Clash of Civilizations: Debunking the Cultural Relativism Myth in Western and Islamic Worlds

The West’s Unique Fusion of Faith and Reason in a World of Relativism

It is a curious thing in western culture that the freedoms and benefits of our societies allow us to view the world through the lens of cultural relativity. Cultural relativity itself is a product of Western civilization’s unparalleled openness to self critique, the Judeo-Christian concept that no one or thing is perfect other than god and therefore critical analysis not only is allowed but encouraged. From the Enlightenment onward, the West has enjoyed the luxury of questioning its own foundations, reexamining the traditions and ideas that shaped it and created a flourishing in science and the humanities. This self critical instinct has given rise to profound insights and corrections, but has also birthed a misguided relativism: a belief that all civilizations and ideologies are interchangeable in their merit and structure. Nowhere is this fallacy more evident in modern political conversations than in the Western left's perception of Islam, particularly its theological framework as a governing system.

The left, with its penchant for cherry-picking history to suit contemporary narratives, has constructed an image of Islam as a savior of Western civilization—a force that safeguarded the Greek philosophers and catalyzed the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. This narrative, repeated ad nauseam in academia and media, claims that Islam, like Judeo-Christianity, is compatible with modern liberal values and Western institutions. But this is a distortion born of cultural naivety, a perspective possible only from the comfortable distance of the inside looking out of Western Civilization. It’s the same habit many a conservative has pushed against when one critiques Fundamentalist islam and gets the knee jerk “Christians fought crusades hundreds of years ago” as a defense of modern Islamist fundamentalism being the same thing.

The truth is less flattering and far more instructive. The preservation and development of Greek and Roman knowledge under Islamic rule occurred in spite of Islam’s inherent qualities as a legalistic and theologically rigid doctrine, not because of it. The golden age of Islamic intellectualism—a period that leftist apologists so often extol—was a brief anomaly made possible by a specific cultural and political milieu, not the theological framework of Islam itself. Indeed, the eventual suppression of philosophy and science in the Islamic world was not a deviation from its theological principles but a natural consequence of its structure.

Islam, as a system of governance, integrates law, morality, and religion into an indivisible whole. Unlike Christianity, whose theological emphasis allows for separation between the spiritual and the temporal (think render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s), Islam’s fusion of the sacred and the political has historically acted as a brake on intellectual and cultural flexibility. The assertion that "true Islam" is divorced from the later theological rigidity and fundamentalist leanings that stifled intellectual progress is itself a contradiction, for the legalistic framework of Islam inherently resists the pluralism and adaptability that Judeo-Christianity historically embraced.

This is not to attack Islam as a faith. Its spiritual tenets have guided and comforted billions over centuries and faith that allows for positive outcomes is always a good thing. But the Western left’s romanticized view of Islam as a civilizational equal to the Judeo-Christian and the western tradition it has as it’s basis—or worse, as its corrective—is an error rooted in cultural relativism and historical illiteracy. By conflating the contributions of individuals who flourished in Islamic societies with the qualities of Islam itself, this perspective misses the essential distinction between what occurred because of a tradition and what occurred despite it.