Multiculturalisms: Western, Muslim and future

We are accustomed to thinking of the West as open to and tolerant of difference, and the Muslim world as being homogenous and violently opposed to cooperation with others. What we forget is the not-so-distant history of the West as the site of profound xenophobia and the Muslim world as the home of diversity and multiculturalism.

It is only in the past half-century that the West has evolved away from two paradigms that led to extreme violence against people considered the "other":

1. The racist paradigm, euphemistically phrased as the "White Man's Burden," that led to a Western triumphalism that aggressively proselytized the rest of the world into adopting Western culture and religion. The British, for example, sought to create a race of 'brown Englishmen' in India. The French Francophiled their North- and West-African colonies (Algeria, Morocco and Senegal) while the Spanish completely displaced Central and South American native cultures with their own Hispanic culture and Catholic religion. It was this attitude that fueled the discriminatory "White Australia" immigration policy until the mid-20th century and sanctioned other policies that permitted the horrible treatment of Australian aborigines. It also explains the American genocide of the Native American Indians and slavery of the black race, behavior neither countenanced by any religion nor by the American Declaration of Independence.

2. The nation-state paradigm, which aggressively sought to homogenize human identities within a geographic boundary. When race was not different, ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities were oppressed and treated as outsiders, alien to the dominant culture. Where once wars were conducted by a warrior class or by soldiers, wars between nation-states drew whole populations into participating in national wars, broadening the conflict to include non-combatants. Pogroms against Jews in East Europe, the treatment of the Irish Catholics by the Protestants, and the ejection of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula are examples of what happens when societies shift from a multicultural social contract to a monocultural one.

These two paradigms ineluctably ushered a 'Clash of Civilizations' that reached its most explosive apogee in the two World Wars of the 20th century and with the Nazi regime, which sought to establish a purified white Aryan race and gave us the holocaust. Monoculturalism weakened the European powers and almost destroyed the human race.

The multiculturalist paradigm now on the rise in Europe and the West was the operational paradigm that ruled the Muslim world for thirteen centuries, flowing from the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad as understood and implemented by his immediate successors.

How the Muslim World Lost Its Multiculturalism

Until the 20th century, the Muslim world operated under a multicultural paradigm, understood as flowing from Islamic theology, law and historical precedent. Until the First World War, Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman caliphate since 1453, was almost half Greek, with many cities and regions of modern Turkey populated by Greek majorities. Smyrna, the modern Izmir, for example, was two-thirds Greek until 1922. 400,000 Greeks lived in Alexandria, Egypt until the mid-1950s. Today it has less than 3% of this figure. Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and Persians, reflecting the full variety of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretations: Shia and Sunni with all the varieties of legal schools of interpretation, lived and worked in intimate proximity with each other, as did Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. Today the head Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church is still based in Istanbul.

Starting with WW1, the Muslim world, under the colonial influence of the West and legitimately enamored by the ideas that catalyzed Western prosperity, uncritically adopted these two pernicious paradigms. The result was the rise of triumphalist nation-state identities around ethnicity and religion. Monoculturalist societies began to emerge around hardening ethnic and religious identification. Arab nationalism was one, fueled by the British in the late-19th century as a means of breaking up the Ottoman Empire. Traditional Islamic systems of rule came to an end, systems that had hitherto ruled over multicultural groups of peoples, including the Islamic nation, the ummah, based upon workable concepts of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual society not defined by geography.

Geographically homogeneous ethnic nations were born, seeding ethnic conflicts that continue to this day. Turkey now had no place for Greeks, who left in large numbers. Armenians and Kurds suffered atrocities Islamic law forbids. Pakistan and Israel were examples of geographies carved to accommodate religious nationalisms that philosophically had no space for Hindus and Gentiles as equals, violations of the very religious ethical principles of Islam and Judaism. And when Arab nationalism failed to progress society, Islamic nationalism readily filled the vacuum, a concept completely alien to the traditional notions of Islamic thought, theology or legal and historical precedent.