The West and Islam: Can the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt Coexist?
Dr. John H. Keiser
April 20, 2007
I. Introduction
The earth has sported both a Bible Belt and a Koran (Qur’an) Belt for 1,400 years. Today the two Belts sustain 50% of the world’s population. Christianity represents more than two billion people, twenty centuries of history, and tremendous diversity. Islam, with fourteen centuries of history, now claims a billion and a third people and a religious and cultural history militantly diverse. It thrives in 56 Muslim nations and may be the third largest religion in Europe and America. Belt styles and sizes have changed and clashes have occurred when they approached the same Belt loop simultaneously.
Differences among the three Abrahamic faiths are symbolized by the Muslim Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 692 on the site of an ancient Jewish temple and resembling nearby Christian monuments. The message to the Jews and Christians is that while the word of Moses and Jesus was once authentic (both appear in the Koran) it was corrupted by their successors, but purified by that of Muhammad. Who controls the place and how doctrines coexist must be addressed if the globe is to wear both Belts in style.
From the 8th century to the 16th, Muslim empires under a number of caliphs extended from Spain to Central Asia with capitals in Damascus and Baghdad; the Muslim Moors invaded France just as the Tartars, who controlled Russia, became Muslim; and the Koran Belt was tight. The Christian Crusaders (who seem more important now than then) captured Jerusalem in 1099 but lost it 90 years later. Under the medieval Arab caliphate and again under Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative and most enlightened center of the world, and for most of the Middle Ages, Christendom was on the defensive.
Globalization, which is built on business, technology, and communication changed this. Globalization began in 1498 when Vasco de Gamma sailed from Portugal around Africa to India through traditional Muslim trade routes. As to business, technology and communication da Gamma had European goods, better boats, gun powder, and a Western message destined to get louder and louder.
Modern history in the Near East began in 1789 when Napoleon, soon to be replaced by the British, occupied Egypt. After a century of conflict, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires was abolished in 1918. Iraq and Palestine were created by the West as were Lebanon and Jordan. As a consequence the entire Muslim world had been incorporated into the four European empires of Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. The Bible Belt seemed buckled, albeit over a somewhat less than politically rational and culturally and tribally coherent body.
The world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant compared to the West. As Bernard Lewis points out, the Muslim world was dominated by the questions: "Who did this to us?" "What did we do wrong?" "How do we correct it?" As a result of developments after 1945, the United States became prominent in Muslim answers to these questions. To them globalization explains their poverty and tyranny, and it is another word for a half-century of American dominance and exploitation supported by the U.S. alliance with selected Muslim tyrants in the post-Ottoman world.
To understand and to deal with the 21st century constrictions and overlap of the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt, complicated by weapons of mass destruction, the elements of globalization (business, technology, and communication) must be used to finance and deliver education, to encourage reason in both camps, and, though a public affairs conversation, to emphasize what human beings have in common. Truth must supersede wealth and power.
For Americans that requires: (1) a greater self-knowledge and an appreciation for what it means to be an American as we explain ourselves: (2) an increased knowledge of our global neighbors and the cultures that unite and motivate them, with a special focus on the 20th century history of Islam in order to understand and to tolerate its adherents; and (3) an examination and strengthening of the MSU West Plains program with China as a model for a similar educational relationship between West Plains and Islam. The Bible Belt and the Koran Belt will not disappear, be replaced by secularism or become one but can coexist in peace if citizen-teachers recognize the place religion and culture play in the lives of the great majority of the world’s people and pass it on to their students, worldwide, through a compelling agenda in which curriculum, reason, and conversation replace terror, jihad, and forced conversion.
II. Know Thyself, Trust Thyself, To Thine Own Self Be True-As An American
In the first place, to deal with Islam in countries in the Near East and throughout the world one must know and appreciate what it means to be an American and a part of Western culture. (Muslims do feel that they know themselves, even though they have yet to reconcile religion, tribalism, and politics around that identity.) Every teacher knows that sometimes, some way, every young person asks, "Who am I?" That comes down to "what is man?", in knowing the alternative answers, and to thinking about them. What each country is and what each generation within it is can best be discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind—which all teachers must explore and which are central to Christianity and to Islam. Residents of West Plains and Springfield know that residing under the "buckle of the Bible Belt" is a joke to many academicians but a point of honor to literalists. Those attitudes must be reconciled. To do that there is an American soul cohabited by secularism and religion that each of us possesses and must activate.
