Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacque Derrida

[Dalal Al Shareif]

The title of Mustapha Cherif’s Islam and the West: A Conversation
with Jacque Derrida caught my attention especially with the name of
Derrida the deconstructionist on the cover page. The book is published
in 2008 and translated from French to English by Teresa Fagan. The
title, however, does not resonate with its content which appears to be
more political with a subtle hint of philosophy. After going
thoroughly through it, I still find the book useful for the discussion
of our group because Derrida probes into the causes and the possible
solutions of today’s clash of civilizations.

“Ignorance is the primary cause of hatred,” Jack Derrida states
in his interviews with Cherif in Spring 2003, a recurrent idea in most
of modern philosophers’ discussions. The conversation opens with
Derrida’s wish to be remembered as an Algerian expressing his deepest
feelings about Algeria prior to his death and wanting the reader to
believe that, even as a master of deconstruction, he had a dream of an
Algeria in which French and Algerians could live together in harmony.
“Nostalgerie” was a term he developed to describe his affections to
Algeria. Growing up as a Franco-Algerian Judo-Arab Jew, Derrida admits
that the cultural heritage he received there inspired his
philosophical orientation. He was deprived of the chance of learning
Arabic language or history because it was a ban in schools in Algeria
at that time.

He stresses the clash between the Northern and the Southern
shores. Considering himself part of the southern shore, Derrida
assumes that it is shocking to see the dominant rationalist atheist
discourse in the North makes inappropriate criticisms of Islam. A
certain West orders others to line up along with their dehumanizing
model, which in his opinion is an “unbalanced restrictive model.” The
universality of democracy, he assumes, can not be achieved by imposing
it with violence, but with an open dialogue of equal partners without
one having un upper hand. The major problem of the West according to
him is that westerners are led to believe that belief in general is an
obstruction to modernity, and only secularism and scientism can
replace faith with emancipation. However, all the concepts of
modernity and civilization are created according to western standards,
with an utter “refusal of dialogue and negotiation.” “ The law of the
UN, the Security Council, are founded on Western concepts” he says,
“and I have a tendency to challenge that. I’m thinking of Aznar,
Berlysconi, Blair, have attempted to drag all of Europe behind the
United States.” Derrida ironically questions how westerners now
confuse Islam with terrorism, when only a few decades ago no one
confused the Colonial State with Christianity. The current
international system led only to more poverty and fake democracy:

The Third World has become a Fourth World, and poverty there
has become extreme
poverty. For a third to a quarter, it is almost a Zero
World, a sort of ‘absence of world’
people that we have before our eyes. The gap between rich
and poor countries sometimes
reaches a difference of one to ten, which makes them often
incomparable… In the North,
we witness the creation of wealth and policies followed by
societies of unlimited
consumption without any control over their needs. In the
South, we experience the
impoverishment of many populations deprived of the
conditions of even a decent life… this
leads to harmful imbalances, to inequalities and fractures,
and reinforces the law of the
strongest, while at the same time we hear of globalization,
human rights and democracy.

The western awareness of its superiority over the underdeveloped
eastern world is party due to the western supremacy in technology that
has widened the gap between the two worlds. Derrida thinks it is
unfair to contrast cultures because it eventually leads to
“questionable political divisions through violence.” The
international law should be universal and not a monopoly of one part
of the world. Both parts, East and West, should take parts in
discovering a common universal law:

The will of domination and the egotism of certain
Westerners, fed by technological
supremacy, the imperatives of the market, and the retreat
of interknowledge, make our
burdens the following: the deformation of our values, the
politics of doubles standards;
the refusal and hesitations of the Northern shores to
engage in a true dialogue, to
imagine true negotiations, and finally, the insufficiency
of aid to the South.

After spotting some aspects of the problem, Derrida suggested in
what in his opinion could be the possible solutions. Starting a
dialogue, regardless of who takes the initiative, should be the first
step. Yet, this dialogue has to be conducted under certain conditions
in which no constrains or use of force are practiced. A dialogue can
be reestablished when each party tries to understand the other within
its own religious and cultural background. “I cant not address the
other, whoever he or she might be, regardless of his or her religion,
language, culture, without asking that other to believe me and to
trust me. One’s relationship to the other, addressing the other,
presupposes faith, ” Derrida states.

The key argument of the book is the necessity of accepting the
plurality in Islam as well as in the West, and accepting the idea of
plurality and not unity as the source of advancement and harmony. His
deconstructional point is clear in this part: he attempts “to
deconstruct the European intellectual construct of Islam” and
emphasizes that civilization and community are not about sameness but
difference.

Derrida did not say much about Islam in this conversation as he
was trying to objectively state a philosophy of any kind of clash
between civilizations of the past, the present, or the future.
However, he viewed Islam and Muslims without external prejudice. He
thinks that West and East are now living in a state of intolerance of
their differences, or at least in an absence of dialogue. The
propaganda of the clash of civilizations and the ambition of the
primary world power creates a situation of disorder and hatred towards
Islam. He expresses his sadness that today, extremists from both sides
have more influence than men and women of peace. “The majority of
Muslims live their faith peacefully; they refuse the howling of the
wolves who call for intolerance… We all are, believers and
nonbelievers, caught up in the same movement of the world.” Muslims of
today are attempting to resists against injustice and “de-
signification” of the world. To some, this resistance is an
intolerable dissent.

The book was a short strip and pleasant to read. It is always good to
read some positive thoughts when the world is full of contradictions
and negativity. As human beings, there is always a chance for us, no
matter how vast the gap between us is, to eventually think alike and
to come to the same conclusions. After all, and I am quoting Derrida
here, “one can not happen without the other.”

[d_als...@hotmail.com]

I’m sorry but block quotations are awfully adjusted here, not as I
spaced them in my MS Word File. Whenever you see a messy paragraph
preceded by a colon, it is a block quotation. I tried to edit the
post, but I couldn’t.

[d_als...@hotmail.com]

The book is available here, but one needs a member ship to view it.
Membership is free any way.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9604950/Islam-and-the-West-Derrida