Pretender to Universalism: Western Culture in a Globalising Age

Ali A. Mazrui is Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Cultural Forces in World Politics (James Currey and Heinemann, 1990). This article is adapted from his keynote speech for the Royal Society of Arts and the BBC World Service, delivered in London on 15 June 2000.

A Yugoslav from Montenegro once taught an African from Mombasa, Kenya, at Oxford University. Among the lessons which the professor from Montenegro taught the young African was a simple proposition: “The sins of the powerful acquire some of the prestige of power.”

 

The Yugoslav was John Plamenatz who was at the time a distinguished Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and who later became a professor of political theory at Oxford. The student was Ali Mazrui.

 

In that simple proposition, Plamenatz captured the importance of power in universalising the culture of the powerful. Even the very vices of Western culture are acquiring worldwide prestige. Muslim societies which once refrained from alcohol are now manifesting increasing alcoholism. Chinese elites are capitulating to Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s hamburgers. And Mahatma Gandhi’s country has decided to go nuclear.

 

Western civilisation is a pretender to the status of universal validity. Yet there are three forces which contradict that claim. One force is within the West itself. This is the force of historical relativism. What was valid in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century is not necessarily valid in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If validity is changeable in the West itself from generation to generation, how can the claim to universalism be sustained?

 

Another challenge is not historical but cross-cultural and is the old nemesis of cultural relativism. Two of the organising concepts of this article are therefore, first, cultural relativism (differences in values between societies) and historical relativism (differences in values between historical epochs). One of my theses is that the moral distance between the West and Islam or between Africa and the West is narrower than often assumed. Another is that what are regarded as medieval aspects of African culture or Islamic culture may have been shared by Western culture until relatively recently. In other words, the historical distance between African and Islamic values, on one side, and Western values, on the other, may not be as great as many have believed.

 

But in addition to historical and cultural relativism, there is relativism in practice, or comparative empirical performance. Is Western practice at variance with Western doctrine? Indeed, are Western standards better fulfilled by other societies than by the West? In some respects, is either Africa or Islam ahead of the West by Western standards themselves?

Globalisation

Before analysing these three areas of relativity—historical, cultural and empirical—I would first like to explore the processes of globalisation, which lead towards global interdependence and increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances. The word “globalisation” is itself quite new, but the actual processes began centuries ago.

 

Four forces have been major engines behind globalisation across time. These are religion, technology, economy and empire. They have not necessarily acted separately, but have often reinforced each other. For example, the globalisation of Christianity began with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 313 ce. The religious conversion of the head of an empire launched the process under which Christianity became the dominant religion not only of Europe but also of many other societies thousands of miles from where the religion started.

 

The globalisation of Islam began not with converting a ready-made empire, but with building an empire almost from scratch. The Umayyads and Abbasids put together bits of other peoples’ empires (former Byzantine Egypt and former Zoroastrian Persia, for example) and created a whole new civilisation.

 

Voyages of exploration, such as those by Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century, were another major stage in the process of globalisation. Economy and empire were the major motives. There followed the migration of people symbolised by the Mayflower. The migration of the Pilgrim Fathers was in part a response to religious and economic imperatives. Demographic globalisation reached its height in the Americas with the influx of millions of people from other hemispheres. In time, the population of the United States became a microcosm of the population of the world, with immigrants from every society on earth.

 

The industrial revolution in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards was another major chapter in the history of globalisation. A marriage between technology and economics resulted in levels of productivity previously unknown in the annals of man. Europe’s prosperity whetted its appetite for new worlds to conquer. The Atlantic slave trade was accelerated, moving millions of Africans from one part of the world to another. Europe’s appetite also went imperial on a global scale. The British built the largest and most far-flung empire in human experience. Most of it lasted until the end of the Second World War.

 

The two world wars were themselves manifestations of globalisation. The twentieth century was the only century to witness globalised warfare. The Cold War (1948–89) was another manifestation of globalisation, because it was power-rivalry on a global scale between two alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Warsaw Pact. While the two world wars were militarily the most destructive, the Cold War was the most dangerous potentially because it carried the seeds of nuclear planetary annihilation.

