Moghul Emperor Akbar, built Fathepur Sikri, the Moghul capital, 160km south of modern Delhi, India at the end of the 16th
century. Akbar initiated inter-
religious dialogue, discussing religious truth, declaring ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion’, thereby arguing for the pursuit of reason rather than tradition. In the 16th century, Jesuits were being martyred in England; the Inquisition, in Spain and Portugal was torturing those who challenged the Catholic Church and in Rome, Giordano Bruno, was burnt at the stake. Emperor Akbar, the greatest ruler of all the Muslim states, stood for modern
western values. Westerners state ‘We should not be afraid to assert the superiority of western values’ citing the rule of law, parliamentary democracy and freedom of expression and conscience as the Judaeo-Christian tradition being their ethical source.
I point of fact, Judaeo-Christian ethics were born in Palestine - the Victorians thought God an Englishman. Christianity derived its structure in Antioch, Constantinople and Alexandria.
The words of the Credo were set out in 325AD where there were more bishops from Persia and India than from Western Europe. Judaism and Christianity are as eastern as Islam or Buddhism because paper, book printing and universities were transmitted from east to west via the Islamic world entering Western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain. The first law code was created by Hammurabi in ancient Iraq, the first ruler to insist on the equality of his subjects. The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka c.300BC, set in stone basic freedoms for all his people, not excluding women and slaves as did Aristotle. Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical creed as Osama Bin Laden? Sir Steven Runciman , the chronicler of the Crusades described ‘Our civilization grew out of the long interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.’
European history is replete with monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, those of Salazar, Tito and Franco surviving into living memory. Freedom came from the tyrannies of Marxism, Fascism and Nazism. The west has a long tradition of militarism, attacking and invading untermenschen. Tasmanian Aborigines were systematically wiped out by British hunting parties; along with the Caribs of the Caribbean; the Guanches of the Canaries, the Native Americans; while the slave trade destroyed African tribes; then the industrial extermination of the semitic intrusion into the Aryan West by the Nazis.
In modern times if the East does not share our particular sensibility at specific times in history then it is wrong and the West is right.
We recognise genocide is an appalling crime, yet 30 years after Vietnam and Cambodia the massacres of Iraqi civilians in Falluja and the torture of the prisoners of Abu Ghrieb show the West treating Arabs as sub-humans. Iraq, a formerly prosperous and secular state has been destroyed with 4 million Iraqis exiled. Zimbabwe was handed over to Mugabe, the West knew what he was like, South Africa fully supports this despot. The religious parties of political Islam have gained recruits to counter aggressive US intervention.
The Islamic world wrote to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, representing 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every Muslim sect urging Christian leaders to ‘come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.’
Some old fashioned humility could be the solution.