As the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt tighten a year’s course in American History at West Plains with uncompromising standards in content and student performance, agreed to and discussed by all faculty, is essential. Many of the issues that arise require an equally rigorous course in philosophy and another in religion, whether Harvard offers it or not. Their topics influence the individual long after graduation. It is interesting that in spite of the number of people in the Bible and Koran Belts, a professor at Harvard leading the successful opposition to a required course in "Reason and Faith" maintained that religion is "an American anachronism…in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it." He speaks for an increasing number of "sophisticates" and "secularists" who reside in but who despise the Bible Belt and who fail to acknowledge our "secularity" in sympathetic relationship with our parental Christian ideology.
The world has five major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are united by the common threads of belief in a higher being, belief that acts of kindness reward both the giver and the recipient, and belief in an afterlife. They project surprisingly similar codes of conduct. But other doctrinal and political differences are substantial and must be understood in a global setting. In doing so all students will know themselves better.
Young Americans must know that they are primarily a part of a nation and an idea not a place and a state. "American" is not a racial, tribal, or ethnic identity. One is born Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, or Mexican, but a person becomes American regardless of birthplace –including the fifty states. Neither Americans nor Muslims have considered how they are both defined by ideas, despite separate religious and secular emphases, but that is the place to begin. Interestingly, Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim member of Congress, took the oath of office on a copy of the Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson. Analyze that. Winston Churchill gave a speech at Harvard in 1943 on commonalities that held English –speaking peoples (Americans) together. "Law, language, literature…Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and to the poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all a love of personal freedom" made up his list, and he could explain it to the world. So can good teachers.
There is an American Creed that took shape for 150 years found in the words of Jonathan Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Roger Williams as the Nation developed, that has been essential for over 200 years after it was formed, and that was understood and practiced by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and countless others whom they represented and who shared the American soul. The American Creed, captured in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution, is a philosophical/political identity composed of liberty, freedom, independent conscience and thought, self-reliance, justice, equality, and hard work geared to exploit opportunity based in the best traditions of Judaic-Christian culture. The American Creed must be a central theme in the American history course at West Plains and prominent on the agenda of the Bible Belt/Koran Belt discussion. You have teachers who can explain it to the world.
Faculties are responsible to stimulate principled understanding, motivation, and practice for their students to create a better world. Unfortunately, the dominant belief on American campuses is that truth is relative and that that is a condition of free society-which is not the strongest position to begin discussion with the Koran Belt. This is the modern academic replacement for inalienable natural rights; so we educate the democratic personality rather that the democratic man or woman. At the same time, too may academics leave public governance to others, specialize in criticism, and ignore real public-affairs education. Commonalities do not play well at Harvard, for example, where a recent report on General Education says that its purpose is to put students in a position from which they can choose principles by which to be guided. After all why should 2,000 Ph.D.’s take a stand on principles? Journalism as well as much education has been replaced by entertainment, gossip, or life-style information. Is there underlying truth in both the Bible and the Koran or must we export historical relativity to Muslim lands and call it diversity?
Too many academics gush about how Americans should celebrate diversity, without understanding its oppressions. Diversity among the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish population of Iraq is a major reason why we cannot pacify it. And diversity led to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, and a million lives destroyed when Muslim Pakistan split from Hindu India in 1947. Students should contemplate whether or not the Hindus and Muslims of India would have been better off if partition had not occurred and the groups had found a way to coexist within India’s larger boundaries. Is stability and prosperity built on diversity or commonalities? Compare the answers of Mahatma Gandhi and Osama bin Laden to that question.
Peter Wood’s volume, Diversity, The Invention of a Concept, which should be required reading for Americans asking to understand their status, points out, "The [contemporary] diversity principle is…a feeling that group identity is somehow more substantial and powerful than either our individuality or our common humanity." James Madison called diversity "faction" in The Federalist No. 10 which he said "divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for the common good." A consideration of diversity (after it is defined) in American history as well as in the history of Islam is essential to the Bible Belt/Koran Belt discussion.
