Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, all of us on the planet’s east coast, are the only people left on earth who continue to retain a sense of religion and faith in our daily lives. This attitude tends to make us somewhat other worldly in our response to the challenges we face and how we manage our affairs. A kindly maulana, our neighbour in the Gulshan-i-Jinnah apartments, in Islamabad whose weekly knock to invite me to join the tablighi get together I used to avoid on one or the other pretext, one day caught up with me and asked me the reason for not turning up in the pious assembly. I was afraid to respond and open my mouth for the fear of blasphemy law, but knowing the tablighi people to be of a kindly sort, I gathered my courage to submit that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), during the course of his mission, brought about a social revolution and devoted his energies to making his people acquire good manners, and be decent and just in their behaviour, but you people pay no attention to this. For instance I said you never check youngsters from vandalising the flower beds and spoiling the grassy lawn which the gardener has so meticulously tended. I pointed to the lights which were made a target of the cricket balls and the general state of disrepair in which the entire prospect of the housing complex had fallen so soon after its completion as a model residential facility. The maulana smiled and told me that I was absolutely right. It was a fact that this temporary life and its betterment was not their concern at all. Their concern was the life to come, the eternal life in the hereafter.

In two short sentences the maulana had summed up the quintessence of what distinguished the East from the West, the proverbial twain that shall never meet. The people of the West may they be Christians or Jews or whatever, have made this world and, their life on earth, this temporary abode, their main concern.

Its betterment, its improvement, its enrichment, its overall management is what they regard to be the purpose of their life and their duty on earth. The Hereafter they have left to the eternal care of the Lord Supreme. This attitude is the driving force of their civilisation, its advancement, power and success. On the other side, since we, the people of the East, are working for success in the unseen beyond, our failure here is also quite visibly and quantifiably apparent; our poverty, squalor, the mayhem and shabbiness of our lives being such a spectacle. There is no other explanation.

But this very clear demarcation between our two hemispheres escapes our notice and our perception of the West remains fuzzy and confused. We talk about the Christian West and the Christian civilisation as if they were Christians in the way we happen to be Muslims. We do not realise that religion has ceased to be their end all and be all as it is of our’s. The fact that they have arrived and we are still passengers on the train to the Beyond does not register in our calculations. I was appalled by the pathetic naivety of an Indian writer — Mr Tariq Ghazi who lives in Canada and is author of the book The Cartoons Cry he has recently published — who contemplates what he calls the convergence of the Islamic and Christian civilizations, that he fondly refers to as Abrahamic, as the solution to the present global turmoil, and thinks it is both “possible and practical” provided the two civilizations trace their origins’ back to Abraham and start the process of convergence from there.”

This kind of innocuous optimism results from a simplistic perception of the West as a Christian civilization and gets us a bleeding nose instead of the Biblical other cheek every time we stand up to present our case on that anomaly. Mr Ghazi forgets he will not find even one dozen believing Christians in the West who would agree to regard the Ummah as an Abrahamic grand nephew.

Ghazi has gathered a lot of relevant and significant material from various sources in his book to effectively debunk the freedom-of-expression ruse that the Danish newspaper and its conspiring supporters employed to defend the publication of the offensive cartoons together with a chronology of the development of the crisis to point out that unless protest turns nasty it gets no attention as was recently demonstrated by the success of the workers’ protest in France and the failure of the peaceful protests in stopping the invasion of Iraq. But the book loses its focus as the catalogue of facts and the progress of the argument drifts into a trackless discourse on what he understands by civilization, a term that he loosely uses for communist regimes calling them a “vanishing civilization” and as the Soviet- Slavic-Orthodox-Christian Civilization. He uses an interesting potpourri of ideas — from Shah Waliullah who stresses the moral principle, Paul Kennedy who relies on military power, Fukuyama on liberal democracy and Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun who agree on creativity, as the ingredients that sustain a civilization — to advance his Abrahamic convergence plan.

He says that the Abrahamic people, the Christian West and the world of Islam, were being watched by China, India and the Latins and, taking cue from Henry Kissinger’s advice, who has predicted the fall of America by the end of the century, China was already adjusting its policies towards taking America’s place as the emerging civilization. But Ghazi believes that both India and China, as followers of Western capitalism, lack the creativity necessary for such a role. Only the West and Islam can save the present civilization from certain demise. But for this they need a “mutually inclusive challenge” to “jump-start” their creativity. So far, he says, it appeared the West was moving in the right direction. If that is so, there’s nothing to worry. As Robert Browning said: God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!

The Cartoons Cry will be read with interest in Pakistan. The Dutch politician’s recent faux pas and if there is any build up to that of the kind the Danes aroused would add to its relevance.