The long and checkered relationship between Islam and the West entered a new phase in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America. A ubiquitous sense of suspicion and denouncement swept through the public sphere in many Western countries and in the US that had so far interacted with the Islamic world in a modus operandi considerably different from that of its European equivalents. The legacy of anti-Islamic sentiment deeply rooted in the Western perceptions of Islam and Muslims, a short summary of which will be given below, has been only tangentially present in the American conscience and in cases where it is an unmistakable determinant (it is mostly imported from the European and Christian memory of theological and political rivalry that came about between the two civilizations since the advent of Islam).
The long history of the Islamic and Western worlds, taking a number of divergent forms from theological polemics in Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries to the experience of Andalusia from the 11th through the 14th centuries, informs in many subtle ways the current perceptions and qualms that permeate the attitudes of the members of the two civilizations vis-à-vis one another. One may justifiably argue for the overcoming of such categories as Islam and the West to focus on larger questions of human (co-) existence and offer a frame of analysis that would render such a conceptualization simply redundant or irrelevant. Even though this enterprise merits serious consideration, it does not obviate, at least for our purposes here, the possibility of maintaining the categories of Islam and the West. On the contrary, using the interlocked history of the two can help us stand on a firmer ground.
In making sense of the 9/11 attack and its repercussions for both worlds, it is important to look at some of the salient features of the history of Islam and the West and put things in a proper historical perspective. In many ways, the monolithic representations of Islam, created and sustained by a highly complex set of image-producers, think-tanks, academics, lobbyists, policy makers, and the media, which dominate the present Western conscience, have their roots in both the West’s perception of itself, as well as in its long history with the Islamic world. The primary goal of this essay is to trace the history of the Western perceptions of Islam from the 8th century when Islam came upon the historical scene and soon was perceived to be a theological and political threat by Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. The medieval Christian views of Islam as a heresy and its Prophet as an impostor have had a lasting impact on how Europeans came to see Islam and Muslims for over a millennia and this mode of perception continues to be a key factor in modern depictions of Islam in certain parts of the Western world.
Although some of the Renaissance thinkers saw Islam under the same light as they saw all religions and thus derided it as ‘irrational’ and ‘superstitious’, they nevertheless had a sense of appreciation for the philosophical and scientific achievements of Islamic civilization. This rather new attitude towards Islam had a major role in the making of the 18th and 19th century representations of Islam in Europe and paved the way for the rise of Orientalism, the official study of Oriental and Islamic issues for the next two centuries to come; hence the need to analyze Orientalism within the context of the Western perceptions of Islam and how it has effected the modern picturing of Islam. We will also look very briefly at how the modern reference to violence, militancy, terrorism, and fundamentalism - categories used disproportionately to construct a belligerent image of Islam as ‘The ‘Other’ of the West - find their root in early medieval views of Islam as the “religion of the sword”.
