Tuesday, November 11, 2025: Islam vs the West: The Four Biggest Fallacies About Islam Explained

Editor's note: I've often wondered about the intricacies of the Muslim world and the differences which seem so difficult to bridge. In reading about the history of what we call "The Middle East" I realize that our love for and dependence on oil has led us into some dark places (literally and figuratively). This is a very brief article with a couple of questions and answers that help me be more informed about Islam. The answers make sense to me. I hope you find the discussion enlightening. - David

By Jonathan Cook:

A recent conversation with a friend highlighted to me how little most westerners know about Islam, and how they struggle to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. This lack of knowledge, cultivated in the West to keep us fearful and supportive of Israel, creates the very conditions that originally provoked ideological extremism in the Middle East and ultimately led to the rise of a group like Islamic State.

Here I examine four common misconceptions about Muslims, Islam and Islamism – and about the West. Each is a small essay in itself.

Question: Is Islam an intrinsically violent religion, one that naturally leads its adherents to become violent too (Islamists)?

There is nothing unique or strange about Islam. Islam is a religion, whose adherents are called Muslims. Islamists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project (the Caliphate), and use their Islamic identity as a way to legitimate efforts to advance that project. Muslims and Islamists are different things.

If that distinction is not clear, think of a parallel case. Judaism is a religion, whose adherents are called Jews. Zionists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Jewish identity as a way to legitimise efforts to advance that project. Jews and Zionists are different things.

Notably, with the help of western colonial powers over the past century, one prominent group of Zionists had great success in realizing their political project (Israel). In 1948 they established a self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel by violently expelling Palestinians from their homeland. Today, most Zionists identify at some level with the state of Israel. That is because doing so is advantageous, given that Israel is tightly integrated into “the West” and there are material and emotional benefits to be gained from identifying with it.

The record of the Islamists has been far more mixed and variable. The Republic of Iran was founded by clerical Islamists in a 1979 revolution against the despotic rule of the western-back monarchy led by the Shah. Afghanisan is ruled by the Islamists of the Taliban, young radicals who emerged after prolonged super-power meddling by the Soviets and Americans left their country ravaged and in the grip of feudal warlords. Nato-member Turkey is led by an Islamist government.

Each has a different, and conflicting, Islamist program. This fact alone should highlight that there is no single, monolithic “Islamist” ideology. 

Some groups of Islamists seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Islamists are the head-chopping zealots of the Islamic State.

The same can be said of Zionists. Some seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Zionists are the genocidal, child-killing soldiers sent by the state of Israel into Gaza.

The same kind of distinction can be made between the religion of Hinduism and the political ideology of Hindutva. The current government of India – led by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party – is fiercely ultra-nationalist and anti-Muslim. But there is nothing intrinsic to Hinduism that leads to Modi’s political project. Rather, Hindutvaism fits Modi’s political objectives.

And we can see similar political tendencies over much of Christianity’s history, from the Crusades 1,000 years ago through the forced Christian conversions of the West’s colonial era to a modern Christian nationalism that prevails in Trump’s MAGA movement in the United States, and dominates major political movements in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Italy and elsewhere.

The main point is this: followers of political movements can – and often do – draw on the language of the religions they grew up with to rationalize their political programs and invest them with a supposed divine legitimacy. Those programs can be more or less violent, often depending on the circumstances such movements face.

The West’s obsession with associating Islam, and not Juadism, with violence – even as a self-declared “Jewish state” commits genocide – tells us precisely nothing about those two religions. But it does tell us something about the political interests of the West. More on that below.

Question 2: But Islam, unlike Christianity, never went through an Enlightenment. Does that tell us there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam?

No, this argument entirely misunderstands the socio-economic basis of Europe’s Enlightenment and ignores parallel factors that snuffed out an earlier Islamic Enlightenment.

Europe’s Enlightenment emerged out of a specific confluence of socio-economic conditions prevailing at the tail-end of the 17th century, conditions that gradually allowed ideas of rationality, science, and social and political progress to be prioritized over faith and tradition.

The European Enlightenment was the result of a period of sustained wealth accumulation made possible by earlier technical developments, particularly relating to the printing press.

The change from hand-written texts to mass-produced books increased the dissemination of information and slowly eroded the status of the Church, which until then had been able to centralize knowledge in the hands of the clergy.

This new period of intense scientific inquiry – encouraged by greater access to the wisdom of previous generations of thinkers and scholars – also unleashed a political tide that could not be reversed. With the erosion of the Church’s authority came the diminishment of the authority of monarchs, who had been ruling under a supposed divine right. Over time, power became more decentralized and core democratic principles gradually gained currency.

