerns about how the meeting on dialogue might end up being one way traffic where, according to Hassan Hanafi, professor of Islamic philosophy at Cairo University, "the West becomes the patron telling us how to be a better world because it represents the norm". "I would like to express my frustration with most dialogue conferences where, instead of reciprocity, Muslims end up being the party in the relationship which is the object of analysis. Why should Islam be any more peculiar than Christianity or Judaism? Why should it be the periphery to the centre, the colour to the white, the other of the West. There is a sense that we are not living in the same moment of history," Hanafi told a stunned audience. His views were echoed by other participants who expressed dismay at attempts to constantly place Islam under the microscope of Western analysis. These concerns however did not prevent the meeting from addressing crucial issues in the relationship. The participants grappled with the concept, "A clash of civilisations or a clash of perceptions?" The agenda was also packed with a number of important topics, which have acquired added urgency after the 11 September attacks. It began with the legacy of Islamic Spain, moving on to a debate about civilisations, and finally asking key questions about "who speaks for Islam?" and whether or not Islam is a political religion. There was near consensus that the relationship between Islam and the West was too urgent and emotive to be left to the media and to what Tlili dubbed "pop philosophy", a clear reference to Huntington's theory. Some have sought answers in history, others in philosophy, but most believe that politics has played the biggest part in shaping the civilisational relationship. Muhammed Arkoun, a prominent Arab thinker and professor of Islamic thinking at the Sorbonne University, stressed the need to relate to the past. He said that Europe needs to remember that Islam not only brought hegemony but also a system of thought and a culture. "It circulated culture through the Mediterranean area," he said. "Mediaeval history has been disregarded by Europe. There was a time when both Europe and Islam coexisted, not religiously, but rather intellectually and philosophically. This was a time of major cultural transfer from the Muslim world to its northern neighbours." The construction of hostility between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, Arkoun explained, only took place during major periods of transformation. "Now the Islamic world is faced with the same situation the West faced before the Renaissance. There is a transfer of science, technology and information from the West to the Muslim world in the very way that the Renaissance's roots were a result of the transfer of knowledge from the Muslim world to the West," Arkoun said. Taking this point a bit further, Richard Bulliet, professor of Islamic history at Columbia University, stressed the role played by school textbooks in shaping the relationship between the two parties. "There should be a consideration of what is taught about Islam in schools. What is taught about US or European imperialism, what is taught about the Iranian revolution. I sense that this is an area where indoctrination plays an important role," Bulliet said. He urged that textbooks are crucial for attempting to change mutual perceptions and that the process should be in both directions, not just in the Islamic world. "Western textbooks tend to ignore the Islamic roots of the Renaissance. Material and cultural exchange is forgotten and war and confrontation are remembered as if the relationship was shaped only through conflict," he added. Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, first vice-chairperson of the committee on foreign affairs and human rights at the European parliament, took the discussions to a different level by questioning the nature of the philosophy of the relationship. She explained that it should be drawn along political, cultural, religious and social lines. "I would like us to investigate how to understand political differences by discussing the compatibility of Shari'a law and Western democracy, looking at cultural differences in terms of basic needs in Muslim countries. Why does aid fail? Consider also religious differences: is Islam on a conquering mission; can it tolerate apostasy; what are the core values of Islam, the core values of the US and the core values of the EU," Nicholson said. To some, this kind of questioning is redirecting the discussion to territory where Islam is merely an object of analysis. Hanafi responded by posing another question "Can Islam offer the West something? It can offer its humanitarian values, and power with justice. However, the West wants to play the role of the master, the producer, the creator. Islam needs recognition, it needs to be treated as equal partner to be able to coexist," Hanafi said. The discussions shifted from philosophy to politics when Kurt Seinitz, foreign editor of the Kronenzeitung newspaper in Austria, intervened by asserting that a clash of civilisations did exist between what he described as the totalitarian fascism represented by Al-Qa'eda and liberty. "We should know how to handle the forces of confrontation and isolate them from mainstream society." [Islamic] terrorism, Seinitz went on, has its roots in the Middle East conflict, so we have to give them a programme of hope. The Baroness begged to differ, "what people need is not a programme of hope so much as a provision for their basic needs. Poverty growth has escaped us in these discussions. The bulk of the world leads a miserable life. The gap is widening all the time and the systems devised around 30 years ago have failed," she said. