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A lesson in humility for the smug West
Many of the western values we think of as superior came from the
East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world
By William Dalrymple
10/18/07 "The
Times" -- -- About 100 miles south of Delhi, where
I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri.
This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th
century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers,
mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of
their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment
in formal inter-religious dialogue.
Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi),
Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu
atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians
came together to discuss where they differed and how they could
live together.
Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as
standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed
with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a
mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with
on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over
to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he
called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the
marshy land of tradition”.
All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung,
drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the
Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the
Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at
the stake in Campo de’Fiori.
It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of
the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man
so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim
for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray,
a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he
“was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in
which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral
confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer
tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.
The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared
debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David
Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over
the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the
superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually
carried, I regret to say.)
Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law,
parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and
conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is
the ethical source of these values.
Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and
Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much
the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead
they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its
intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch,
Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where
the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more
bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.
Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions
as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value –
universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from
East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering
western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.
And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London?
Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient
Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the
equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in
the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all
his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle
had done.
In the real world, East and West do not have separate and
compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have
the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist?
Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same
ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden?
In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical
systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and
evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals,
and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are
somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as
unhistorical.
The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew
better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: “Our
civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of
interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” He is
right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come
not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having
the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to
recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the
throats of others is rarely a productive tactic.
There are lessons here from our own past. European history is
full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which –
such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the
1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy
across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent
western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly
from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths
that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism,
fas-cism and Nazism.
These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as
terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation,
including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.
Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad
in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the
Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as
untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman.
For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves
as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong
militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries
of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the
less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our
civilising mission. The list of western genocides that preceded
and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one.
The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting
parties who were given licences to exterminate this “inferior
race” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down
like wild beasts and destroyed”. Many were caught in traps,
before being tortured or burnt alive.
The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean,
the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe
of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted
15m Africans and killed as many more.
It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the
ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial
extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an
inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.
For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves,
in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual;
for allthat is remarkable and beautiful in ourart, literature
and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting
this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful
and self-de-feating in western history.
The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian
ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and
decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin
Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual
frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority
remains the same. If the East does not share our particular
sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told
that it is wrong and we are right.
Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other
cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not
completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong,
yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My
Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged
shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the
massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting
treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how
the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these
traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead.
Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush
administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility
of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as
democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather
than through example and dialogue.
In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly
prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee
problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been
forced abroad.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy
in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against
its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent
monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than
turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they
would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties
that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive
US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of
political Islam.
Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that
is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict
and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from
every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders “to come together
with us on the common essentials of our two religions.” It will
be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.
We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the
arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western
values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is
most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign
policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired
in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little
old-fashioned humility.
William Dalrymple’s new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a
Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been
awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history
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