 

The final historical stage of globalisation came when the industrial revolution was mated with the new information revolution. Interdependence and exchange became dramatically computerised. The most powerful single country by this time was the United States. Pax Americana mobilised three of the four engines of globalisation—technology, economy and empire. Pax Americana in the second half of the twentieth century did not directly seek to promote a particular religion, but it did help to promote secularism and the ideology of separating church from state. On balance, the impact of Americanisation has probably been harmful to religious values worldwide—whether intended or not. Americanised Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim youths are far less likely to be devout to their faiths than non-Americanised ones.

Between Hegemony and Homogeny

The dual consequences of globalisation are homogenisation and hegemonisation. We are getting to be more and more alike across the world every decade. This increase of similarity is homogenisation. The paradoxical concentration of power in a particular country or civilisation is hegemonisation.

 

People dress more alike all over the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they did at the end of the nineteenth century (homogenisation). But the dress code which is being globalised is overwhelmingly the Western dress code (hegemonisation). The man’s suit (Western) has almost become universalised throughout the world, and the jeans revolution has captured the youth-dress culture of half the globe.

 

Today, the human race is closer to having world languages than it was in the nineteenth century, if by a world language we mean one which has at least three hundred million speakers, has been adopted by at least ten countries as a national language, has spread to at least two continents as a major language, and is widely used in four continents for special purposes (homogenisation). But when we examine the languages which have been globalised, they are disproportionately European—especially English and French, and to lesser extent, Spanish (hegemonisation). However, Arabic also is putting forward a strong claim to world-language status, partly because of the globalisation of Islam and the role of Arabic as a language of Islamic ritual.

 

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are closer to a world economy than we have ever been before in human history. A sneeze in Hong Kong, and certainly a cough in Tokyo, can send shock waves around the globe (homogenisation). And yet the powers that control this world economy are disproportionately Western. They are the G7: the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy, in that order of economic muscle (hegemonisation).

 

The Internet has now given us instant access to both information and mutual communication across large distances (homogenisation). However, the nerve centre of the global Internet system is still located in the United States and has residual links in the United States federal government (hegemonisation).

 

Educational systems in the twenty-first century are becoming more and more alike across the world, with comparable term-units and semesters, and increasing similarity of teaching structures and course content (homogenisation). But the role models behind this dramatic academic convergence have been the educational systems of Europe and the United States, which have attracted both emulators and imitators (hegemonisation).

 

The ideological systems of the world in the twenty-first century are also converging as market economies seem to emerge triumphant. Liberalisation is being widely embraced, either spontaneously or under duress. Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt opened the gates of infitah (economic liberalisation), and even the People’s Republic of China has adopted a kind of market Marxism. India is in danger of traversing the distance from Mahatma Gandhi to Mahatma Keynes (homogenisation). However, the people who are orchestrating and sometimes enforcing marketisation, liberalisation and privatisation are Western economic gurus—supported by the power of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United States and the European Union. Indeed, Europe is the mother of all modern ideologies, good and evil: liberalism, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, fascism, Nazism and others. The most triumphant by the end of the twentieth century was Euro-liberal capitalism (hegemonic homogenisation).

Islam: Victim or Victor?

At the moment, the Muslim world is a net loser from both homogenisation and hegemonisation. However, will Islam one day gain from homogenisation? Only if Muslim values penetrate the global pool. Can people share Muslim values without sharing the Muslim religion? For example, many US Muslims find themselves sharing social values with Republicans in the United States. Both groups:

 

• favour prayer in schools;

 

• favour strong family values and stable marriages;

 

• oppose easy abortion;

 

• oppose too much homosexual permissiveness.

 

One can be in agreement with Islamic values without being a Muslim. The Muslim objection to alcohol, for example, was briefly shared in the United States after the First World War when the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment in 1919 introduced Prohibition.

