That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed
could generate turmoil in so many countries tells
us some rather important things about the
contemporary world. Among other issues, it points
up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about
representation and derision of the prophet in the
Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim
religious beliefs that is taken to go with it)
and the evident power of determined agitators to
generate the kind of anger that leads immediately
to violence. But stereotyped representations of
this kind do another sort of damage as well, by
making huge groups of people in the world to look
peculiarly narrow and unreal.

The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the
form of a hat is obviously a figment of
imagination and cannot be judged literally, and
the relevance of that representation cannot be
dissociated from the way the followers of the
prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very
seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this
sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only
implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities,
and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A
person belongs to many different groups, of which
a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for
example, a mathematician who happens to be a
Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic
identity would be to hide more than it reveals.
Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say,
MIT or Princeton invokes an “algorithm” to solve
a difficult computational problem, he or she
helps to commemorate the contributions of the
ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi,
from whose name the term algorithm is derived
(the term “algebra” comes from the title of his
Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr
wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on
Al-Khwarizmi’s Islamic identity over his identity
as a mathematician would be extremely misleading,
and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly,
to give an automatic priority to the Islamic
identity of a Muslim person in order to
understand his or her role in the civil society,
or in the literary world, or in creative work in
arts and science, can result in profound
misunderstanding.

The increasing tendency to overlook the many
identities that any human being has and to try to
classify individuals according to a single
allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an
intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous
divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence
against infidels may want Muslims to forget that
they have any identity other than being Islamic.
What is surprising is that those who would like
to quell that violence promote, in effect, the
same intellectual disorientation by seeing
Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world.
The world is made much more incendiary by the
advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional
categorization of human beings, which combines
haziness of vision with increased scope for the
exploitation of that haze by the champions of
violence.

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be
found in Samuel Huntington’s influential 1998
book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of the World Order. The difficulty with
Huntington’s approach begins with his system of
unique categorization, well before the issue of a
clash-or not-is even raised. Indeed, the thesis
of a civilizational clash is conceptually
parasitic on the commanding power of a unique
categorization along so-called civilizational
lines, which closely follow religious divisions
to which singular attention is paid. Huntington
contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic
civilization,“”Hindu civilization,“”Buddhist
civilization," and so on. The alleged
confrontations of religious differences are
incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of
hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can
be classified according to many other partitions,
each of which has some-often
far-reaching-relevance in our lives:
nationalities, locations, classes, occupations,
social status, languages, politics, and many
others. While religious categories have received
much airing in recent years, they cannot be
presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and
even less can they be seen as the only relevant
system of classifying people across the globe. In
partitioning the population of the world into
those belonging to “the Islamic world,” "the
Western world,“”the Hindu world,“”the Buddhist
world," the divisive power of classificatory
priority is implicitly used to place people
firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other
divisions (say, between the rich and the poor,
between members of different classes and
occupations, between people of different
politics, between distinct nationalities and
residential locations, between language groups,
etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal
way of seeing the differences between people.

The difficulty with the clash of civilizations
thesis begins with the presumption of the unique
relevance of a singular classification. Indeed,
the question “Do civilizations clash?” is founded
on the presumption that humanity can be
pre-eminently classified into distinct and
discrete civilizations, and that the relations
between different human beings can somehow be
seen, without serious loss of understanding, in
terms of relations between different
civilizations.

This reductionist view is typically combined, I
am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of
world history that overlooks, first, the extent
of internal diversities within these
civilizational categories, and second, the reach
and influence of interactions-intellectual as
well as material-that go right across the
regional borders of so-called civilizations. And
its power to befuddle can trap not only those who
would like to support the thesis of a clash
(varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic
fundamentalists), but also those who would like
to dispute it and yet try to respond within the
straitjacket of its prespecified terms of
reference.

The limitations of such civilization-based
thinking can prove just as treacherous for
programs of “dialogue among civilizations” (much
in vogue these days) as they are for theories of
a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating
search for amity among people seen as amity
between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided
human beings to one dimension each and muzzles
the variety of involvements that have provided
rich and diverse grounds for cross-border
interactions over many centuries, including the
arts, literature, science, mathematics, games,
trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human
interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing
global peace can have very counterproductive
consequences when these attempts are founded on a
fundamentally illusory understanding of the world
of human beings.

Increasing reliance on religion-based
classification of the people of the world also
tends to make the Western response to global
terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed.
Respect for “other people” is shown by praising
their religious books, rather than by taking note
of the many-sided involvements and achievements,
in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of
different people in a globally interactive world.
In confronting what is called “Islamic terrorism”
in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global
politics, the intellectual force of Western
policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to
define-or redefine-Islam.