Academicians too often reinforce the standardized list of American "offenses" recited in the lands of Islam with little concern that lack of knowledge and relativism do not prepare their students to discuss these issues. However, participants in the Bible Belt/Koran Belt conversation must be prepared to analyze those "offenses" that include" (1) expropriation of the lands and ill-treatment of native Americans; (2) slavery; (3) war crimes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Vietnam and Iraq; (4) creation and assistance of Israel; (5) support of Middle Eastern tyrants in Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, etc. and, (6) the debauchery of American life. As a result of Muslim interpretation, America has become the "Great Satan" to many in the Koran Belt and to some at home. Ironically, "Evil Empire," as our Presidents have used the term, in Islamic idiom connotes "Great Satan." Negative interpretations in American classrooms produce cynical students who believe mankind is so corrupt that positive or corrective action is useless.
While historians must recognize that America’s "interest" and America’s "values" do not always rhyme, and that the country was born in war, preserved its unity in war, and maintained democracy in war, natural rights have dominated. For example students and Muslims alike should hear that in 1861 the American South’s "politically correct" position was that they should be able to approve slavery with a vote. They must contemplate Lincoln’s view of God and principles, his rejection of relativism and the South’s view of democracy, when the President said that there could be no compromise with the principles of equality and liberty, that slavery did not rest on the peoples’ choice, and that popular sovereignty on the question of African slavery was impermissible even if it may have avoided a bloody civil war. Hundreds of thousands of white Americans died to eliminate slavery, national unity was maintained, equal opportunity was instituted over time, and slavery in America, like all of the other issues listed by Muslim critics, must be placed in context, understood and compared with how similar issues were handled in other cultures and nations. As many as one out of five slaves brought to the United States were practicing Muslims. Today, African Americans constitute the largest indigenous Muslim population in North America.
Why didn’t the defeated Confederates take to the hills and become terrorists? What if they had? What if the South had won? American and Muslim students also must be reminded of a time when American Catholics, Protestants, and Jews were hostile toward and suspicious of one another. While they took their beliefs seriously they worked out accommodations for coexistence which were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls. That discussion is part of globalization as Christianity spreads in the populations of the Southern hemisphere where there are increased differences in the churches, and where schisms exist. Of course, Church and State conflict when the Chinese government insists on appointing Catholic bishops without the approval of Rome, without violence to this point—compared to the Muslim response to the Pope’s comment on Islamic history.
Students also should be reminded that internecine Muslim violence does not yet approach that of the Wars of Religion within the Bible Belt as it existed in the 16th and 17th centuries and work to see that modern struggles, colored by nuclear weapons, do not reach that level. What happened between then and now are relevant considerations. How these issues are handled by the Bible Belt and what remains in common can be used in the seminars, classes and in the broader discussion between the Bible and the Koran Belts and may also suggest alternatives for the intense battle between the newly empowered Shiites of Islam (15% of the population) and the majority Sunni (85%) who are increasingly combative throughout the Muslim world.
Class, race, sex, religion, national origin, or cultural differences have moderated or disappeared when bathed in the light of natural rights (the American Creed) which focus on shared human interest, liberty, and equality. In a striking image of human unity, too often forgotten by his fellow African Americans as well as others Reverend Martin Luther King wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." It was and is clear that the U.S. Constitution does not promise respect for whites, blacks, yellows, Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews, or immigrants from nations around the world but rather for the rights of individual human beings, and it affects a system. "a single garment of destiny," for them to live together. It has worked thus far, and discussions with the Koran Belt may keep us from re-embracing factionalism as we globalize.
Thus appreciating American history, philosophy and religion is essential for the next generation. Tom Bissell, a young man who felt the war in Vietnam was an atrocity, toured that country with his father who had served in the Marines in that war. The account is in his recent book, The Father of All Things. The son was overwhelmed with the beauty of the Citadel in Hue, and asked his father why he never felt a similar awe at any of the U.S. cultural monuments, e.g., the Lincoln Memorial. "Because you’re an ungrateful little prick," his dad explained. We don’t need DI’s in the classroom, but that’s one way to phrase it.
