{"id":6356,"date":"2025-11-03T18:40:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T16:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6356"},"modified":"2025-11-04T04:08:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T02:08:40","slug":"islam-vs-west-four-fallacies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2025-11-03\/islam-vs-west-four-fallacies\/","title":{"rendered":"Islam vs the West: The four biggest fallacies about Islam explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Isn’t Islam inherently violent? What stopped the Islamic world having an Enlightenment? Why are some Muslims so into head-chopping? And isn’t Hamas the same as Islamic State?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A recent conversation with a friend highlighted to me how little most westerners know about Islam, and how they struggle to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. This lack of knowledge, cultivated in the West to keep us fearful and supportive of Israel, creates the very conditions that originally provoked ideological extremism in the Middle East and ultimately led to the rise of a group like Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Here I examine four common misconceptions about Muslims, Islam and Islamism \u2013 and about the West. Each is a small essay in itself.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Islam is an intrinsically violent religion, one that naturally leads its adherents to become Islamists.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is nothing unique or strange about Islam. Islam is a religion, whose adherents are called Muslims. Islamists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Islamic identity as a way to legitmise efforts to advance that project. Muslims and Islamists are different things.<\/p>\n

If that distinction is not clear, think of a parallel case. Judaism is a religion, whose adherents are called Jews. Zionists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Jewish identity as a way to legitimise efforts to advance that project. Jews and Zionists are different things.<\/p>\n

Notably, with the help of western colonial powers over the past century, one prominent group of Zionists had great success in realising their political project. In 1948 they established a self-declared \u201cJewish\u201d state of Israel by violently expelling Palestinians from their homeland. Today, most Zionists identify at some level with the state of Israel. That is because doing so is advantageous, given that Israel is tightly integrated into \u201cthe West\u201d and there are material and emotional benefits to be gained from identifying with it.<\/p>\n

The record of the Islamists has been far more mixed and variable. The Republic of Iran was founded by clerical Islamists in a 1979 revolution against the despotic rule of the western-back monarchy led by the Shah. Afghanisan is ruled by the Islamists of the Taliban, young radicals who emerged after prolonged super-power meddling by the Soviets and Americans left their country ravaged and in the grip of feudal warlords. Nato-member Turkey is led by an Islamist government.<\/p>\n

Each has a different, and conflicting, Islamist programme. This fact alone should highlight that there is no single, monolithic \u201cIslamist\u201d ideology. (More on that later.)<\/p>\n

Some groups of Islamists seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Islamists are the head-chopping zealots of Islamic State.<\/p>\n

The same can be said of Zionists. Some seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Zionists are the genocidal, child-killing soldiers sent by the state of Israel into Gaza.<\/p>\n

The same kind of distinction can be made between the religion of Hinduism and the political ideology of Hindutva. The current government of India \u2013 led by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party \u2013 is fiercely ultra-nationalist and anti-Muslim. But there is nothing intrinsic to Hinduism that leads to Modi\u2019s political project. Rather, Hindutvaism fits Modi\u2019s political objectives.<\/p>\n

And we can see similar political tendencies over much of Christianity\u2019s history, from the Crusades 1,000 years ago through the forced Christian conversions of the West\u2019s colonial era to a modern Christian nationalism that prevails in Trump\u2019s MAGA movement in the United States, and dominates major political movements in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Italy and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The main point is this: followers of political movements can \u2013 and often do \u2013 draw on the language of the religions they grew up with to rationalise their political programmes and invest them with a supposed divine legitimacy. Those programmes can be more or less violent, often depending on the circumstances such movements face.<\/p>\n

The West\u2019s obsession with associating Islam, and not Juadism, with violence \u2013 even as a self-declared \u201cJewish state\u201d commits genocide \u2013 tells us precisely nothing about those two religions. But it does tell us something about the political interests of the West. More on that below.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

But Islam, unlike Christianity, never went through an Enlightenment. That tells us there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam.<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, this argument entirely misunderstands the socio-economic basis of Europe\u2019s Enlightenment and ignores parallel factors that snuffed out an earlier Islamic Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s Enlightenment emerged out of a specific confluence of socio-economic conditions prevailing at the tail-end of the 17th<\/sup> century, conditions that gradually allowed ideas of rationality, science, and social and political progress to be prioritised over faith and tradition.<\/p>\n

The European Enlightenment was the result of a period of sustained wealth accumulation made possible by earlier technical developments, particularly relating to the printing press.<\/p>\n

The change from hand-written texts to mass-produced books increased the dissemination of information and slowly eroded the status of the Church, which until then had been able to centralise knowledge in the hands of the clergy.<\/p>\n

This new period of intense scientific inquiry \u2013 encouraged by greater access to the wisdom of previous generations of thinkers and scholars \u2013 also unleashed a political tide that could not be reversed. With the erosion of the Church\u2019s authority came the diminishment of the authority of monarchs, who had been ruling under a supposed divine right. Over time, power became more decentralised and core democratic principles gradually gained currency.<\/p>\n

The consequences would play out over succeeding centuries. The flourishing of ideas and research led to improvements in shipbuilding, navigation and warfare that enabled Europeans to travel to more distant lands. There they were able to plunder new resources, subdue resistant local populations, and take some as slaves.<\/p>\n

This wealth was brought back to Europe, where it paid for a life of ever greater luxury for a small elite. Surpluses were spent on the patronage of the artists, scientists, engineers and thinkers we associate with the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

This process accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, which increased the suffering of peoples across the globe. As Europe\u2019s technologies improved, its transport systems grew more efficient, and weapons more lethal, it was ever better positioned to extract wealth from its colonies and prevent those colonies\u2019 own economic, social and political development.<\/p>\n

It is often assumed there has been no Enlightenment in the Islamic world. This is not quite true. Centuries before the European Enlightenment, Islam produced a great flourishing of intellectual and scientific wisdom. For nearly 500 years, starting in the 8th<\/sup> century, the Islamic world led the way in developing the fields of mathematics, medicine, metallurgy and agricultural production.<\/p>\n

So why did the \u201cIslamic Enlightenment\u201d not continue and deepen to the point where it could challenge the authority of Islam itself?<\/p>\n

There were several reasons, and only one \u2013 perhaps the least significant \u2013 is related to the nature of the religion.<\/p>\n

Islam has no central authority, equivalent to a Pope or Church of England. It has always been more decentralised and less hierarchical than Christianity. As a result, local religious leaders, developing their own doctrinal interpretations of Islam, have often been better able to respond to the demands of their followers. Similarly, the lack of centralised authority to blame or challenge has made it harder to create the momentum for a European-style reformation.<\/p>\n

But as with the emergence of a European Enlightenment, the absence of a proper Enlightenment in the Muslim world is really rooted in socio-economic factors.<\/p>\n

The printing presses that liberated knowledge in Europe created a major handicap for the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s Roman scripts were easy to print, given that the letters of the alphabet were discrete and could be arranged in a simple order \u2013 one letter after another \u2013 to form whole words, sentences and paragraphs. Publishing books in English, French and German was relatively straightforward.<\/p>\n

The same could not be said of Arabic.<\/p>\n

Arabic has a complex script, where letters change shape depending on where they occur in a word, and its cursive script means each letter physically connects to the letter before and after it. The Arabic language was almost impossible to reproduce on these early printing presses. (Anyone who underestimates this difficulty should remember that it took Microsoft Word many years to develop a legible digital Arabic script, long after it had done so for Roman scripts.)<\/p>\n