 

One of the remarkable things about the twentieth century was that it combined the cultural Westernisation of the Muslim world, on the one hand, and the more recent demographic Islamisation of the Western world, on the other. The foundations for the cultural Westernisation of the Muslim world were laid mainly in the first half of the twentieth century. The foundations of the demographic Islamisation of the Western world were laid in the second half of the twentieth century. Let us consider each of these two phases of Euro-Islamic interaction in turn.

 

In the first half of the century, the West had colonised more than two-thirds of the Muslim world—from Kano to Karachi, from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, from Dakar to Jakarta. The same period also witnessed the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the more complete de-Islamisation of the European state system. The aftermath included the abolition of the Caliphate as the symbolic centre of Islamic authority. The umma (Islamic community) became more fragmented than ever and even more susceptible to Western cultural penetration.

 

Other forces which facilitated the cultural Westernisation of the Muslim world included the replacement of Islamic and Qur’anic schools with Western-style schools; the increasing use of European languages in major Muslim countries; and the impact of the Western media upon the distribution of news, information and entertainment, ranging from magazines, cinema, television and video, to the new universe of computers. Homogenisation was responding to the forces of hegemonisation. Finally, there has been the omnipresent Western technology, which carries with it not only new skills but also new values. The net result has indeed been a form of globalisation of aspects of culture. However, this has been a Euro-centric and Americo-centric brand of globalisation. An aspect of Western culture is eventually embraced by other cultures—and masquerades as universal. An informal cultural empire is born, hegemony triumphant.

 

The globalisation of two pieces of Euro-centric world culture may tell the story of things to come: the Western Christian calendar, especially the Gregorian calendar, and the worldwide dress code for men, which I mentioned earlier.

 

Many countries in Africa and Asia have adopted wholesale the Western Christian calendar as their own. They celebrate their independence day according to the Christian calendar, and write their own history according to Gregorian years, using distinctions such as before or after Christ. Some Muslim countries even recognise Sunday as the day of rest instead of Friday. In some cultures, the entire Islamic historiography has been re-periodised according to the Christian calendar instead of the hijra, the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce, which became Year 1 of the Muslim lunar calendar.

Islamisation of the West

Since the second half of the twentieth century, both Muslim migration to the West and conversions to Islam within the West have consolidated a new human Islamic presence. In Europe as a whole, there are now twenty million Muslims, ten million of whom live in western Europe. This figure excludes the Muslims of Turkey, who number some fifty million. There are new mosques from Munich to Marseilles.

 

Paradoxically, the cultural Westernisation of the Muslim world is one of the causes behind the demographic Islamisation of the West. The cultural Westernisation of Muslims contributed to the “brain drain” that lured Muslim professionals and experts from their homes in Muslim countries to jobs and educational institutions in North America and the European Union. The old formal empires of the West have unleashed demographic counter-penetration. Some of the most highly qualified Muslims in the world have been attracted to professional positions in Europe or North America. It is in that sense that the cultural Westernisation of the Muslim world in the first half of the twentieth century helped prepare the demographic Islamisation of the West in the second half of the twentieth century.

 

But by no means are all Muslim migrants to the West highly qualified. The legacy of Western colonialism also facilitated the migration of less qualified Muslims from places such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Algeria into Britain and France—again post-colonial demographic counter-penetration. There have also been occasions when, in need of cheap labour, the West has deliberately encouraged the immigration of less qualified Muslims, as in the case of the importation of Turkish workers into West Germany in the sixties and seventies.

 

As another manifestation of the demographic Islamisation of the Western world, there are now over one thousand mosques and Qur’anic centres in the United States alone, as well as professional associations for Muslim engineers, Muslim social scientists and Muslim educators. There are over six million American Muslims, and the number is rising impressively. Muslims now outnumber Jews in the United States, and Islam is currently the fastest growing religion in North America.

 

In France, Islam has the second-highest number of adherents after Catholicism. In Britain, some Muslims are experimenting with their own Islamic parliament, and others are demanding state subsidies for Muslim schools. Germany is realising that importing Turkish workers in the seventies was also an invitation to the muezzin and the minaret to establish themselves in German cities. Australia has discovered the implications of being a neighbour to Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Australia now has an Islamic presence in its own body politic.