Finally, to understand oneself and to portray America within the Bible Belt and to the world requires an acceptance and a mastery of one’s own language. Immigrant students at West Plains should learn English and American students, proficient in English, might consider Chinese or Arabic. I believe a second language should be required. Shortly before he died in 1898, Bismarck, the former German Chancellor, was asked what he thought was the decisive factor in modern history. He replied: "The fact that the North Americans speak English." He is still correct, and a sound course in English, spoken and written, building a lifetime commitment to literacy for native and immigrant Americans is essential. True communication depends on it, and faculty must be examples of it. Deconstructionists and other modernists and relativists, who are critical of America and supposedly want peace, write in a fashion only a few of their colleagues with "modern" Ph.D.s can translate. They do not speak to the world. The effect of informal E-Mail, modern movies, and T.V. jargon, as well as the fate of grammar, formal English, and communication necessary to explain oneself is illustrated by a story from the early 90s when a student asked another student, "Can you tell me where the freshman dorms are at?" The response was, "At SMS we never end a sentence with a preposition." The correction was, "Can you tell me where the freshman dorms are at, asshole?" Whom would you rather have represent you in the Bible-Koran Belt conversation?
III. Global Neighborhoods
In the second place, that exchange (the language and respect) makes me question the term "global citizenship" and speculate about what rights such a person who lived in West Plains would have in Moscow, Beijing, Teheran, Baghdad or other global neighborhoods as a result of that title? (It obviously does not include the right or possibility to breathe clean air or pump and drink fresh water anywhere in the world.) Their rights come from being an American citizen and from whatever is granted by the nation or global neighborhood that they are visiting. Americans must become more familiar with those neighborhoods to coexist. Except for the increasing number of academics who promote multi-culturalism in America and universalism in the world most observers would agree that human beings are divided into global neighborhoods distinguished by one of eight cultures, i.e., either a definable Japanese, a Hindu, an Orthodox (or Russian), a Latin American, an African, a Sinic (or Chinese), an Islamic or a Western culture. This listing rejects the approach of Orientalism that diminishes culture with the will to dominate and reduces the world to the Occident (West) and the Orient (East) rather than to eight distinctive cultures. Once again, as Americans frequent these global neighborhoods, they must recall that they are products of Western Culture in: (1) philosophy; (2) religion; (3) language; (4) separation of church and state; (5) the rule of law, or constitutionalism; (6) social pluralism and societies; (7) representative bodies; and (8) individualism or personal liberty and choice. These characteristics must be the basis of self-understanding when the American citizen faces and adapts to the cultures of the world in global neighborhoods that have different perspectives on each category.
Of course, Westerners must deal with the true signs of "decadence" in their culture observed by participants and by those from other cultures. Decadence may be a topic where occupants of the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt can talk because for each culture, each nation, to deal with tomorrow, it must live with events whose examination might rationalize their and the world’s future. Americans must admit that too many young people know more about Brittany Spears than Martin Luther King as they respond to the other elements of Muslim concern. Germany is stronger if it admits to and examines the Holocaust; Russia may find a greater concern for its peoples if Stalin’s massive brutality is exposed; China cannot overlook the 40 million people killed by Mao; and Japan must recognize the atrocities committed in China in the late 1930’s. Muslims must weigh the inhuman actions associated with acquiring and holding their own historical empires when they use the term "empire" to denigrate America. Can stability be achieved without oppression? Machiavelli’s The Prince should be required reading.
With the understanding of Western Culture and what it means to be an American, students at West Plains should be exposed to another culture or two in required General Education classes. Given the existing relationship with China and its expanding importance in the world, as well as in the future of all American students, and the front-page presence of Islamic nations triggered by oil, nuclear weapons, and terrorism, there should be compelling courses in both Chinese and Islamic culture and history.
The conversation between the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt depends on increased American knowledge of Islam. The Muslim people, like Westerners and American, have been shaped by their history, are keenly aware of it, but also believe history reflects the working out of God’s purpose for their community, or for those in it that accept the teachings of Islam and obey its law. History, in the Bible Belt, conveys no such message and has been regarded as of lesser value. Muslims tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion subdivided into states. That, of course, is the case in the Middle East after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and perhaps a great cause of instability and flashpoints. Those qualitative differences must be recognized before a true conversation can take place.
