Freedom and identity

Abstract

As show the partly violent clashes between liberal secularists and Islamists in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the two factions certainly defend two diametrically opposite political points of view. For liberals, politics finds its ultimate justification in the protection of individual freedom. For Islamists, only the application of the moral code and religious law codified in the shariah can justify politics. Contrary to what is sustained by a theory of situated agency, there is no easy and definite reconciliation between the two positions. And this depends precisely upon the fact that both political models are based upon the very same idealist conception of the individual, namely the assumption that we, as persons, have a free will and are not determined by the law of causality. Paradoxical as it might sound, it is our freedom that gives rise to the problem of identity and lends force to the Islamist argumentation. If freedom as such cannot bring about practical reason and also liberals recognize that the ultimate source of normativity is identity, there is a point in the Islamist and, more general, communitarian claim that we are not free to choose our identity. In order that identity does the normative work it is supposed to do, it must be given and not chosen. What remains, however, unclear in the communitarian picture is how the norms of our community can come to constitute our will without a process of active identification. If we cannot identify voluntarily with our community’s norms, then only emotional attachment to our community can explain identification and the normative grip communitarian norms have upon us. Yet, attachment is conditioned by the effective satisfaction of our psychological and physical needs. The problem is that our need for freedom and liberty can become overshadowed by our more immediate needs based, for example, upon resentment and revenge and that today makes Muslims in particular to be so hostile towards liberal ideas. I suggest that conciliatory trust-building measures can help to surmount the anger, fear, mistrust and suspicion Muslims feel vis-à-vis the West and that are at the origin of today’s conflict between freedom and identity in the Muslim world.

Keywords

Attachment freedom human needs identity Islam practical reason

One of the predominant concerns with regard to the democratic revolutions in the Arab world is the question of whether or not they can bring forth a political order that is able to reconcile individual freedom and religious identity, a political system that is able to guarantee civil rights within a Muslim public culture. The often irreconcilable conflict and violent clashes between those who advocate individual freedom and the promoters of one form or another of political Islam make many political observers fear, however, that the Arab Spring could be turning into an Arab winter.

Yet, only few political theorists actually think that there is a contradiction between the claims of freedom and the struggle for identity. And these few thinkers, sustaining Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations, come to the far from constructive conclusion that Islam is the enemy of liberalism and western culture and that Islam therefore needs to be fought and contained in the best manner of the cold war.¹ The large majority of contemporary political philosophers believe, on the contrary, that freedom and identity are perfectly compatible with each other and that the current opposition between liberal secularists and the religious faithful is purely artificial and invented, fostered by serious misconceptions of both freedom and identity. It is only once we consider our true self to be autonomous from its social context that identities and their claims start to give us anxiety and come to be conceived as a danger for our freedom. And vice versa, it is just in the case that we think our autonomy coincides with our identity that aspirations for freedom are judged as a threat to our integrity and the authenticity of our community and religion. But freedom and identity are always interdependent; the self is never entirely transcendent, nor fully embedded. The self rather displays both the properties of transcendence and embeddedness simultaneously, the self is constituted and free at the same time. If it is true that social norms give content to our will, we still have the freedom to interpret and dislocate the meaning of these very norms.²

Therefore our fear that the Arab revolutions will give rise to some version of Islamic theocracy is ‘motivated by entrenched cultural prejudice against Muslims and their capacity for self-governance’ rooted in our western-centric worldview. ‘There are multiple historical and institutional models to choose from in reconciling Islam and democracy. Rather than shying away from the contentious debate which will now break out in these countries … we should celebrate it as an aspect of pluralist democratization’,³ wrote Seyla Benhabib in the early days of the revolution. In reality, the current conflict must be understood as a democratic process in which political actors come to appropriate, redefine and transform the traditional interpretations of Islam, as a process that contributes to an ‘interpenetration and dialogical relation’ between secularism and Islamism, ‘unsettling the fixity of positions and oppositional categories’, as Nilüfer Göle claims with regard to the Turkish experience of the place of Islam in the public sphere.⁴ Our freedom gives way to an hybridization of identity⁵ that, as Roger Cohen observes in the case of Egypt, allows people to have their passion for Islam to be equaled only by their passion for free speech and free press. And Cohen sees these examples of Muslims who are religious liberals or liberal believers as ‘a living repudiation of all the trite religious-secular, either-or, clash-of-civilizations intellectual constructs through which the world has tried to address the Arab Spring’.⁶

