Islam Is Not Inherently Violent

There is no historic inevitability to the Israel – Palestine conflict, or between the West and Islam

Editor Commentary

The rhetoric surrounding the October 7th attacks on Israel reverberates with the hateful echoes of sentiments expressed post 9/11.

You can hear the anger filled voices shout: “Islam is inherently violent. Our cultures are incompatible. The West and East have always been at war.”

This is a way to reduce the conflict to good vs evil. It eliminates gray areas and ignores the fact that historically Arabs, Jews, and a whole host of other ethnicities and religions have lived peacefully side by side in Palestine for many hundreds of years. That is until the world maps were redrawn by colonial powers and national interests in the wake of the World Wars.

What may surprise many is that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a modern one, not one with deep historical roots. The Islamic world being at war or Muslims being considered violent is also a recent phenomenon that is much more deeply tied with nationalism and globalism than religion or culture.

These ideas found popular acceptance following the 9/11 terror attacks and were commonly used to justify the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Samuel Huntington, the most famous proponent, argued that all of humanity is divided into a discrete amount of “civilizations” that all hold distinct traits, are incompatible with each other, and will eventually clash with one another. The Islamic “world” is inherently and irrevocably different from the Western “world,” as is the Chinese “world,” etc. etc.

Although reductive, it explains both why the United States and Israel were attacked. Without placing any fault on ourselves, our civilizations are just not compatible, and this was a “hail mary” of sorts to engage the West in a culture war. Proponents point to Biblical stories, the Crusades, and modern Islamic terror attacks as if there is a through-line connecting them all.

This ignores the centuries of peace and exchange of ideas that separates these violent episodes from one another. There is not an inherent conflict between the West and the Islamic world. In fact, there is not even a dividing line between them. Ideas, inventions, and people all flow back and forth from West to East over time, influencing and changing each other in both imperceivable and dramatic ways.

The European Renaissance was influenced by Arab and Persian scholars who preserved, debated, and improved on ancient Greek knowledge that had largely been lost to European thinkers, for one dramatic example. For a time, the Islamic world was the center of science. The words for algebra, algorithm, alcohol, and almanac all come from the Arab world. We use modern numbers instead of Xs and I’s because of knowledge spread through the Middle East. Arabic was one of the first “lingua franca’s” of the world, uniting scholars from Spain to Pakistan.

Unfortunately, the recent attack on Israel has re-released much of the same rhetoric and hate we saw two decades ago. If the current Palestine-Israel conflict is not about a clash of cultures or religions, what is it?

It’s a real estate dispute masking itself as a religious one. 

The idea that each group of people who speak a common language and culture should have their own separate nation is relatively new. Before the rise in the idea of nationalism, there was no hard and fast dividing line between entire regions in the middle east. Sure there were Jewish quarters, Arab sections, and whatnot in cities, but Palestine — and the Middle East as a whole — did not have lines drawn through it like it does today. Lines that were imposed from the outside, and that emphasized differences.

Take any part of the world, have outsiders redraw its borders and regroup its people, and there will be conflict. This is exactly what happened to the former Ottoman Empire after World War 1. Competing interests of the European powers plotted on maps what spoils they would acquire. No consideration was given to historical connection, religious affiliation, or political orientation. Following WW2, the United States assumed the role in the Middle East that former colonial powers had, at first mainly to stop the spread of Communism.

The modern conflicts in the middle east, and indeed Islamic terrorism, have risen from these fateful decisions. They are modern reactions to colonialism and globalism, not historical continuations of inevitable clashes.For centuries, the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922 AD) ruled the Middle East and North Africa, plus much of Eastern and Southern Europe. Palestine was at relative peace. There is not an unbroken chain of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, or West and East. Islam is not inherently violent, it just happened to be the religion in the parts of the world that European powers carved up and that the United States has meddled directly in most recently. The fact that Islam is not Western may be precisely why many have resisted in its name, rather than violence being an inherent part of the religion.