Once again, the founder of Christianity saw a distinction between the things that were God’s and those that were Caesar’s. He did not build a state. The founder of Islam builds his own state and empire, and did not need to create a church. During Muhammad’s lifetime, the Muslims were at once a political and a religious community and the Prophet was head of state. Islam, therefore, is not only a matter of faith and practice; it is also an identity and a loyalty that for many, transcends all others. Details of that difference obviously must be reconciled for peaceful coexistence. To communicate one must understand that the Koran is a single book, uncreated, eternal, divine, and immutable, promulgated at one time by one man, the Prophet Muhammad. The Old and New Testaments are collections of books extending over a long period of time and seen as divine revelations. Both the Bible and the Koran must be examined for what they share and must not become "hot buttons" in the courses on religious history and philosophy. The issues they define are unlikely to go away.
With few exceptions, Christian clergy neither exercise nor claim the kind of public authority still accepted in Muslim countries. The Ten Commandments on a tablet in a park in America have become objectionable. In few, if any, Christian countries do Christian sanctities enjoy the immunity from critical comment or discussion that is accepted as normal even in supposedly secular and democratic Muslim societies. (The great majority of Muslims make no pretense of being either democratic or secular.) That immunity, often reported in the news, has been extended to Western Countries, including America, and to their Muslim Communities where their beliefs and practices are protected from criticism that Christian majorities have lost and that Jewish minorities never had. What is the appropriate balance? How will atheists and the concerns of the ACLU fit into that balance?
Islam as such, however, must not be portrayed as an irredeemable enemy of the West. There are growing numbers of Muslims, worldwide, who desire a closer and more friendly relationship to the West and the development of democratic or representational institutions in their own countries, even though stability is a precondition that may lead to non-American versions of government. They remain committed Muslims and well aware of the flaws of modern Western society, but also see its merits-its inquiring spirit, which produced modern science and technology and its concern for freedom which created modern, functional, and stable democratic government. There are many Muslim success stories in the U.S., but at the same time two-thirds consider the Americans immoral because of sex outside marriage and alcohol-both banned by Islam. The discussion of these topics could benefit America. While they wish to retain their own beliefs and culture they are the ones who seek to join the Bible Belt in a conversation to reach a freer and better world. We must accommodate them as well as assimilate them into the American idea, recognizing that there are four to six million Muslims in America but, as yet, no fifth column as a base for terrorism.
There are several flashpoints, not all created in the 20th century, that include oil, water, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Indonesia and Southeast Asia which must be recognized by students who wish, as Americans, to lead the conversation between the Bible and the Koran Belts. The first flashpoint is oil, so critical to America. The presence of 60% of the world’s proven oil reserves in the Muslim societies of western Asia, including Iraq, has caught Western interest, often in debatable fashion, has allowed the construction of modern cities (even though in Kuwait the electorate for parliament is restricted to 80,000 of 600,000 men), and strengthened and increased competition among tribal oligarchies for control. The importance of oil, as well as the possible substitutes, to America as it relates to Muslim countries must be recognized and become part of our history, business and science courses.
Another natural resource that must be part of the conversation and is a potential flashpoint, is water which, in its scarcity has had a determining influence on the core regions of the Islamic world. The root-meaning of "Sharia"-the Muslim divine law-is the path to a watering place, the source of life and purity. Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as "a silent mournful expanse with hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." Water is critical to Egypt (where the controversial Aswan Dam may be an ecological disaster), to Mesopotamia, and to Arabia where sharing the waters of the Jordan River is a key to the Arab-Israeli dispute. "Virtual water" has been a temporary savior in the Near East and is a result of globalization. It is a calculation of how much water it would take to produce foods, wheat for example, that oil-rich countries can now buy from the Western Hemisphere, and preserve their own water resources. Water is a topic under the context of global warming that must be discussed in its broader meaning by the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt. What is the future political effect of "the inconvenient truth" of global warming; how long will virtual water last; will America be able to afford to export it, and will greater parts of the Near East become uninhabitable desert? Muslims and Westerners face potential conflicts over the answers. West Plains is equipped to discuss both water and agriculture.
