Islam Between East and West

Islam Between East and West: This is a great philosophical work, starting with the beginning of humanity, the human original idealism, the difference between Darwin and Michelangelo, and how there is no evolutionary explanation, nor there can be, for strictly human phenomena like art, aesthetics, ethics, and religion, because they belong to the subjective world of the human being, while science (and the theory of evolution) deals only with external phenomena.

Mr. Izetbegovic makes a very useful distinction between culture and civilization: culture deals solely with the domain of the human, of our individual, personal, unique experience of life and its dramas and riddles, while civilization is the product of science, the result of our attempt to dominate nature, and therefore will always be zoological.

Only humans consistently engage in activities that are not just for utility and function, but for the principle of it, or for the aesthetic experience. “There are three degrees of reality known and possible in our world: matter, life, personality. Science deals only with the first, art with the last.”
The internal and the external worlds are two parallel lines that never cross philosophically, but they are both found together in the human being, so we inhabit two worlds at the same time. More than half of the book deals with the differences between the two world views representing the two worlds:

the religious and the materialistic, elegantly showing that ideas such as human dignity, human freedom and responsibility, equality among people, and tolerance can only come from the religious perspective. Materialism means determinism, which means humans are not free and only subjects to their environment and natural development, which means they cannot be equal from that perspective, and there is no human to speak of, just a perfect animal.

The second part of the book explains how Islam, consciously and intentionally, reconciles these two world views, showing how this reconciliation is evident in every part of the Muslim faith. “Islam here (in this book) is the name of a method rather than of a ready-made solution and means the synthesis of opposite principles.”

Talking about the “mandatory Muslim charity”, Izetbegovic says: “The goal of Islam is not to eliminate riches, but to eliminate poverty.” This is a clear jibe at communism, who were “very successful” at eliminating riches. In terms of law and its spiritual origins, Izetbegovic states: “The touchstone of the legality of any social system is the way it treats its opponents and minorities.

The power of the strong is a fact, not the law. The law stars where the limitation of this power begins and where it has taken the stand of the weak as opposed to the benefit of the strong.”
At the end of the book he mentions another third way between materialism and religion, the Anglo-Saxon one. He gives many examples of English philosophers successfully reconciling materialism and religion.
By Roumen Bezergianov, author of “Character Education with Chess”

A must read – referred to by professors of Islamic studies internationally, this work served as Alija Izetbegovic’s doctoral dissertation and has become a foundational text for understanding the sociopolitical, cultural and intellectual challenges that Muslims face to this day.

This is a heady distillation of intellectual Muslim thought, demonstrating the kind of man Izetbegovic was. I once gave this book to my father (an agnostic) who said, “He’s so intelligent it’s scary.”

Islam Between East and West is a modern treatise on cultures and civilization which attempts to show how so many philosophies have failed to give human beings what they need. Izetbegovic is no coward, and he makes strong assertions: “Every culture is theistic in its essence; every civilization is atheistic.”

By differentiating between culture and civilization, he shows the difference between critically analytical Islamic thought ( a throwback to the Golden Age of Muslim philosophers) and the Christian turning of “the human spirit in upon itself” (witness the convents and monasteries betokening the negation of worldly life). Izetbegovic argues that the Islamic ideal offers firm middle ground between Christianity, which focuses on the spirit, and Judaism, which “represents the ‘this-world’ tendency.”

In support of the latter assertion, he writes, “The Jews have never entirely accepted the idea of immortality. . . . The Kingdom of God which the Jews were predicting before Jesus’ appearance was to materialize on earth, not in heaven as the Christians believed.” This, then, apparently explains why the Jewish nation has tended to focus on external progress: “It seems as if they have been constantly migrating from a civilization on the wane to one on the rise.”

Izetbegovic was the farthest thing from a fundamentalist, royalist, or nomad,which in some part explains the tepid interest of the Saudi government when he approached it during the Bosnian War, when Serbs began machine gunning hordes of Caucasian Bosnian Muslims (in front of pits–the educated first) who looked (to the Arabs) more like Westerners than Muslims. He had a secular education and later got involved in activism and then politics.

Izetbegovic does not ignore the East: the exclusive preoccupation with this world as evinced in socialism, communism, fascism, etc.with materialism shows how if religion, by itself, does not necessarily lead to progress, “science does not lead to humanism and in principle has nothing in common with culture.”

Izetbegovic defines culture as “the art of being man,” while civilization is “the art of functioning, ruling, making things perfect.” Both are indispensable, he says: “Civilization educates; culture enlightens.”

He explains education as something that makes human beings more capable but not freer, better, or more human. In many ways, he contends, the progress of education has made mankind less happy, if longer lived. He points out that man has the propensity to grow in nobility specifically when faced with adversity, yet science treats man as an animal, and that is why psychology is an accepted science in a material world.

But in a scientific world, there can be no equality or brotherhood–that is only possible when we accept that man is created by God. The equality of human beings is spiritual and not a natural, physical or intellectual fact.

Izetbegovic uses art as proof of the existence of the soul–it matters not that the artist himself should be a believer in God. His argument? Art, he offers, is a spiritual rather than material act; the flip side to this argument is that “A human being is not the sum of his different biological functions, just like a painting cannot be reduced to the quantity of paint used.”

This book proves that in our modern time, there have been exceedingly erudite Muslim thinkers, far from the inflexible psychosis of fundamentalism.

Islam Between East and West