Yet, from the possibility of a hybridization of secular and religious identities we cannot deduce any necessity since not only can we quote positions of the Muslim Brotherhood that actually stand in strong contrast with any sort of secular thought, but also a theory of situated agency cannot exclude categorically traditional religious commitments that are hostile to individual rights. A theory of situated agency cannot prescribe content and direction of the reiterations of the social norms that come to constitute us. Even if we presuppose cross-cultural contaminations and religious norms to be historically indeterminate and hybrid, nothing in our freedom inhibits us from interpreting these norms in a more traditionalist and archaic manner. Our interpretations and the kind of identities we eventually come to endorse are not bound by any independent moral criteria and have no objective measure outside the internal point of view of the respective individuals themselves. Benhabib clearly sees this danger when she warns that ‘because they are dependent on contingent processes of democratic will-formation, not all jurisgenerative politics yields positive results’. Therefore ‘the validity of cosmopolitan norms is not dependent on jurisgenerative and democratic iterations’.⁷ But then, in the last instance, freedom tends to trump identity and to precede any ethics of identity.

There is a lot at stake, if eventually we have to choose between freedom and identity. Not only will the West continue to be in conflict with cultures and civilizations that currently deny negative rights, but also these societies will remain stuck in their struggle for recognition without actually addressing the root causes for which they are unable to account for individual liberties. I am going to claim that the either/or choice between freedom and identity goes back to an idealist conception of the self and that, in fact, the liberal position itself is rather unstable and that only an identitarian theory of agency can account for the obligatory character of our will, with all the problems this entails for individual freedom. I am suggesting, however, that identity is not simply given to us by the fact of our social embeddedness, as communitarian theory claims, but that identity is the result of an attachment we have towards a community that is responsive to our fundamental needs as human beings. In this perspective, if circumstances are favorable, identity and freedom tend to stand in continuity and not in conflict with each other.

I The idealist self

In a certain sense, this harsh opposition between liberalism and Islam comes as a surprise and the political theorists insisting on the compatibility between freedom and identity seem to be up to something very important. Islam as such does not exist and what we encounter in social reality is rather a variety of Islams, Islamic pluralism, as Clifford Geertz demonstrates exemplarily in his seminal study of the contrasting development of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia.⁸ Islamists seem to be rather pretentious when they require Muslims to follow a literal interpretation of the shariah. Don’t we have the freedom to interpret Islam in the light of today’s necessities, in line with modernity and globalization,⁹ and develop a contemporary Islam, a European Islam, for example, as Tariq Ramadan suggests to Muslims living in Europe?¹⁰ Yet, the reason why Islamists categorically dismiss and reject religious pluralism is precisely, and oddly enough, the same reason with which liberals justify a Muslim’s autonomy in interpreting Islam: the freedom of human beings. Interestingly, both liberals and Islamists start from the very same transcendental (or idealist) conception of the self and draw exactly opposite conclusions with liberals claiming individual rights and Islamists imposing the law of God. And the even more interesting thing is that Islamists are right in insisting that our identity constitutes our freedom. Let us understand why.

Paradoxical as it might sound, it is our freedom that gives rise to the problem of identity and lends force to the Islamist argumentation. To be free means not to underlie the laws of causation. As physical and psychological beings we obviously are affected by the causal forces of nature, but insofar as we have a will, an agency, these forces do not determine our actions. As we saw during the Arab Spring, people can withstand the worst forms of oppression, terror and intimidation and rebel themselves against tyranny, even at the cost of losing their lives. It seems that people have a will that cannot be caused by any natural force, however strong and mighty it be. As Immanuel Kant maintains, our true self is at home in the transcendental world and not in the world of nature. Yet, how can we be sure that we really act freely and that the reasons for our actions, even if only unconsciously, are not determined by some empirical content? We, westerners, often tend to interpret the Arab Spring as a revolution in the name of freedom and human rights, but who could assure us that, in reality, it was not the outcome of a deep-felt resentment and hate of the tyrannous regime and driven by motives of economic well-being? Acting upon principles is the only proof of our freedom, even if never ultimate given the lack of transparency of our minds. Only if an action is done for no other sake than that of a law, can we say that an action is really free. The fact that we can act upon obligations is the only evidence we have of our freedom.¹¹

The next problem is to determine which exactly is the law of the free will. It is on this point that liberals and Islamists depart from each other; they disagree upon the question of where the law of the will comes from. Whereas liberals tend to believe that the law is one of our own making, Islamists maintain that the law is given to us, that the law of the will has its origin in Islam itself. All the conflict between liberals and Islamists turns around the question if the law of the will has its source internal to the individual or if it is given by an external source, namely the Koran.

