Islamo-Christian civilization

Muhamad Ali, Manoa, Hawaii

What would most people think when they read or hear the phrase 'Islamo-Christian Civilization'? Many Muslims and Christians would likely bristle at the very idea it seems to embody, and others might view suspiciously the omission of "Judeo-" from the phrase. Many more would suspect that this is simply impossible theologically and historically. Why Islamo-Christian Civilization? Aren't Christianity and Islam distinct and separated theologically and historically?

Challenging Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Prof. Richard Bulliet wrote an enlightening work entitled The Case for Islamo- Christian Civilization (2004). Such phrases as Children of Abraham, Semitic Scripturalism, or Abrahamic Religions seem to do quite well for the Islamo-Judeo-Christian Civilization, but an Islamo-Christian civilization implies that Muslims and Christians share a past, present and future.

Conventional wisdom maintains that the differences between Islam and Christianity are irreconcilable. Bulliet looks beneath the rhetoric of hatred and misunderstanding to challenge the prevailing and misleading views of Islamic history and "Clash of Civilizations". Bulliet argues that sibling Christian-Muslim societies began at the same time, went through the same developmental stages, and confront the same internal challenges. Yet as Christianity grows rich and powerful, Islam finds success around the globe but falls behind in terms of wealth and power.

According to Bulliet, the term Islamo-Christian civilization denotes a prolonged and fateful intertwining of sibling societies enjoying sovereignty in neighboring geographical regions and following parallel historical trajectories. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian historical path can be fully understood without relation to the other.

There is still a tendency to say that Muslims are less open to new ideas than Christian Westerners, and that Muslims are more prone to conflict between themselves and to hate non-Muslims. Many Westerners view the actual life of backward, poor, and sometimes violent Muslims in the light of the ideal peaceful separation between religion and the church in the West. On the other hand, many Muslims still blame the West as the cause of their backwardness materially, and defend their moral crisis by referring to, for example, sexual references appearing in the media.

As Bulliet suggests, Westerners characterize militant Muslims as the dominant voice and scarcely recognize the presence of moderate and liberal minds. Muslims on the other hand, see the West as the secular land of sin, salesmanship, and superficiality. Both sides seem unaware of the admirable positive qualities that most Muslims and Westerners exhibit in their everyday lives.

Westerners do not include Islam in their civilization mainly because they are heirs to a Christian construction of history that is deliberately exclusive. Western Christendom has for many centuries regarded Islam as a malevolent "Other", and has created many reasons for holding to this view.

In Western academic circles, there is a strong tendency to read European or Western history from Euro-centric perspectives; that is, interpreting the world only in terms of Western values and experiences. On the other hand, Muslims also have their own historical readings, as if there where only Islamic history with no interaction between them and others.

In Indonesia, historiography tends to be exclusive. For example, Christianity has been regarded as a colonial religion; a religion that was carried and preached by Dutch colonials -- as well as English, Germans, and Americans. This has become the main obstacle for mutual understanding among Muslims and Christians in Indonesia.

The historical fact is that Christianization is not always part of a colonial enterprise. There were Christians who opposed Dutch colonialism; and when some of them did not they were engaged in education and cultural development. Many of them were independent missionaries, just like Muslim preachers. Understanding this objective shared history is crucial in rehabilitating hidden distrust between Muslims and Christians.

It is true that the majority of Indonesians today are Muslims, but this does not necessarily mean that non-Muslims, including Christians, did not play a significant part in achieving Indonesian national independence, or in postcolonial local and national development. Majority-minority perspectives have often obscured the fact that significant contributions to shared economic, cultural, and political development have been made by different religious leaders and communities.

Indonesia has actually witnessed peaceful coexistence between different religious communities. News reports and scholarly research on inter-religious conflict taking place in certain parts of Indonesian archipelago should not overlook the more consistent and wider-range condition of inter-religious cohabitation.

Such economic, political, and cultural shared experiences are examples of how Islamo-Christian civilization in Indonesia is neither something foreign nor impossible to maintain in the future. In social, economic, and political relationships, Muslims and Christians have long collaborated at both local and national levels.

The kind of Islamo-Christian civilization that Richard Bulliet envisages has apparently worked quite well in Indonesia, but a shared religious history in which Muslims, Christians as well as other religious communities play an equal role is still far from reality. The challenge is how to establish a shared history of civilization in which both Christian and Muslim cultures are integrated in Indonesia.

In addition, religious pluralism in the sense that good Christians and good Muslims do not treat each other as "infidels", and that good Christians and good Muslims can achieve salvation and happiness, is something much more difficult to achieve.

Therefore, an Islamo-Christian civilization should consider different levels of human relations: material-economic, but also religious-moral. Our challenge is how to rethink our own beliefs in light of other beliefs, and to reinterpret our rituals and sacred texts in light of more contextual, general and shared reading of history.

Thus, to be tolerant does not simply mean pretending to be "good" to other religious individuals and communities at the social and economic levels, but also to regard the others as we regard ourselves in terms of God's salvation and blessings here in the world and in the hereafter.

The writer is on the academic staff at State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, a PhD candidate at the Department of History, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu. He can be reached at muhali74@hotmail.com