Neither East nor West: going beyond the opposition
Contents
To describe the opposition between East and West, René Guénon wrote in 1930 that it was “at bottom identical to the one people so often like to establish between contemplation and action”.
He pushed his reflection further through questions that themselves induce elements of an answer: “Are these truly two contraries? Or would they not rather be two complementaries? Or would there not be, in reality, between one and the other a relation not of coordination but of subordination?” For a very long time, East and West were easily differentiated by their geographical location and by the values their respective societies carried within them. With globalisation, however, many Eastern countries became “Westernised” while the West, conversely, let itself be influenced by traditions from the East. Can one still, in the conditions proper to the twenty-first century, oppose East to West? Shaykh Khaled Bentounes and Faouzi Skali exchange views on what these notions may mean today.
Apparently, everything opposes East and West. The West can be associated with multiplicity and the East with unicity: the West has developed the mental, rationality, individuality and the society of having, whereas the East privileges the unity of being through stripping away and the return towards the way of spiritual realisation. Today, materialist society dominates the world and justifies its hegemony by the technical and material progress achieved for the benefit of man turned consumer with an endless appetite. Faced with this, what can the Eastern world bring, if not values that nourish man’s interiority, his relation with the sacred, so as to rebalance his life and give it meaning?
Where does the East begin?
But where exactly is the East? And where is the West? For Europeans at the beginning of the century, the East begins beyond Gibraltar. Tangier was the symbol of the East, with its smells and its colours. For the Muslims of the Middle East, Morocco is the extreme West; for others, the East began at Athens or Alexandria. Was Istanbul, the old Byzantium, not the capital of the Christian world of former times? The Greek philosophers nourished the East as much as the West. Nowadays, geographical location no longer necessarily corresponds to the symbolic considerations mentioned above. Thus, I have just returned from a journey to the Persian Gulf states and I discovered that these countries were in fact more “Westernised” than the region of France where I live. Yet these countries lie in the East, while their civilisation no longer has anything Eastern about it: it is the culture of consumer society. The people who live there think of nothing but earning money from morning to night.
In most Muslim countries, the islam that is transmitted is quite simply a cultural inheritance. It is no longer a matter of seeking and deepening the spiritual and universal way contained in this message. True Sufism, for that matter, is very little known, and it is finally thanks to certain Westerners, through their writings and their undertakings, that Muslims are rediscovering their own East. As for today’s West, it has little to do with the values of the Christian West of the past; and in reality it is within its own population that a genuine work of evangelisation would have to be accomplished.
The two faces of the same coin
In my view, East and West are only the two faces of the same coin. “To God belong the East and the West; whichever way you turn, the face of God is there. God is present everywhere and He knows!” (Qur’an II, 115). A coin consists of one face bearing the effigy of the king or nation that issued it, while the other indicates the figure or the value. But this coin only has value in relation to the sovereignty of the country or authority that stands guarantor for it. The East is also the symbol of sunrise, the West being the symbol of sunset. These two parts make only one, like mirrors in which reality is reflected. If we live in unity, we find that East and West are to be found in each of us. We are in fact all attached culturally to a West or an East by the destiny of our birth. We are all someone’s west and someone else’s east. What we are seeking is the unity of ourselves; so we set out in quest of a way that can lead us to it.
This quest gives meaning to our life and awakens us to values hitherto unknown to us. It reveals to us the existence of a way of fraternity, between men and women of different cultures, colours and tongues, capable of reuniting and reconciling the two faces of ourselves: the material and the spiritual, having and being. Little by little, we reconcile these two parts of ourselves. The ultimate Reality takes us by surprise; it appears now in one way, now in another, and plunges us into situations that are so many mirrors for ourselves, made to enlighten us. God shows His signs where He wills and when He wills, and this through encounters and in often unexpected forms. The path is not limited to such and such a tariqa (way), to such practices, to such a ritual, to such a shaykh, still less to a nation or a country, for they become the trap of our own world of illusion, in which we shut ourselves up and which cuts us off forever from that source of wisdom and teaching that comes to us from everywhere.
The middle way
The tasawwuf is the way of all those who seek God humbly, with sincerity, through a personal and resolute approach, trusting in divine mercy, that invisible hand that guides the destiny of every being. “We have made of you a community set apart from the extremes, so that you may be witnesses over mankind and the Prophet a witness over you” (Qur’an II, 143). The tasawwuf is precisely this middle way: it is the path of the permanent quest for the true, beyond East and West; it is also the fruit of the two, which are but one in the heart of the serene servant.