To understand Iraq, the most prominent contemporary flashpoint to which Iran (militant but plagued by internal forces of national liberation) is closely related, it is important to know its volatility. British occupation (begun in 1918) lasted until 1934 (although they maintained a controlling interest in the Iraqi Petroleum Company which exported oil), was reestablished in 1941, and replaced by a monarchy overthrown in 1958, by a military government in 1963 and again in 1968 by the Baath Party of which Saddam Hussein became President in 1979. He led the war with Iran from 1979-89, and viciously suppressed the Kurds, attacked Kuwait in 1991 and was captured by the Anglo-Americans in March of 2003. America’s unsuccessful attempt to establish democracy, dispel terrorist attacks and civil war are built on a volatile base. American decision makers were not sufficiently aware that it was not just human beings we "liberated" in Iraq but Shia and Sunni Muslims and Kurds with an ethnos, religion, culture, virulent diversity and a distrust of one another and of Western institutions developed over 1,400 years. That may mean the security, stability, productivity, and prosperity in a new Iraq government may well not depend on or work on an American system-not a disgrace to either culture. This critical situation, basic to American elections, cannot be the exclusive focus of the educational conversation but the cost of spreading democracy to the world must be evaluated. Machiavelli’s The Prince was read but not really understood by President Bush.
Similarly, Afghanistan has been a modern flashpoint that can not be ignored. In effect neither the region nor the population is a single entity, and effectively divided among Panthans, Hazaroas, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. As a result, they do not have political parties, and a ballot may have 350 individuals who do not represent competing ideologies or a platform but rather ethnicities and factions. It got that way when the empire that once controlled Afghanistan collapsed in the late 19th century, and the door was opened for Russian and British penetration. A Muslim state uniting the various peoples was established in 1880 which in various forms lasted until 1979 and direct Soviet intervention. The responding jihad supported by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States attracted volunteers from many countries, including Osama bin Laden. Under the stimulus of U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles, the Soviets withdrew in 1989. Discontent was exploited by the Taliban who instituted an oppressive control until removed by a massive U.S. bombing campaign following terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in September, 2001. Afghanistan and what it represents will not disappear. The conversations between the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt cannot ignore it and must help arrange peaceful coexistence among Afghanistan’s populations and between them and their neighbors.
A flashpoint, emotionally closer to home, lies in the age-old yearning of Jews to return to Israel, the land promised by God to the Prophet Abraham. Modern Zionism was built on this tradition and stimulated by Nazi genocide in World War II. A 1947 UN partition provided for Arab and Jewish states; on May 14, 1948, the British withdrew, and Israel was recognized by the major powers but attacked by the surrounding Arab states with wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. An Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed at Camp David in 1979 followed by disengagement agreements with Syria and Jordan, but (1) the problems of Palestine and Lebanon remain unresolved, (2) the President of Iran denies the Holocaust (a stimulus for creation of Israel) as he develops nuclear weapons and (3) a number of Islamic nations refuse to recognize Israel and speak of eliminating Israel which already has nuclear weapons. A popular American Muslim paper’s headline reads "U.S., U.K., and Israel: The Real Axis of Evil." Obviously, the Israeli flashpoint must be acknowledged in a Bible Belt (Old and New Testament) /Koran Belt discussion and a reconciliation of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad sought by their followers who have increasing capability to destroy one another. Because America, after the collapse of Soviet Communism, became the world’s sole super power and the explanation of the Muslim suffering, it must lead the discussion.
Of course, we must recognize that in southeast Asia there is a diverse set of nations, especially Indonesia with the largest Muslim population in the world, which emerged in the late 1940’s and 50’s. (It is important to consider the impact on desert and dry-land colonizers after they took over green lands.) Unity, stability and peace there will take great effort and understanding to avoid it becoming a threatening flashpoint. They join our global Muslim neighbors whose often volatile situation we must understand and help pacify in the interest of the people-theirs and ours. The Bible Belt and the Koran Belt discussions must both recognize and attempt to rationalize this complexity because globalization is unlikely to include a 21st century American or Islamic empire that can. While considering the volatility of Islamic nations, American students like Tom Bissell might evaluate and better understand the benefits of living in a democratic-republic that has lasted two and a quarter centuries.
