Americans think they understand the Arab world but may be missing the truth entirely, said Professor Keith Watenpaugh, a visiting Research Fellow from Le Moyne College in a lecture at Carlson Hall on Jan. 18.
“We need to abandon historical vocabulary which creates cultural barriers and instead explore how religion and secularism work together,” he said.
Watenpaugh focused his remarks on the Western misconception that Arab and Islamic thinkers are fundamentalist and not modern-minded in their ideology.
These ideas came from Western journalists, he said, and the media oversimplifying Islamic thought and law.
There are serious implications when our culture creates a mental environment in which the Arab world is unavoidably foreign and incompatible with Western thought; it creates an irresolvable conflict, he said.
Watenpaugh opened his lecture with comments about current events in Iraq, such as the United Iraqi Alliance’s victory in last month’s election.
It is a bad idea, he argued, to characterize secular government as democratic government. A focus on the past in Islam does not make the ideology closed to change.
“Fundamentalists may want to actually recreate the seventh century, like the Wahhabis ? but this is not a common goal,” Watenpaugh said.
Many leaders would rather base their teachings on the ideal of the past, taking from it the best aspects and evolving new societal systems.
“The idea of learning from religious past-using history to instruct, not as an absolute-is very modern thinking,” he said.
The creation of the Middle East as the “consummate other” is a recent, post- twentieth century idea. This idea has created a convenient enemy of the day, fabricated to have no solution.
Watenpaugh sees the Islamic world as something Westerners to which can relate, and vice versa. He draws a distinction between those Arab thinkers who want to incorporate the good parts of Western culture and reject the bad and those Jihadists who declare everything Western as evil.
Accepting Islam as part of modern thought, Watenpaugh says, will help us acquire a more comprehensive understanding of our conflict with Iraq.
Watenpaugh’s remarks spurned a lot of thought in the history department.
U Fellow Kathrin Koslicki, professor of philosophy from Tufts University, said she thought Watenpaugh needed to clarify his definition of “modern.”
“He must develop a more concrete notion of what the term means in a non-Western, non-secular society,” she said. “And establish how that changes his observations.”
Michaele Ferguson, U fellow and professor of political science at University of Colorado, Boulder, said she thought it important to show parallels between Western and Arab definitions of modernity, regardless of how vague the term is.
The lecture was part of the Tanner Humanities Center Work-In-Progress talks, which are scheduled throughout the semester.
A round table discussion on April 6 will further discuss these ideas.
Watenpaugh’s book, “Being Modern in the Middle East,” will be available starting March 24.