The consequences would play out over succeeding centuries. The flourishing of ideas and research led to improvements in shipbuilding, navigation and warfare that enabled Europeans to travel to more distant lands. There they were able to plunder new resources, subdue resistant local populations, and take some as slaves (think slaves and the brutal slave system in the Americas).

This wealth was brought back to Europe, where it paid for a life of ever greater luxury for a small elite. Surpluses were spent on the patronage of the artists, scientists, engineers and thinkers we associate with the Enlightenment.

This process accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, which increased the suffering of peoples across the globe. As Europe’s technologies improved, its transport systems grew more efficient, and weapons more lethal, it was ever better positioned to extract wealth from its colonies and prevent those colonies’ own economic, social and political development.

It is often assumed there has been no Enlightenment in the Islamic world. This is not quite true. Centuries before the European Enlightenment, Islam produced a great flourishing of intellectual and scientific wisdom. For nearly 500 years, starting in the 8th century, the Islamic world led the way in developing the fields of mathematics, medicine, metallurgy and agricultural production.

So why did the “Islamic Enlightenment” not continue and deepen to the point where it could challenge the authority of Islam itself?

There were several reasons, and only one – perhaps the least significant – is related to the nature of the religion.

Islam has no central authority, equivalent to a Pope or Church of England. It has always been more decentralised and less hierarchical than Christianity. As a result, local religious leaders, developing their own doctrinal interpretations of Islam, have often been better able to respond to the demands of their followers. Similarly, the lack of centralized authority to blame or challenge has made it harder to create the momentum for a European-style reformation.

But as with the emergence of a European Enlightenment, the absence of a proper Enlightenment in the Muslim world is really rooted in socio-economic factors.

The printing presses that liberated knowledge in Europe created a major handicap for the Middle East.

Europe’s Roman scripts were easy to print, given that the letters of the alphabet were discrete and could be arranged in a simple order – one letter after another – to form whole words, sentences and paragraphs. Publishing books in English, French and German was relatively straightforward.

The same could not be said of Arabic.

Arabic has a complex script, where letters change shape depending on where they occur in a word, and its cursive script means each letter physically connects to the letter before and after it. The Arabic language was almost impossible to reproduce on these early printing presses. (Anyone who underestimates this difficulty should remember that it took Microsoft Word many years to develop a legible digital Arabic script, long after it had done so for Roman scripts.)

What was the significance of this? It meant that European scholars were able to travel to the great libraries of the Islamic world, copy and translate their most important texts, and bring them back to Europe for mass publication. Knowledge in Europe, drawing on the Muslim world’s advanced research, spread rapidly, creating the first shoots of the Enlightenment.

By contrast, the Middle East lacked the technical means – chiefly because of the complexity of Arabic script – to replicate these developments in Europe. As western science surged ahead, the Islamic world progressively fell behind, never able to catch up.

This would have an all-too-obvious consequence. As Europe’s technologies of transport and conquest improved, parts of the Middle East became a target for European colonization and control, from which they struggled to free themselves. Western meddling dramatically increased in the early 20th century with the weakening and then collapse of the Ottoman empire, soon followed by the discovery of vast quantities of oil across the region.

The West governed through brutal systems of divide and rule, inflaming sectarian differences in Islam – such as those between the Sunni and Shia, the equivalents of Europe’s Protestants and Catholics.

More than 100 years ago, Britain and France imposed new borders that intentionally cut across sectarian and tribal lines to produce highly unstable nation-states, such as Iraq and Syria. Each would rapidly implode when western powers started directly meddling in their affairs again in the 21st century.

But until that point, the West benefited from the fact that these volatile states needed a local strongman: a Saddam Hussein or a Hafez al-Assad. These rulers, in turn, would look to a colonial power – typically Britain or France – for support and to stay in charge.

In short, Europe arrived first at its Enlightenment chiefly because of a simple technical advantage, one that had nothing to do with the superiority of its values, its religion or its people. Deflating as it may be to hear, Europe’s spectacular dominance may be explained by little more than its scripts.

But perhaps more importantly in this context, that dominance exposed not an especially “civilised” western culture but a naked, brutal greed that repeatedly laid waste to Muslim communities.

Once the West got ahead in the race – a race for resource control – everyone else was always going to be playing a difficult game of catch-up, in which the odds were stacked against them.

https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/05/islam-vs-the-west-the-four-biggest-fallacies-about-islam-explained/

 By Jonathan Cook / Jonathan Cook Blog