IV. West Plains and Islam: A Model Program
In the third place, the issue of the spiritual Belts must not be solely left to politicians but be articulated by citizens. Isolation or ignorance would be disastrous. MSU West Plains is in a position to begin an exchange program with a Muslim university and nation modeled on and related to its China program, to allow experience in one to benefit the other, and to extend it though upper-division and graduate work in the MSU system. It would focus the discussion between the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt on education, reason and professional and student exchange, producing graduates in the interest of global peace. I have mentioned the curriculum in General Education, i.e., history, philosophy, religion, and language. But it must also provide interaction of personnel and visits with Muslim centers inside and outside the United States, a partnership with a Muslim university, and the effective use of the elements of globalization, i.e., business, technology, and communication. At both the lower and upper-divisions, the emphasis on business, as in the China program, must emphasize that coexistence and peace can be promoted through commerce because to trade together in a global world you must live together.
The regular classes would have a true public affairs emphasis as they recognized, for instance, that some textbooks in Iranian schools tells students to prepare for a global struggle against America and to welcome the privileges of martyrdom. West Plains’ students can have a more compelling message. For Muslim visitors, it must be emphasized that such communities as West Plains are seldom seen by potential terrorists. Islamic teachers, mullahs, must see these places, speak about them, and understand that just as in their world, communities, not just large societies, exist in America; that millions of Americans attend church and take care of their families with traditional values; and that Hollywood is not exclusively representative of America.
It would be interesting, for example, to hear an Islamic student explain to a West Plains’ colleague that the founder of the Shiite sector of Islam in the 7th century was Muhammad Ali, to boast of his capacity to fight and to point out that the American Mohammed Ali, who also knew how to fight and achieve victory in the modern world, frequently appears in Islamic sermons. Perhaps the West Plains’ student could provide a helpful perspective.
America has educated many scientists, business managers, politicians, engineers, and military personnel from Islamic lands, but the present relationship viewed as either a "holy war" or a "crusade" demands a broader-based public-affairs oriented academic program. Even Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda could not overcome the division between and unite the Sunni and Shiites using the most outlandish anti-American feelings. Therefore, how a war between sects becomes a universal dialogue of ideas led by teachers (discussed rather than fought over) and how Islam makes space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim; how to establish a peaceful distinction among worldwide religions each committed to its own way but to similar goals for its members; how America might profit from some of the strengths and observations of Islam; and how Islam sees and adapts to the real strengths of America are meant to be results of a West Plains’ program.
Muslim teachers are often clergy who must see America for themselves and observe the West Plains program. An organization chartered in Oregon, The Road to Peace, of which I, for whatever reason, am the president and former Professor Karl Luckert of MSU is the founder, is bringing several influential Muslim professors from China, who represent effectively more than half of the 40 million Muslims in China, to spend this summer in the United States traveling among universities- one of which I believe is MSU, sponsored by its Religious Studies Department. We are contemplating expanding the group to include mullahs (professors) from Afghanistan. They should come to West Plains, unobtrusively observe life here, examine the existing program with China, and recognize that exchanges of professors (mullahs), students, and graduates can build goodwill between the Koran Belt and the Bible Belt based on knowledge and the capacity to admit, discuss, and accept differences. Fundamentalists shouting passages from the Bible or the Koran won’t cut it. Peaceful globalization depends on it.
Of course, there is much to be learned by interacting with European nations in the global Bible Belt and observing how they handle Muslim immigrants. It is also important to observe and to discuss the way the States in the U.S. with the most Muslim populations interact and find ways to coexist. It would be helpful to know that Muslims from Lebanon came to Iowa in the late 19th century, worked the farmlands, and have been joined by Muslims from 30 other countries. They opened a "Mother Mosque" in 1934, and nearly all are striving to become practicing U.S. citizens. It’s a field trip. While some younger Muslims are reaffirming their Islamic identities, a great many are finding ways to assimilate with American society-and that must be the goal of a worldwide program based in West Plains.