There is a profound reason why liberals maintain that the law of the will is within us. Kant says the following in this regard:

Supposing that a will is free, to find the law which alone is competent to determine it necessarily. Since the matter of the practical law, i.e., an object of the maxim, can never be given otherwise than empirically, and the free will is independent on empirical conditions (that is, conditions belonging to the world of sense) and yet is determinable, consequently a free will must find its principle of determination in the law, and yet independently of the matter of the law. But, besides the matter of the law, nothing is contained in it except the legislative form. It is the legislative form, then, contained in the maxim, which can alone constitute a principle of determination of the [free] will.¹²

Kant maintains that we are not really free if we act upon principles that have an empirical ground, may it be of psychological or communitarian nature. So, if our obligations can have no other source than the will itself – otherwise only the external grounds or choices upon which our obligations depend are the reasons for action, but never the obligation itself – then the will must auto-determine its own laws. But given that freedom by definition cannot have any content, a free will can be constituted only by a law that commands our actions to have a law-like character. The reasons of our actions underlie the categorical imperative and have to be universalizable. As Christine Korsgaard concludes, ‘in a sense, the Formula of the Universal Law simply describes the function or task of an autonomous will’.¹³

The standard critique of Kant’s moral law is that the universal law is empty, that it has no content. Hegel objects that the universalization test of our maxims is not providing the substantial moral principles Kant is hoping for; in fact, whatever action can be universalized without running into any sort of contradiction.¹⁴ Yet, this is not the direction in which the Islamists’ critique of liberalism pushes. Their problem is not so much the emptiness of the moral law as its unbinding character. They claim that an autonomous will and the individual rights which it justifies give rise to nothing less than arbitrariness and a sort of moral relativism that throws society into chaos. It is true that John Rawls’ political constructivism has provided liberalism with a substantial foundation of the laws of practical reason that Kantian liberalism might lack.¹⁵ But also Rawls’ political liberalism runs into the problem pointed out by Islamists and of which already Kant has been very much aware: the problem of normativity. Rawls must suppose, once he has constructed the laws of public reason, that citizens effectively have the desire to act upon those reasonable principles ‘that regulate how a plurality of agents … are to conduct themselves in their relations with one another’.¹⁶ He must assume that ‘the conception-dependent desire to act in ways worthy of a reasonable and equal citizen, becomes one of the desires by which we are moved’.¹⁷ And the way these principle-dependent desires enter as elements into a person’s motivational set is simply by ‘desiring to be this kind of person’,¹⁸ to be a worthy reasonable and equal citizen. Yet, why should we desire to be a reasonable citizen?

Kant himself is quite aware that, whatever our transcendental self might command us to do, the action has to be undertaken by the empirical self, the action must take place in our world in which no effect can be without a cause. Since the moral law has its origin in practical reason and ‘reason of itself’, as Hume shows, ‘is utterly impotent in … produc[ing] or prevent[ing] actions’,¹⁹ the moral law itself cannot be the cause of any action. ‘For’, and herein Kant agrees with Hume, ‘all inclination and every sensible impulse is founded on feeling, and the negative effect produced on feeling (by the check on the inclinations) is itself feeling.’²⁰ In order that our will becomes effective, it has therefore to produce some motivational state and affect the agent’s psychology. We must somehow develop a desire to follow the laws of our will. Now Kant claims that ‘this feeling (which we call the moral feeling) is produced simply by reason. It does not serve for the estimation of actions or for the foundation of the objective moral law itself, but merely as a motive to make this of itself a maxim.’²¹ ‘Consequently’, continues Kant, ‘we can see a priori that the moral law, as a determining principle of the will, must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling which may be called pain; and in this we have the first, perhaps the only, instance in which we are able from a priori considerations to determine the relation of a cognition (in this case of pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.’²² Now the question is how practical reason could ever be the cause of such a moral, or, as Kant also sometimes calls it, practical feeling, if Kant, as we have seen, does not dispute Hume’s claim that empirically there can ever be a causal relationship between reason and our passions?