 

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three Abrahamic creeds of world history. In the twentieth century, the Western world was often described as a Judaeo-Christian civilisation, thus linking the West to two of those Abrahamic faiths. But if Muslims already outnumber Jews in countries such as the United States, perhaps Islam is replacing Judaism as the second most important Abrahamic religion after Christianity. Numerically, Islam in time may overshadow Judaism in much of the West, regardless of future immigration policies.

 

As Islam becomes a more integral part of Western society, the question has arisen over how the faith is to be treated in Western classrooms, textbooks and media. In the Muslim world, education has been substantially Westernised. Is it now the turn of education in the West to become partially Islamised?

 

The Euro-Islamic story of interpenetration continues to unfold. Is this a new threshold for globalisation? Or is it just another manifestation of the post-colonial condition in world history? In fact, it may be both.

 

The counter-penetration of Islam and Muslims into Western civilisation will not in itself end Western hegemonisation. But an Islamic presence in the Western world on a significant scale may begin to reverse at long last the wheels of cultural homogenisation. Values will begin to mix, tastes compete, perspectives intermingle, as a new moral calculus evolves on the world scene.

Empirical Relativism

Let us now return to the three forms of relativity with which we began: historical, cultural and empirical. Hegemonic and homogenising as Western culture has been, it has not been without its contradictions and serious shortfalls. Its claim to universalism has been challenged by the relativity of history (temporal), of culture (cross-cultural) and of implementation (the logic of consistency). Let us begin with this third area of relativity—the tests of empiricism and performance.

 

Empirical relativism has two aspects. One aspect concerns whether in practice Western civilisation lives up to its own standards. The other concerns situations in which Western ethical standards are better implemented by other, non-Western civilisations.

 

When Jefferson’s famous Declaration of Independence pronounces that “all men are created equal” and the founders of the United States then base its economy on slavery, that is a case of Western culture failing by its own standards. On the other hand, if during the same historical period we study economies without either slavery or caste among the Kikuyu in East Africa or the Tiv in West Africa, we are observing societies which were more egalitarian than the liberal West.

 

The Western Christian ethic of the minimisation of violence has repeatedly been honoured by Westerners more in the breach than the observance. In the last hundred years, Christians have killed vastly more people than have followers of any other religion in any single century. Many of the millions of victims of Christian violence in the two world wars were themselves fellow Christians—though the Holocaust against the Jews and the Gypsies stands out as a special case of genocide perpetrated by Westerners in otherwise Christian nations.

 

If minimisation of violence is part of Christian ethics, it is a standard which has not only been violated by the West, but has also been better implemented by other cultures in history. In the first half of the twentieth century India produced Mahatma Gandhi who led one of the most remarkable non-violent anti-colonial movements ever witnessed. Westerners themselves saw Gandhi’s message as the nearest approximation to the Christian ethic in the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Gandhi’s India gave birth to new principles of passive resistance and satyagraha, or soul force. Yet Gandhi himself said that it might be through blacks that the unadulterated message of soul force and passive resistance would be realised. If Gandhi were right, this would be one more illustration that the culture which gives birth to an ethic is not necessarily the culture which fulfils the ethic.

 

The Nobel Committee for Peace in Oslo seems to have shared some of Gandhi’s optimism about the soul force of black people. Africans and people of African descent who have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the middle of the twentieth century have been: Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Luthuli (1960), Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), Anwar al-Sadat (1978), Desmond Tutu (1984) and Nelson Mandela (1993).

Soul Force in Africa

In reality, blacks have perpetrated acts of violence at least as great as any perpetrated by Indians. What is distinctive about Africans is their short memory of hate. Jomo Kenyatta, for example, was unjustly imprisoned by the British colonial authorities over charges of founding the Mau Mau movement. A British governor also denounced him as “a leader into darkness and unto death”. And yet when Kenyatta was released, he not only forgave the white settlers, but gave the whole country a basic pro-Western orientation to which it has remained committed ever since.