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a columnist for Al-Ahram, said, in response to Seintiz's remarks, that there should be a fundamental change to the rules of coexistence. "The world system has to change in order to make this type of behaviour unnecessary. Civil society, rather than the state, needs to make decisions that more accurately represent the repressed social forces that find themselves in a hopeless situation," Sid-Ahmed said. Though little has been said about the role of the media in generating a perception of the "other", there were conflicting views as to how the media was responsible for shaping the relationship between Islam and the West. Karl Meyer, editor of the World Policy Journal, believes that the media does alter reality, however, the stereotypes created by what he described as "vendors of global journalism" do not necessarily determine history. Malise Ruthven held a different opinion. He believes that the future of interaction between Islam and the West is going to take place within the media rather than outside it. James Piscatori, professor and fellow at Wadham College, Oxford University, posed interesting questions about the nature and the role of religion. "Is there something about religion that makes it both part of the problem and part of the solution?" he said. He traces attempts made both by Muslim and Western governments to "bureaucratise religion". "There is a quest by governments to install this bureaucracy, an attempt to control Islam. They want to make it an object and commoditise it," Piscatori said. "These attempts to control Islam have always backfired. Both Muslim and Western governments which try to install Muslim leaders, particularly in England and France, should be wary of the consequences." Piscatori also pointed out an issue which more often than not escapes discussions, namely "who speaks for Islam". The answer to this question, says Piscatori, is detrimental not only to the future of internal debates among Muslims, but also to the course of dialogue between Muslims and Westerners. Piscatori's remarks profoundly affected the nature of the discussions on the final day. There were questions about the forces that should speak for Islam and in what way the West plays a role in internal debates between Muslims. This was when many participants thought the discussions had reached a point of common ground. Sid- Ahmed said that new rules of engagement should be outlined. These should be based on reciprocity. "We have to question the logic of their [Islam and the West] relationship and how to establish rules for equality among the parties concerned. In other words, how can we create a mechanism to counter-balance what is being imposed on us now," Sid Ahmed said. Hanafi urged that the conference should go beyond legacies inherited over the past four decades. "We should go beyond the bipolarity of Islam and the West and focus more on the logic of the relationship. Is it bipolarity or building bridges?" He said that without a comparative framework the dialogue becomes futile. So in what way has the Granada gathering affected the debate between Islam and the West? The answer to this question is found in the workings of an informal meeting held between Western policy planners representing the British Foreign Office, the Spanish and the French foreign ministries as well as the US State Department and some 20 Arab and Western thinkers. The conference organisers were keen that the Granada meeting should not be another debate with no impact on the policy making process. Therefore, a meeting where "policy planners put their agenda on the table and Arab thinkers express their genuine concerns", was bound to take the discussion a step further from where it usually ends. Arab and Muslim participants expressed deep concerns over the critical situation in the region. Indeed, for some, Palestine was very the much the issue at the heart of any project of reconciliation. Additionally, democracy should be induced not by giving instructions but by setting an example. On the part of Western policy makers, there was a recognition that the West did not do enough to support democratisation in the Arab world. There was also a realisation that "the mistakes committed in Algeria", as one Western official put it, "should not be repeated again". Another official expressed the West's genuine concerns about the coming to power of Islamists. "How do we deal with the fact that democracy is bringing in more Islamists? Should we talk to them? And would this mean encouraging them? Or should we boycott them?" he said. Another official admitted that there is "confusion" about how to deal with the Islamist phenomenon. "Gilles Kepel, the French scholar, once wrote that political Islam was waning in influence but we have found that Islamists scored high points in elections in the most recent elections in Bahrain, Pakistan and Morocco," he said. One official admitted that "since 11 September there has been a state of policy paralysis". He went on to explain the issues of high priority on the West's agenda. "The issue of weapons of mass destruction being in the wrong hands, that is, with those who may use them against us, is extremely high on our agenda. Equally important, are concerns over how to secure stable energy supplies for the future. There is also a major concern over failed and failing states with Afghanistan as an example of the kind of problems we want to avoid repeating in other countries," the high ranking Western official said. He admitted that "democracy was never on the West's agenda. As long as we can secure a continuous flow of oil, other issues do not really matter. Now we are faced with a dilemma over whether the existing [geo-political] situation serves our interests in the long run. If democracy brings Islamists to power, we will have to live with the problems of an Islamist government. This may be necessary for our long-term interests." The official also acknowledged that double standards had been applied to the Palestinian issue. A US State Department official asked, "Do we have a role to play in furthering democracy? Can we put pressure on governments to change their laws?". It was at that point that many of the participants, mostly Arabs, realised that the discussions had gone back to square one.