Kant’s solution to this problem is, in fact, identity. It is through our moral or practical identity that the empirical self comes to coincide with the transcendental self. The moral law is the source of our self-esteem and personal worth, which, as Kant states, ‘in the absence of agreement with the moral law, is reduced to nothing’.²³ Violating the moral law we are betraying ourselves, and it is this self-deceit that generates the feelings of humiliation, disgust and repulsion. The moral law is constitutive of our identity and identity gives rise to moral feelings. The following passage renders explicit Kant’s thesis on identity as source of normativity of the moral law:

When an upright man is in the greatest distress, which he might have avoided if he could only have disregarded duty, is he not sustained by the consciousness that he has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person and honoured it, that he has no reason to be ashamed of himself in his own sight, or to dread the inward glance of self-examination? He cannot endure that he should be in his own eyes unworthy of life.²⁴

Yet, if identity indeed can confer on the moral law a binding character, it is not clear why we should actually come to identify with the moral law. Why should we, as persons, have such a moral identity? Kant’s answer is the following: ‘Man alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself. By virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law, which is holy. Man … must regard humanity in his own person as holy.’²⁵ We come to identify with the moral law, because we are stunned and glorify its almightiness and purity and feel a profound sense of love for the holiness of the moral law. It is self-love, love of our holiness as authors of the moral law, that explains our identification with the moral law. And this love is the outcome of admiration and illumination, of an awe-inspiring experience. Yet, this is not the way how our psychology seems to work. Love is not the result of respect, but arises only within a relationship that is based upon sympathy, empathy and compassion. Children, for example, do not love their parents because they recognize their superiority, but because parents take care of their basic needs. Discussing moral development, Rawls holds the following concerning the psychological law of love: ‘Given that family institutions are just and that the parents love the child and manifestly express their love by caring for his good, then the child, recognizing their evident love of him, comes to love them.’²⁶ The transcendental self with its relentless commandments does not take care at all of our needs and, on the contrary, commands us to disregard, neglect and even despise them. Hence, if psychologists are right, it is impossible that we can love the moral law and have a moral identity.

II The psychological self

Liberals face the problem that the practical principles inherent in our freedom lack normativity. Although we are ourselves the sources of our practical reasons, we still need a desire to follow our will, the desire Rawls calls principle-dependent desire. However, given the independence of our agency and will from our psychology, this desire can have its foundation only in our identity. It is our identity that provides us with a desire to follow the moral law. As we have seen, it is, however, quite dubious that we identify ourselves with the moral law. The will cannot constitute our identity, as long as its practical laws are given a priori and identification has to take place a posteriori. Therefore contemporary liberals give up on the idea that the laws of the will are given and maintain that we ourselves are choosing our own identity. They establish a direct link between the will and identity, making the will the source of our identification and avoiding thereby the difficulty Kant is facing in explaining how we actually come to have the identity that gives normative force to our will. And by way of a transcendental argument liberals establish that next to our particular identities we also must have a moral identity: Since it is the fact of being a human being that allows us to have a will and to be who we are, we must also value and identify ourselves with our humanity.²⁷ This way liberals seem finally to assure us that individuals truly have inescapable ethical and moral obligations.

Korsgaard puts it the following way: ‘The reflective structure of the mind forces us to have a conception of ourselves’²⁸ and ‘identify [ourselves] with some law or principle which will govern [our] choices’.²⁹ ‘It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.’³⁰ But of course, if identity is chosen and not given by our will, there are two immediate objections. First, what could we actually will in complete autonomy and independence from our actual desires, if there is no law internal to the will? The problem is that an autonomous will is literally forced to make an arbitrary choice between the identities available, if it remains undetermined by any empirical content. And from this first objection follows a second problem. If all of our identifications are arbitrary, in what sense could they ever be normative for us? If I choose to be a Muslim for no reason at all, how could violating Islamic principles ‘be worse than death’?³¹ Korsgaard is certainly well aware of these problems when she states that ‘you can stop being yourself for a bit and still get back home’.³² And she proposes that ‘a commitment to your own identity’ is the solution to the problem: ‘We must commit ourselves to a kind of second-order integrity, a commitment to not letting these problems get out of hand.’³³ But she herself admits that ‘the problem reiterates within the commitment to your own integrity’.³⁴ Why could an arbitrary second-order commitment to Islam not be shed in favor of another commitment? Korsgaard eventually concludes that ‘obligation is always unconditional, but it is only when it concerns really important matters that it is deep’.³⁵

