Thank you very much. Let me begin by drawing a distinction in the remarks that follow. I would like to talk about multi-culturalism from a slightly different perspective then the way we’ve been talking about it in the morning session. When I speak about culture in what follows I am trying to think about the highest form of inquarary that group of people or any other kind of body can have. I am trying to think in terms of what coacher in its fullest form is so I don’t mean simply different groups of people living together. Because I look at it from that perspective I do think that we have to talk about multi-culturalism, it is not possible to have something such as homeo culturalism, one culture that fits all. In order to get it at the roots of what makes us a particular kind of people, Turks, French, Germans, Americans may be people who identified by religious tradition then we have to think in these in terms of plurality. Just very quickly think for a moment how we moved world that could be called mono-cultural to a world that is multi-cultural and since I know best the Western tradition or Western culture I’ll speak from that perspective and you who come from a different culture will have to make the translation for me. If you think of the West and especially of Western Europe then the first break with mono-culturalism would have to be the renaissance. All of a sudden books that people have heard about but have never red came into being either because they came out what used to be called Byzantium or they came into Italy and France from the world of Muslim Spain. Books that have been known to be Greek books have been translated into Arabic and from Arabic into Hebrew and from Hebrew into Latin and were then brought into Western Europe. The Renaissance is the first break. I think the second break appears somewhere in the 17th and the 18th centuries and that is just for lack of being able to be precise and few minutes harvest enlightened and what I am thinking about is all of the interest that the enlightenment philosophers Montesque, Didero, Russeau and herds of others all of a sudden took in the East. They were interested above all in Islam as it manifested itself to accounts by travelers and by missionaries. So it was either a very romantic view of Islam or very predigest view of Islam and of course there was the political background looking at what was going on here in Turkey or in the greater Ottoman Empire at oriental despotism and all of its problems. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
And then there is another movement that is very interesting in the 19th century what is now known, as orientalism became a big movement and it was especially prominent in middle 19th century Germany. I am thinking of authors especially like Nitche but also Nitche took some of his directions from Goethe and there are number of other authors that you can point to but all of a sudden the East, the Orient entirely different way of looking at learning and entirely different way of what it means to be a human being came under horizon so from all these different ways of thinking about things Europeans began to see that the world was much more complex. Usually it was an unfavorable contrast of European culture with oriental culture and one of the reason why the Ottoman Empire came in for such terrible caritcatures was that by looking in a critical way at oriental despotism and criticizing what went on under the caliph one could say a great deal about what was going on under the kings of France and yet not be executed for saying it as long as you could point at somebody else and let the mirror reflect what you were saying you had a political scape.
And then the last point that I would think about in this period of time is somewhere in the 1950’s about half a century ago or more again Westerners began to look around and now was looking much more to North Africa, Latin America even to the Orient itself Japan and China, Indochina and trying to understand what they had to say about the important questions of human life. For reasons that we can’t go into detail somehow this looking at other cultures led to an understanding that different people have different solutions to things and that all solutions are equal to a kind of relativism. It is rooted in a particular way of looking at history and comes from that as well as contributes to it but because of that relativism a backlash occurred and the backlash is instead of having many cultures, multi culturalism let’s just have one understanding, there is only one correct way and everybody else is wrong. It would not surprise you if I tell you that once again those people in the West who adopted this attitude and it turned into very much a reaction to attempts to look at other cultures and understand other cultures sympathetically. You can find this alive and well today in any number of instances in the US where people who are attempting to understand Latin American literature, African literature, Indian literature are scuffed at because they don’t understand that the high culture is the Anglo-Saxon or Western or perhaps Greek Christian literature.
