The Paradigm of Islamic Civilization

​​In the Western world "a certain question type has been around for a long time. The question goes: Is Islam compatible with ... xy? For xy one inserts: human rights, democracy, international law, etc."

Alexander Haridi, an expert from the younger generation (born in 1967), considers this "sweeping image of Islam," questionable in itself "due to its generalization," to be a purely intellectual construct which he intends to "deconstruct."

Islamic studies as an independent scholarly field

Carl Heinrich Becker, who founded the science of Islamic history and culture in Germany at the turn of the 19th century, is the ideal counterpart for such a project. On the one hand the professor – who was also Prussia's Minister for Culture at the time – considered Islamic civilization as a "uniform" network of religion, politics, and economics spread across several continents, whose cohesiveness enabled him to turn Islamic studies in 1910 into an independent scholarly field in Germany with its own university professorships.

Next to Great Britain and France, Germany was among the leading countries to scientifically explore Islamic history and culture, although naturally blurred from a Eurocentric perspective characteristic of the time.

Islam's internationalism as unrealistic political theory?

On the other hand Becker also taught that "the centralized state of the caliphate formed the framework for this uniform civilization." This state, however, has been defunct for over seven hundred years. Ever since, according to Becker, "Islam's internationalism" has been nothing more than unrealistic "political theory."

In contrast, nearly one hundred years ago, the scholar said that "everyday reality" shows "the vast differences between the various peoples."

"Moral justification for all colonization"

Becker received his first full professorship at the age of thirty at the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1908. Fully in the mainstream of European imperialism, he saw a "moral justification for all colonization" in the "civilizing" of the subjugated peoples.

In this, however, Islam was not an adversary, as many believe(d), but an ally. Islam – according to Becker – promoted, especially in Africa, "a spirit of discipline, an inner steadfastness, and external good behavior much more extensively than the (Christian) mission ever could, and therewith the preliminary stages to a higher civilization."

The "big problem," however, was "the modernization of Islam."

Its "future" could "only exist by adapting to European intellectual life," that is, in today's words, a (global) Euro-Islam. The decisive factor for this, says Becker, is religion as a private matter in an otherwise secular world, such as that dawned in Europe with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Consult Becker, and you can save yourself shelves of specialist literature and textbooks on sociology, political science, intellectual history from back then to the present.

Common intellectual roots of Orient and Occident

The father of German Islamic science did not think that the religion of the prophet Mohammed stood in the way of the progress of civilization in the Orient. After all, the Orient has the same intellectual roots in antiquity – in Hellenistic, Jewish, early Christian thinking – as present-day Europe.

Rather stagnation, a characteristic of the "Orient," which Becker at times expanded to include Japan, was the problem. Here Haridi remarks critically that his counterpart made "a priori assumption" of the term Orient and used it as a self-evident final justification for the backwardness of the Orient in comparison to Europe.

All facets of the term as used by Becker are negative: in political terms the Orient was characterized by despotism and absolutism; in terms of social psychology, it was characterized by everyday fatalism, which could turn into religious fanaticism; and in economic terms, the Oriental societies were unproductive.

In this respect, the "Orient" is obviously the early 20th century code name for today's "developing countries" in contrast to the West/Occident.

Becker, however, was by no means without hope: "The Oriental educational system is not exclusively devoted to intellectual problems. It is closely connected with the economic improvement of the country" by means of "the free play of forces.'"

Taking the blinders off misleading terminology

It is simply astounding to learn that authoritative views in the West about the non-European world have been determined by the same perspectives and assessments for at least a hundred years. Haridi calls for us to remove the "asymmetrical terms" Orient/Occident from this discourse and thus to take the blinders off it.

Almost thirty years ago, Edward Said made the same case in his book "Orientalism. Western Concepts of the Orient." But in the process, he explicitly exonerated German scholarship of imperialist thinking – quite unfounded, as Haridi now demonstrates.

Hermann Horstkotte

© Qantara.de 2005

Alexander Haridi. Das Paradigma der "islamischen Zivilisation" – oder die Begründung der deutschen Islamwissenschaft durch Carl Heinrich Becker (1878 – 1933) / The Paradigm of the "Islamic Civilization" – The Making of the Science of Islam in Germany by Carl Heinrich Becker. Ergon Verlag: Mitteilungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der islamischen Welt Bd. 19, Würzburg 2005. 204 pages. EUR 34.00.

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