And the Islamists’ argument precisely aims to provide this depth to our identity that liberal theory, emphasizing the freedom of choice, is unable to account for. The depth of our identity depends upon the very fact that it is given to us and not chosen, we simply are the persons we are and there is nothing we can choose to be. Yet, we are not moral persons commanded by the moral law, but individuals whose personal identity is deeply intertwined with their collective identities, with the communities, cultures and religions they are born into and in which they grew up. There is just nothing we can choose about our origins, nor can we simply shed them. We are who we are! There is no transcendental, free self, as in liberalism, that ‘is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses’ and ‘can always, if [it] wishes to, put into question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of [our] existence’.³⁶ Islamists, in this regard, are undistinguishable from communitarians³⁷ who hold that ‘[we] inherit from the past of [our] family, [our] city, [our] tribe, [our] nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of [our] life, [our] moral starting point.’³⁸ ‘Shorn of these we would cease to be ourselves, … our existence as persons … would be impossible outside the horizon of these evaluations.’³⁹ ‘For the story of [our] life is always embedded in the story of these communities from which [we] derive [our] identity.’⁴⁰

Islamists eventually seem to have discovered the necessarily binding laws of our freedom that both Kant and contemporary liberals were looking for in vain. Our identity constitutes our freedom, and not vice versa. Muslims are truly free persons, they fully realize their freedom only in the case of their following the precepts of the Koran and not when they contest the authority of the shariah over their lives. It is not that Islamists contest Muslims’ freedom of the will, they just believe that Muslims’ individual freedom is not independent of their being Muslims, but coincides with their Muslimhood. Their freedom relies in their being Muslims. Muslims are free when they follow the principles of Islam, not because they somehow willingly do so, but because they simply realize and live up to the laws of their pure will without being affected in whatsoever sense by their desires, emotions and needs, in short by their psychology. Any contestation of Islam, any attempts to reform Islam and to interpret Islam in the light of modernity, either presuppose the idea of a pure free will or must have empirical grounds originating in the idea of individual well-being that puts into question the normative force of Islam and, hence, a Muslim’s freedom and dignity. Those philosophers who think there can be a reconciliation between individual rights and identity are, in fact, liberals in disguise.

But does identity in the Islamists’ conception really constitute our freedom and agency? What remains somewhat unclear in this picture is the question of how we come to be the Muslims we actually are. How do Islamic principles enter our mind and make up our agency without causing our will? Two are the standard explanations: volition and love. Islamists must, of course, exclude the possibility that Muslims come willingly to identify, endorse, or commit themselves to Islamic principles. This would presuppose the idea of a will that is independent of a Muslim’s identity, making identity a matter of choice. It is also not plausible, as Harry Frankfurt claims, that we just happen to have the commitments we have, that we happen to be or become Muslims independent of whatsoever – our family, education, or community. Frankfurt considers our loves, which in his theory are constitutive of our identity, to be independent from agency, cognition and psychology. He argues that love ‘is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional.’⁴¹ According to Frankfurt, love is the cause of itself; it is self-generated. Love is autonomous and ‘the motivations that love engenders are not merely adventitious or … heteronomous’.⁴² However, given that love is as much an emotion as fear or resentment, it is quite strange that love stands outside of the chain of causation and the realm of nature and cannot be considered an emotional response triggered by external events. Hence, if Muslims neither can identify voluntarily with Islamic norms nor simply happen to be Muslims, then only emotional attachment to Islam can explain their identification and the normative grip Islamic norms undoubtedly have upon them. Only a psychological mechanism can account for our being Muslim. But then we make a step outside of the transcendental or idealist framework of agency and communitarianism and enter the grounds of empiricism and non-cognitivism, in which freedom of the will and normativity notoriously play no role at all.