 

Ian Smith, the white settler leader of Rhodesia, unilaterally declared independence in 1965 and unleashed a civil war on Rhodesia. Thousands of people, mainly black, died as a result of the policies Smith pursued. Yet when the war ended in 1980, Smith and his cohorts were not subjected to a Nuremberg-style trial. On the contrary, Smith became a member of parliament in a black-ruled Zimbabwe and openly and frequently criticised the black leaders who succeeded him as incompetent and dishonest. Where else but in Africa could such tolerance occur?

 

The Nigerian civil war (1967–70) was the most highly publicised civil conflict in post-colonial Africa. When the war was coming to an end, many people feared there would be a bloodbath in the defeated eastern region. The Vatican was worried that cities such as Enugu and Onitcha, strongholds of Catholicism, would become monuments of devastation and bloodletting.

 

None of these expectations were fulfilled. Nigerians—seldom among the most disciplined of Africans—discovered in 1970 some remarkable resources of self-restraint. There were no triumphant reprisals against the vanquished Biafrans; there were no vengeful trials of “traitors”.

 

We have also witnessed the phenomenon of Nelson Mandela. He lost twenty-seven of the best years of his life in prison under the laws of the apartheid regime. When he became president in 1994, it was surely enough that his government would leave the architects of apartheid unmolested. Yet Mandela went out of his way to pay a social call on and have tea with the unrepentant widow of Hendrik F. Verwoed, the supreme architect of the worst forms of apartheid, who shaped the whole racist order from 1958 to 1966.

 

Was Gandhi correct, after all, that his torch of satyagraha might find its brightest manifestations among the blacks? Empirical relativism was at work again.

 

In the history of civilisations there are occasions when the image in the mirror is more real than the object it reflects. Black Gandhians such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu and, in a unique sense, Nelson Mandela, have sometimes reflected Gandhian soul force more brightly than Gandhians in India. Part of the explanation lies in the soul of African culture itself, with all its capacity for rapid forgiveness. In any case, in the last one hundred years both Indian culture and African culture have been guilty of far less bloodletting than the West. Christian minimisation of violence has been observed more by non-Christians than by ostensible followers of the Cross. Empirical relativism continues its contradictions.

 

But Western claims to universalism are challenged not just by the forces of empirical contradictions. They are, as I indicated, also challenged by the relativism of history and the relativism of culture. Let us now elaborate on these two areas of history and culture

Cultural and Historical Relativism

If under cultural relativism, cultures differ across space (from society to society), under historical relativism cultures differ across time—from epoch to epoch or age to age. In Western society, pre-marital sex was strongly disapproved of until after the Second World War. In the nineteenth century it was even punishable. Today, sex before marriage is widely practised with parental consent. This is historical relativism.

 

Are laws against gays and lesbians a violation of human rights? Today, half the Western world says “yes”. Yet homosexuality between males was a crime in Great Britain until the 1960s (though lesbianism was not outlawed). Now both male and female homosexuality between consenting adults is permitted in most of the Western world. This is historical relativism. On the other hand, in most of the rest of the world homosexuality is still illegal in varying degrees. We are confronting a clash between historical relativism in the West and geo-cultural relativism in the Third World. In Africa, the two extremes on homosexuality are the neighbouring countries of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, is a personal crusader against homosexuality. South Africa, meanwhile, has legalised it.

 

Almost everywhere in the West, except the United States, capital punishment has been abolished. At present, the United States is actually increasing the number of capital offences. But it is almost certain that capital punishment even in the United States will one day be regarded as a violation of human rights. This would be another example of historical relativism within Western civilisation. In Africa, South Africa has tried to lead the way against the death penalty. Has capital punishment outlived its rational utility?

 

Sometimes cultural relativism and historical relativism converge. This is especially true when Muslim and African countries want to revive legal systems which go back many centuries. Such countries attempt to re-enact the past in modern conditions. Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia are among examples of the convergence of cultural and historical relativism.

Art versus Religion

Are human rights sometimes trapped between the sacredness of art versus the sacredness of religion? As the West has become increasingly secular, it has looked for new abodes of sacredness. By the late twentieth century, the freedom of the artist was more sacred to Westerners than respect for religion. Hence the clash which occurred from 1988 onwards between the Western and Muslim worlds in relation to Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses.