Finally, it is evident that the representatives of the Bible Belt are losing the modern-information war, under-employing technology, and weakly focusing on political and military information that changes momentarily. The conversation between the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt is now being dominated by anti-American insurgents in the Middle East using cell phone cameras, lap-top editing programs, and the Web to broadcast the horrors of civil war and to encourage anti-Americanism and jihad. Without the InterNet, bin Laden would just be a frustrated guy in a cave. The technological, human, social networks must be controlled by Education and the West Plains’ program must be entirely available on the InterNet, supplemented by Public Broadcasting, and devote itself to replacing the propaganda war with educational messages in history, religion, philosophy, and business. As with the China program, perhaps there could be Muslim co-sponsorship. The program can fit squarely into the needs and assets of globalization; business and government can pay for it; technology can deliver it; and public-affairs oriented teacher-scholars can produce it because nothing else may be more important.
V. Conclusion
In conclusion, there is no question that the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt will coexist for the foreseeable future sustaining more that 50% of the world’s population. Instead, the question is can they do so peacefully for the benefit of their people or will the unrepresentative bloody politics and bloodless divisive economics of Jihad vs. McWorld, as Benjamin Barber speculates, dominate? A colleague from my Boise State days, Gregory A. Raymond and a co-author have just published a volume called After Iraq: The Imperiled American Imperium. They advocate a modified American foreign policy and limited military action after Iraq, and I hope that I’ve outlined how West Plains and similar programs throughout higher education can contribute to a citizen’s knowledge-based approach for both and for a stable future. As the Dalai Lama, from a Buddhist perspective, sees it, "What we need to do is to develop an understanding of the differences in our various traditions and to recognize the value and potential of each of them." My contention once more is that that depends on: (1) Americans understanding themselves better, explaining themselves to the Muslim world and emphasizing reason and tolerance; (2) Americans understanding Islam, as well as the cultures in the global neighborhoods where it exists, and seeking commonalities rather than allowing contemporary politics and hostilities to destroy their worlds, and (3) Americans insisting that the conversation between the Bible Belt and the Koran Belt, which as Dr. King pointed out, depends on a "single garment of destiny," is taken seriously enough to form the basis of on-campus and international broadcast of formal education programs at West Plains and other campuses, to educate a generation of human beings who can manage globalization. "one world with many voices" that harmonize in the interest of all.
Personal Recommended Readings Related to The Bible Belt and the Koran Belt
Barber, Benjamin R., Jihad vs. McWorld, Random House, 1995.
Bissell, Tom, The Father of All Things, Pantheon, 2007.
Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Caroll, Robert and Prickett, Stephen (Introduction and Notes), The Bible, Authorized King James Version, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Colby, Anne, et.al., Educating Citizens, Preparing Americas’ Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility, Jossey-Bass, 2003
Dawood, N.J. (translator), The Koran, Penguin Books, 1999.
Hitchcock, Susan Taylor and Esposito, John L., The Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk, National Geographic Society, 2004.
Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Jacoby, Tamar (ed.) Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, Basic Books, 2004.
Kegley, Charles W. Jr. and Raymond, Gregory A., After Iraq: The Imperiled American Imperium, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lewis, Bernard, The Crisis of Islam, The Modern Library, 2003.
Lewis, Bernard, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response, Oxford, 2002.
Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, Mentor Books, 1952.
McWhorter, John, Doing Our Own Thing, The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, Carolina Press, 1995.
Nord, Warren A., Religion and Rethinking American, A National Education Dilemma, University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Ruthven, Malise, Historical Atlas of Islam, Harvard University Press, 2004.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, Vintage Books, 1979.
Spencer, Robert, The Truth About Muhammad, Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, Regnary, 2006.
Wallis, Jim, God’s Politics, Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, Harper San Francisco, 2005.
Wood, Peter, Diversity, The Invention of a Concept, Encounter Books, 2003.
Other Readings: Luckert, Karl, Executive Director, Road to Peace,Inc; Mother Jones, articles; Newsweek, articles, The New Yorker, articles, Wall Street Journal, articles.