The relationship between Islam and the West is profoundly, multifariously, inescapably asymmetrical. In an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance this creates for a Western mentality schooled in the less complex oppositions of the Cold War, I have tried to distinguish ten types of asymmetry. This list does not pretend to be exhaustive or original. Taken together, however, these ten antitheses chart the extent of a confrontation that is still unfolding before the eyes of an intellectual elite that is astonished and affronted by the resurrection of religion as the defining factor in the future of humanity.
In 1888, a century before the advent of David Cameron, the Liberal politician Sir William Harcourt declared: “We are all socialists now.” As self-fulfilling prophecies go, this was one of the more memorable. I wonder whether, early in the twenty-second century, people will look back on the Prince of Wales’s speech to Al Imam Mohammad Bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earlier this year as Britain’s “We are all Muslims now” moment.
As the first Westerner ever to address the clerical elite of Wahabbi Islam, the future supreme governor of the Church of England appeared in the robes of an Islamic scholar and even spoke in the first person plural, as though he were one of them: “I think we need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the