 

The book makes fun of the Qur’an, suggesting that perhaps its verses were a fake or inspired by the devil. The novel strongly suggests that the Prophet Muhammad was a fraud and not a very intelligent one at that. It puts women bearing the names of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives in a whorehouse. The names of the Prophet’s wives are also represented as being an aphrodisiac.

 

Iran issued a fatwa or legal judgement accusing Rushdie of a capital religious offence and sentenced him to death in absentia. Iran was the only one of some fifty Muslim countries to pass the death sentence against Rushdie, but there were popular Muslim demonstrations against him from Kaduna to Karachi. Rushdie has had to spend most of his life since then in cautious hiding.

 

Westerners have argued that as a novelist Rushdie had a right to write anything he wanted. Muslims from Lamu to Lahore have argued that he had no right to make obscenities of and ridicule some of the most sacred aspects of Islam. The sacredness of the artist collided with the sacredness of religion.

 

The West’s claim to universalism sometimes extends from Western values to Western custody of the defence of those values. Even if Western values are universal, is Western practice an implementation of those values?

 

One of the most remarkable coincidences of the year 2000 concerned how democracy clashed with two people called Haider—one a Syrian and the other Austrian, one liberal and the other extreme right-wing, one a writer and the other an activist and politician.

 

In Austria, Jorg Haider was deputy governor of Carinthia and chair of the neo-Nazi FPO party, which in 2000 joined the government coalition. The coalition was the outcome of electoral democratic forces in Austria. And yet pro-democracy fellow members of the European Union turned against the government of Austria and tried to squeeze Haider’s party out of the democratically elected governing coalition. Was democracy fighting against democracy in the European Union over the Austrian question? Certainly, most members of the European Union decided that there was a limit to freedom of political participation.

 

The other Haider is Haider Haider, the Syrian, who published in Cyprus in 1983 a novel entitled Banquet of Seaweed. Lebanon republished the novel in 1992 without any repercussions. In November 1999, Egypt’s ministry of culture followed suit, publishing the book as part of a series of representing the major works of modern Arabic literature. There was little reaction until El-Shaab, a pro-Islamist newspaper, published extracts it claimed were insulting to the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. The newspaper’s condemnation of the novel provoked sermons in mosques nationwide attacking the book and the government for deciding to publish it. A mass student protest—the biggest in Egypt for a decade—ended in violence. The book was soon banned.

 

Was the Syrian Haider as much of a threat to the fundamentals of his own Arabic civilisation as the Austrian Haider had been to his own European civilisation? When individuals threaten the fabric of civilisation, should democracy give way? If Arab and Islamic civilisations are threatened by a Syrian Haider, should democracy be subordinated to higher values? If Western civilisation is threatened by the Austrian Haider, should Austrian democracy be subordinated to European civilisation?

 

In reality, both Islam and the West have put limits on freedom of expression and indeed on democratic outcomes. Over Austria, the European Union has decided that the values of Western civilisation are more important than the outcomes of Austrian democracy. Should the novel Banquet of Seaweed be judged by the standards of Islamic civilisation or by the criteria of democracy? The dilemma is crucial and unresolved.

Censorship, East and West

The third area of relativism is once again empirical. How do cultures behave in practice? Our discussion has already touched on Western civil liberties. In what sense is the cultural distance between the West, Africa and Islam narrower than often assumed? One compelling illustration concerns the issue of censorship and the implementation of values. Here we are again dealing with empirical relativism.

 

Censorship in Muslim countries is often crude, and is carried out by governments, by mullahs and imams, and more recently by militant Islamic movements. Censorship in the West, on the other hand, is more polished and decentralised. In the United States, it is carried out by advertisers for commercial television, by subscribers to the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), by ethnic pressure groups and interest groups, by editors, publishers and other controllers of the means of communication. In Europe, it is sometimes also done by governments.