To focus just on the grand religious
classification is not only to miss other
significant concerns and ideas that move people.
It also has the effect of generally magnifying
the voice of religious authority. The Muslim
clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex
officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic
world, even though a great many people who happen
to be Muslim by religion have profound
differences with what is proposed by one mullah
or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the
world is suddenly seen not as a collection of
people, but as a federation of religions and
civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of
what a multiethnic society must do has led to
encouraging the development of state-financed
Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools,
etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported
Christian schools. Under this system, young
children are placed in the domain of singular
affiliations well before they have the ability to
reason about different systems of identification
that may compete for their attention. Earlier on,
state-run denominational schools in Northern
Ireland had fed the political distancing of
Catholics and Protestants along one line of
divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now
the same predetermination of “discovered”
identities is now being allowed and, in effect
encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a
different part of the British population.

Religious or civilizational classification can be
a source of belligerent distortion as well. It
can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs
well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William
Boykin’s blaring-and by now well-known-remark
describing his battle against Muslims with
disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was
bigger than his,“and that the Christian God”was
a real God, and [the Muslim’s] was an idol." The
idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so
there is comparatively limited danger in the
uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There
is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in
the use in Western public policy of intellectual
“guided missiles” that present a superficially
nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from
opposition through the apparently benign strategy
of defining Islam appropriately. They try to
wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by
insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and
that a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant
individual (“so come off it and be peaceful”).
The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam
is certainly appropriate and extremely important
at this time, but we must ask whether it is
necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to
define in largely political terms what a "true
Muslim" must be like.

******

A person’s religion need not be his or her
all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam,
as a religion, does not obliterate responsible
choice for Muslims in many spheres of life.
Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a
confrontational view and another to be thoroughly
tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them
ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.

The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the
terrorism linked with it also becomes
particularly confused when there is a general
failure to distinguish between Islamic history
and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like
all other people in the world, have many
different pursuits, and not all their priorities
and values need be placed within their singular
identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not
surprising at all that the champions of Islamic
fundamentalism would like to suppress all other
identities of Muslims in favor of being only
Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who
want to overcome the tensions and conflicts
linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem
unable to see Muslim people in any form other
than their being just Islamic.

People see themselves-and have reason to see
themselves-in many different ways. For example, a
Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also
a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite
proud of the Bengali language, literature, and
music, not to mention the other identities he or
she may have connected with class, gender,
occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on.
Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan was not
based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity
was shared by the bulk of the population in the
two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist
issues related to language, literature, and
politics.

Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all
why champions of the Muslim past, or for that
matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate
specifically on religious beliefs only and not
also on science and mathematics, to which Arab
and Muslim societies have contributed so much,
and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab
identity. Despite the importance of this
heritage, crude classifications have tended to
put science and mathematics in the basket of
“Western science,” leaving other people to mine
their pride in religious depths. If the
disaffected Arab activist today can take pride
only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the
many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique
prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on
both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating
people within the enclosure of a singular
identity.

Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate
Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs
with moderateness of religious faith. A person
can have strong religious faith-Islamic or any
other-along with tolerant politics. Emperor
Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the
Crusades in the 12^th century, could offer,
without any contradiction, an honored place in
his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that
distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an
intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16^th
century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at
the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great
Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and
died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his
large project of legally codifying minority
rights, including religious freedom for all.

The point that needs particular attention is that
while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal
politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that
liberality was in no way ordained-nor of course
prohibited-by Islam. Another Mughal emperor,
Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and
persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason,
failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way
that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim
because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.

The insistence, if only implicitly, on a
choiceless singularity of human identity not only
diminishes us all, it also makes the world much
more flammable. The alternative to the
divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is
not any unreal claim that we are all much the
same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our
troubled world lies in the plurality of our
identities, which cut across each other and work
against sharp divisions around one single
hardened line of vehement division that allegedly
cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets
savagely challenged when our differences are
narrowed into one devised system of uniquely
powerful categorization.

Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the
neglect-and denial-of the roles of reasoning and
choice, which follow from the recognition of our
plural identities. The illusion of unique
identity is much more divisive than the universe
of plural and diverse classifications that
characterize the world in which we actually live.
The descriptive weakness of choiceless
singularity has the effect of momentously
impoverishing the power and reach of our social
and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny
exacts a remarkably heavy price.