Hans Rustad Bassam Tibi blander seg i debatten om Ayaan Hirsi Ali på signandsight.com. Han har ett godt poeng: hellenismen er grunnleggende for Europa og det som binder Europa og islam sammen, i en gjensidig trussel og konkurranse.
Now to the problem at hand and to Henri Pirenne’s thesis «No Charlemagne without Mohammed» (1937). What this means is that without the challenge of Islam, Charles the Great’s Christian Occident would never have come into being. Pirenne shows that both these greats – Europe as Occident and Islam as civilisation – have a shared historical development, and are mutually challenging.
The migration of Muslims to Europe today (in 1950, there were only 800,000 Muslims in Western Europe, today there are 20 million) belongs in this context of mutual challenge, and is the contemporary expression of the classic confrontation between Islam and Europe which Henri Pirenne reconstructs. In my book «Kreuzzug und Djihad» (crusade and jihad), in which I reconstruct this history in eight epochs, I try to take a fresh look at Pirenne’s thesis and suggest interpreting the relationship of Islam to Europe as one of a century-long mutual «Threat and Fascination.» Each has threatened the other, be it with Jihad conquest, crusades or colonisation, but has equally enriched the other in cultural and civilisational terms – be these medieval Islam’s borrowings from Hellenism or the influence of Islamic rationalism on the European Renaissance. We can see the 20 million Muslims living in Europe today as part of this history. The American Islamic scholar John Kelsay speaks of «Islamic enclaves which are found in Europe but which don’t belong to its history.» Is it not possible to find a bridge between the two, as Europe and Islam did earlier? It was as just such a bridge that I, a Reform Muslim, presented my concept of Euro-Islam in Paris in 1992.