According to Akeel Bilgrami, the reason for which Muslims today are so attached to the principles of Islam is resentment. Bilgrami sees Islamism and fundamentalism to be a ‘defensive reaction caused not only by the scars and memories of Western colonial rule but by the failure of successive governments to break out of the models of development imposed on them by a dominating neocolonial presence of the superpowers through much of the cold war’.⁴³ In this perspective, Muslims have become pious believers because of (post-)colonial humiliation and depravation. Muslims come to consider Islam as an appropriate answer to western subjugation and condescension that restitutes their sense of autonomy and dignity. Political Islam plays a precise function in a Muslim’s psychological economy. In fact, John Bowlby explains our attachment to our parents with the fact that they are sensitive and responsive to our needs, taking care of our well-being.⁴⁴ I want to suggest that we can explain our being Muslim with the very same psychological mechanism. Our identification with Islam is caused by the satisfaction of our psychological and physical needs. As, moreover, many scholars of political Islam point out, Islamic organizations such Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood gain their popularity above all with the social services they provide to the poor and deprived. They grant universal access to schools and hospitals and offer better services than those provided by secular NGOs or the feeble Arab states.⁴⁵

In a psychological theory, our identity is not somehow miraculously given to us, as it sometimes seems to be the case in communitarianism, but is the outcome of a precise psychological process that is driven by our human needs. It is not identity as such that is normative and constitutive of our will and agency; we follow the principles incorporated by our identity because of the attachment and love we feel for a religion, culture, or community that takes care of our well-being. Of course in a psychological theory of identity, in which freedom is understood in negative terms as to ‘be left to do or be what [one] is able to do or be, without interference by other persons’,⁴⁶ there is no principled reason for which identity and freedom must be compatible. As the case of political Islam and Islamic fundamentalism shows, particularly in pathological political, social and economic contexts such as those in the Arab and Islamic world, where the idea of freedom and liberalism has been for centuries a vector for colonization and oppression, freedom comes to be marked somatically in extremely negative terms.⁴⁷ For many Muslims, the idea of freedom, being connoted as a western value, provokes simply the emotions of disgust and repulsion. This explains the harsh opposition secular and liberal movements face today in Islamic countries. However, if we are thinking a psychological theory of identity through, identities that limit our freedom are anything than stable. As many examples of Muslims, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Magdi Allam, who developed a profound hate and distaste for Islam as a religion and committed apostasy, demonstrate, identities that oppress our longing for freedom and liberty, a fundamental human need as universal political and social history teaches us, become quickly objects of hostility and attacks and often see themselves obliged to recur and rely on sheer force and violence, further depriving us of other basic needs. This suggests also that identity is not, as Bernard Williams claims, reducible to the emotion of shame only.⁴⁸ We embrace wholeheartedly and unconditionally only those identities that respond comprehensively to our various needs.

What conclusion can we draw? In the current context of the Arab Spring, the electoral successes of the Muslim Brotherhood can be explained by the fact that they effectively respond to certain needs of the Muslim population. They are openly hostile to the West and they offer grass-roots social services that benefit large parts of the impoverished societies. But as the very conflicts between the Muslim Brothers and liberal and secular movements show, Islamic organizations, due to their profound anti-western attitude, fail to see the value of freedom and risk becoming either oppressive – just think of the violence that is currently committed by Islamists, or irrelevant in the long term. So that freedom and identity can coexist in the Muslim world, Muslims must overcome the trap of resentment⁴⁹ and conceive freedom not as a western invention and product, but as a universal human need. Yet, if our psychological thesis is right, then Muslims will not achieve this simply by ‘liv[ing] up to the basic conditions of free agency’ and adopting a first-person point of view, as, for example, Bilgrami calls for.⁵⁰ Only conciliatory trust-building measures can help to surmount the anger, fear, mistrust and suspicion Muslims feel vis-à-vis the West and that are at the origin of today’s conflict between freedom and identity in the Muslim world. From this perspective, we, westerners, must above all stop thinking of ourselves and our culture as the true and only heirs of Enlightenment. Moreover, the West must engage in substantial common political projects and cooperation with the Muslim world, such as initially envisaged by the Mediterranean Union, that generate wealth and foster well-being.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

This article has been written on the occasion of the Reset-Dialogues İstanbul Seminars 2012 (‘The Promises of Democracy in Troubled Times’) that took place at İstanbul Bilgi University on 19–24 May 2012.