 

The law in the United States protects opinion better than almost anywhere else in the world. In 1986, my television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, was threatened with legal action by Kaiser Aluminum because I had described the company’s terms for the construction of the Akosombo Dam in Ghana as exploitative. Both my own personal lawyer and the lawyers for PBS were unanimous in their opinion that Kaiser Aluminum did not stand a chance under American law. We called Kaiser’s bluff, showed the offending sequence, and Kaiser Aluminum did nothing.

 

The threat to free speech in the United States does not come from the law and the Constitution but from non-governmental forces. The same PBS which was invulnerable before the law on the issue of free speech capitulated to other forces when I metaphorically described Karl Marx as “the last of the Great Jewish prophets”. The earlier British version of my television series had included that phrase. The American version unilaterally deleted it for fear of offending Jewish Americans. I was never asked for permission to delete. Ironically, many viewers in Israel saw the British version complete with the controversial metaphor.

 

PBS’s action was a case of decentralised censorship. The laws of the United States granted me freedom of speech and freedom of opinion—but censorship in the country is perpetrated by editors, financial benefactors and influential pressure groups. It is a special kind of empirical relativism.

 

On one issue of censorship the relevant PBS-producing station did consult me. WETA, the PBS station in Washington, D.C., was unhappy that I had not injected enough negativism into my portrayal of Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi in a sequence of about three minutes. I was first asked if I would agree to change my commentary and talk more about “terrorism”. When I refused to change my commentary, WETA suggested that we change the pictures instead—deleting one sequence which appeared to humanise Gaddafi by showing him visiting a hospital, and substituting a picture of Rome airport after a terrorist attack, which would re-demonise him.

 

After much debate I managed to save the positive hospital scene, but surrendered to the addition of a negative scene of Rome airport after a terrorist attack. My agreement was on condition that neither I nor the written caption implied that Libya was responsible for the bomb. But ideally WETA would have preferred to delete the sequence about Libya altogether.

 

Two years later I was invited to Libya after the Arabic version of The Africans: A Triple Heritage was shown there. It turned out that WETA had more in common with the censors in Libya than either realised. Although the Libyans seemed pleased with my television series as a whole, the three-minute sequence about Gaddafi had been deleted from the version shown in Tripoli. If WETA had regarded the sequences as too sympathetic to Gaddafi, perhaps the Libyans decided they were not sympathetic enough. And since the Libyans were not in a position to negotiate with me about whether to change the commentary or add to the pictures, they decided to delete the sequence altogether.

 

In the United States, the sequence about Gaddafi had also offended Lynn Cheney, who at the time was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The sequence was a major reason why she demanded the removal of the endowment’s name from the television credits. Much later, after she stepped down as chair, she demanded the abolition of the National Endowment for the Humanities itself. She gave as one of her reasons precisely my own television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, citing it as an example of the type of objectionable liberal project which the endowment had tended to befriend.

 

Another illustration of decentralised censorship and empirical relativism which has affected my own work involved my book Cultural Forces in World Politics. Originally, it was to be published by Westview Press in Colorado. They were about to go to press when they declared that they wanted to delete three chapters. One chapter discussed The Satanic Verses as a case of cultural treason; another compared the Palestinian intifada with the Chinese students’ rebellion in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989; and the third objectionable chapter compared the apartheid doctrine of separate homelands for blacks and whites in South Africa with the Zionist doctrine of separate states for Jews and Arabs.

 

Clearly, the Westview Press wanted to censor those three chapters because they were the most politically sensitive in the American context. I suspected that I would have similar problems with most other major US publishers regarding those same chapters. I therefore relied more exclusively on my British publishers in London, James Currey, and on the American offshoot of another British publisher, Heinemann Educational Books. My book was published by those two houses in 1990.

 

This is the positive side of decentralised censorship in the West. At least with regard to books, what is under threat of censorship by one publisher may be acceptable to another. Or what is almost unpublishable in the United States may be easily publishable in Britain or Holland. With national television the choices are more restricted. Many points of view are condemned to national silence on the television screen. The West does not meet its own democratic standards.

