ISLAMABAD, Aug 22: Western and Muslim scholars both need to “revisit Islam” to refute the talk of clash of civilizations and Islamophobia.

This view was presented by Prof Iftikhar H. Malik, who is member of Royal Historical Society and teaches international history in England, in a talk on “Britain, South Asia and Islam: Distant Neighbours or New Partners”, organized by the British Council and the Oxford University Press here on Monday.

Prof Malik said that the 7/7 events in London had a positive fallout in that it politicized the British Muslims who were now participating, in a democratic manner, in the debate thrown open by the events.

“There is unawareness and misunderstandings on all sides,” he said, disagreeing with the adversarial term “Islam and the West”.

“To me there is a lot of Islam in the West. I am aware of the political tensions but Britain is a criss-cross of ideological, cultural and ethnic identities,” the professor said.

Serious scholars were challenging such concepts that Islam lacked the capacity to modernize itself, that Islam was foreign to Europe or that Islam was an exceptional case in terms of relationship between religion and politics, he said.

Prof Malik recalled that Muslim scholars have long been proposing reconstruction of Islamic thought, and named Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Pakistan’s national poet Dr Mohammad Iqbal and Dr Fazlur Rehman from South Asia where the largest Muslim community lives.

“We don’t want Eurocentric (modernization). We (Muslims) could and should revisit Shariah. I know it is a very tough question,” he said pleading for taking Islam out of a static situation.

“Now there is a chance of European Islam which is tolerant and has no problem in posing questions,” he said, referring to the stirrings in the Muslim Diaspora in the face of Islamophobia that the 9/11 and 7/7 events had given rise to.

“They don’t want ‘official Islam’, to be His Master’s Voice. Public diplomacy is a major occupation among Muslims there,” he said. “May be in 5 to 10 years they have home-grown clerics of Sufi Islam strain.”

At the same time, serious scholars like Karen Armstrong have started asking the West “to revisit their knowledge of Islam”.

“There is a general sense that they (Western scholars) should reach out to the Islamic world,” he observed.

Prof Malik said that despite the Muslim-bashing in the British tabloid media and Prime Minister Tony Blair choosing to blame 7/7 on “evil ideology”, the British people were “not predominantly anti-Islam”. Opinion polls showed that 60 to 70 per cent of them thought the 7/7 attacks had nothing to do with Islam but with Blair’s foreign policy.

“Tony Blair denies that but it is not going to go away. He has to confront it,” he told the audience which included the Deputy British High Commissioner, Simon Butt.

Before Prof Malik began his talk, Mr Butt described the theme as “highly topical”. Islam and Muslims have become a subject of “more inquiry and debate” in Britain “not because of incidents of extremism but because of curiosity”, he said.