What is fascinating in all of this for me is I look at it is that if you try to see people who attempted to be multi culturalist in the best possible sense going from their culture to another culture and trying to understand both of them at their highest level, you’d have to look at people from the Middle East. The person who comes to mind most readily for me is Mohammed Iqbal. Mohammed Iqbal in early 20th century tried to understand what Western philosophy especially German philosophy was all about and made a very good presentation of that philosophy trying to show what light it might shed on his own attempt to explain Islam to fellow Muslims, Southern India or what later became Pakistan. There are a couple of people a handful of people who tried to do this sort of thing, two of them I think are worth mentioning but that can come up in question and answers if you want. One is Louis Morcinion, this famous Frenchman who became preoccupied with Islam and tried to go from his deep catholic faith to deeper understanding of Islamic mysticism and did a marvelous job in the process of introducing people to it. Another man is Paul Claus who is famed among Arabists for his ability to understand all different versions of the Arabic language and not only to understand them but also to use Arabic as a native speaker. One of the images that comes across is Paul Claus standing up before group of native Arab speakers and delivering a flawless address in Arabic without notes, rare kind of person who is able to walk that divide. Today there are a lot of scholars who try to do that but I don’t think anybody comes close to those two pillars.
Just to try to keep this very short and make the panel move along let me conclude by pointing to what might be a new possibility. The problem that we have today is how people like myself in the West can understand people in the Middle East and elsewhere but let’s especially talk in the Middle East and how people from the Middle East especially Muslims but also Arab Christians can understand people in the West. The problem is one of both people coming towards one another and trying to move from their own deep appreciation and familiarity with their culture through the culture of the other person and what I am worried about as I look around and see what’s happening today is that the whole issue of interests that are much more intent upon political goals or economic goals keeping us from this cultural exchange. That’s a threat but I would close with the following hopeful idea. Now for the first time ever this studied peoples are telling people how to study them. Let me just give you one example, if there is a people in this world who is misunderstood, who has been downtrodden, who has even been denied its right to exist as a people, it is the Palestinians. The Palestinians are now depicted especially in the US and I think in Europe also as terrorists, people who engage in suicide missions. A film was made recently by two Palestinians perhaps you’ve seen it here called Paradise Now. It is a portrait of two young men who go out on a mission to use themselves, as human bombs but don’t. And it tries to show what these individuals are as human beings and what prompts them undertake the mission as well as to aboard the mission, to call the mission off. All of the complex political and economic problems that surround them. The film did not receive the attention it deserves in Hollywood when the Academy Awards were handed out but it has received a lot of attention at universities across the US and now for once people are beginning to ask about what is going on with these people. I used that as an example, because it is an important issue but I think that here is a way that we can come to multi culturalism. Let’s try to see what the people whom we want to understand have to say about themselves and then we might understand them as well as understand ourselves. Thank you.
Questions – Answers Question: Sayın Schaumann namus cinayetlerinden bahsetti. Sonuçta tüm demokrasilerde olduğu gibi, bizim ülkemizde de cinayet adli bir suçtur. Namus cinayetlerinin özellikle Almanya’da Türk toplumu üzerinde derin ve bir kısmı haksız kritiklere sebep olduğunu düşünüyorum. Sonuçta, bu bir cinayettir ve hukuk sisteminde suçtur. Bunun Türk toplumu üzerinde ve geneli üzerinde bu kadar acımasızca kritik edilmesini doğru buluyor musunuz?
Question: Öncelikle böyle bir organizasyon düzenlendiği için teşekkür ederim. Benim sorum biraz genel olacak. 2010 yılı için İstanbul kültür başkenti seçildi. Bundan sonrası için eğer dünya genelinde kültürel platform oluşturulduğunda ve dünyayı kapsayan ortak bir fikir platformu oluşursa Türkiye buna öncülük edebilir mi veya öncülük edilecek bir kuruluş veya bir ülke varsa bu hangi ülke olabilir? İkinci sorum, dünya günden güne küçüldüğü için bir başkente ihtiyaç varsa ve ileriki yıllarda veya ileriki yüzyıllarda kültürel anlamda İstanbul buna başkentlik edebilir mi?
Prof. Dr. Charles Butterworth: I think the only remark that was addressed to what I said is this general question about Istanbul in 2010 as the capital of the world, I would prefer to see a rotating capitals if we are going to do that in other words I don’t think it is a very good idea but if it were to come about then it should be an honor that goes to many different countries.