 

What conclusion are we to draw from all this? The essential point being made is that strictly on the issue of free speech, the cultural difference between the West and Islam may not be as wide as is often assumed. In both civilisations only a few points of view have national access to the media and the publishing world. In both civilisations there is marginalisation by exclusion from the centre. But there is one big difference: censorship in Muslim societies tends to be more centralised, often being done by the state, though there are also restrictions on free speech imposed by mullahs, imams and militant religious movements. In the United States, on the other hand, there is no centralised political censorship by governmental or judicial institutions. Censorship is far more decentralised and is exercised by non-governmental social forces and institutions.

Time-Lags

Let us now return to the issue of historical relativism between the West and the world of Islam. Popular images of Islamic values in the West tend to regard those values as “medieval” and hopelessly anachronistic. In reality, most Muslim societies are at worst decades rather than centuries behind the West—and in some respects Islamic culture is more humane than Western culture.

 

The gender question in Muslim countries is still rather troubling. But again the historical distance between the West and Islam may be a matter of decades rather than centuries. In almost all Western countries apart from New Zealand, women did not get the vote until the twentieth century. Great Britain extended the vote to women in two stages, in 1918 and 1928. The United States enfranchised women with a constitutional amendment in 1920. Switzerland did not give women the vote at the national level until 1971—long after Muslim women had been voting in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Indonesia.

 

British wives earned the right to own independent property in 1870. Muslim wives had always enjoyed that right. Indeed, Islam is probably the only major religion which was founded by a businessman who was in commercial partnership with his wife.

 

What we are dealing with here is the practical implementation of values. Even if Western values were universal, is Western practice compatible with those values? Is the West the best embodiment of its own values? Empirical relativism reveals glaring Western contradictions.

 

The United States, the largest and most influential Western nation, has never had a female president or head of government. France has never had a woman president either, or Germany a woman chancellor. Yet Pakistan and Bangladesh, the second and third most populous Muslim societies, have each had women prime ministers more than once. Benazir Bhutto has twice been prime minister of Pakistan, and Bangladesh has had Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Rahman Wajed consecutively in power. Indonesia has a female vice-president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Turkey, another Muslim country, has also had a woman prime minister, Tansu Ciller. Turkey is a Muslim society which inaugurated a secular state as recently as the 1920s, but has already produced a woman chief executive. The United States has been a secular state for more than two hundred years, and has still not produced a woman president.

Seeking the Universal

In this paper I started from the premise that “the sins of the powerful acquire some of the prestige of power”. The West has become powerful over the last five to six centuries. Western culture and civilisation became influential and attracted widespread imitation and emulation. Western hegemony precipitated widespread homogenisation of values, styles and institutions. Much of the world became Westernised.

 

The Westernisation of the world has been part and parcel of the phenomenon known today as globalisation. The economic meaning of globalisation refers to the expansion of world economic interdependence under Western control. The informational meaning of globalisation refers to the triumph of the computer, the Internet and the information superhighway. The comprehensive meaning of globalisation refers to all the forces which have been leading the world towards becoming a global village. Globalisation in this third sense has meant the “villagisation” of the world.

 

In the economic and informational meanings of globalisation, the West has been the primary engine of global change. However, in the comprehensive meaning of globalisation (leading towards the global village), other civilisations have been equally crucial at other stages of history.

 

We can conclude that, in distribution, Western civilisation is the most globalised in history. No other civilisation in the annals of the human race has touched so many individual members of that race, or so many societies in the world. But global distribution is not the same thing as universal validity. After all, Marxism was once globally distributed to almost a third of the population of the world. That did not give Marxism “a third of universal validity”. Indeed, its distribution seemed to shrink almost overnight.

 

If there is a universal ethical standard in the world, we have not yet discovered it. It is certainly not the Western ethical standard, otherwise the United States would not be wondering whether the death penalty is moral or not. Nor would racism still be prevalent in the Western world.

 

This paper assumes that human history is a search for the “universal”. The Western world has not found it, but it has certainly taken us a step or two towards it. The West has also helped to create the conditions not only for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also for the pursuit of the universal for generations to come.