Islam Between East and West is a work of philosophical and religious argument by Alija Izetbegović, a lawyer from Sarajevo, written from within the experience of a Muslim community that had lived in the Balkans for more than five centuries. The book is not theology; it studies Islam’s place in the spectrum of world views from the outside, as one of three integral ways of understanding existence—religious, materialistic, and Islamic. Its two halves move from a long polemic against atheism and materialism to a constructive account of Islam as the synthesis those opposites cannot reach on their own.
“There are moral atheists, but there is no moral atheism.”
The Core Argument
Izetbegović’s central claim is that the modern world is split between two one-sided answers to the same question. On one side stands what he calls Christianization: Christianity as a cultural and religious phenomenon alienated from revelation, the generic idea behind creation, culture, art, and morality, aspiring to spiritualize history. On the other stands atheization: materialistic, practically expressed as socialism, covering evolution, civilization, politics, and utopia, addressing man’s physical nature. Modern man is divided between spirit and matter, and each half, pursued to its conclusion, deforms him. Atheism reduces man to a drilled, depersonalized social member; Christian man, spiritualized but bodiless, turns rebellion into an aesthetic but futile act.
The book’s thesis is that evolution, civilization, science, and utopia run parallel to atheism, while creation, culture, the arts, and morals run parallel to religion. Evolution could only produce a perfected animal; socialism deals with the social animal, not with man. Man is primarily spiritual and originates only by divine creation, so atheism negates man and thereby refutes humanism, freedom, and human rights. Every culture is theistic; every civilization atheistic. Socialism is inverse Christianity: instead of religion, science; instead of individuality, society; instead of love, violence; instead of the city of God, the city of the sun. The second half of the book answers whether this contradiction can be overcome, and answers yes—in Islam, the principle of the universe’s organization, existing before man, which unites religion and social order as man unites spirit and body.
Inside the Book
The Preface and the Shape of the Argument
The book opens with a preface by Hasan Karachi framing it as a multidisciplinary study of the two ideologies that have shaped the modern centuries: Christianization and atheization. Christianity, understood here as a cultural-religious phenomenon alienated from revelation, supplies the generic idea behind creation, culture, art, and morality, and aspires to spiritualize history. Atheization, materialistic and expressed practically as socialism, covers the evolutionistic, civilizational, political, and utopian elements that address man’s physical nature. Modern man is thus divided between spirit and matter, and Islam’s teaching of synthesis is offered as the only model for coping with that division. Both systems show the same symptoms—family disintegration, crime, prostitution, neuroses. Atheism reduces man to a drilled, depersonalized social member; Christian man, spiritualized but bodiless, turns rebellion into an aesthetic but futile act. The author detects fatigue in both the materialistic and the religious mind, treats “Islamic fever” as a historical fact, and concludes that submission to God is the only dignified human choice.
The Author’s Note and the Plan of the Book
Izetbegović then states plainly that this is not theology; it studies Islam’s place in the spectrum of ideas from without. The first part, PREMISES, polemicizes against atheism and materialism across six chapters, arguing that evolution, civilization, science, and utopia parallel atheism, while creation, culture, the arts, and morals parallel religion. Evolution could only produce a perfected animal; socialism deals with the social animal, not man. Man is primarily spiritual, originating only by divine creation, and atheism therefore negates man and refutes humanism, freedom, and human rights. Every culture is theistic; every civilization atheistic. Socialism is inverse Christianity: instead of religion, science; instead of individuality, society; instead of love, violence; instead of civitas dei, civitas solis. The second part asks whether this contradiction can be overcome, and answers yes—in Islam, the principle of the universe’s organization existing before man, uniting religion and social order as man unites spirit and body. The book will parallel Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, analyze the five pillars with salah at the center, and end with “Submission to God.”
The Introduction by Dr. S. Balic
Dr. S. Balic introduces the author as a lawyer from Sarajevo, a South Slav whose people belonged to Islam for over five hundred years. In August 1983 Izetbegović and eleven Bosnian intellectuals were sentenced to fourteen years in jail by a Sarajevo court for “fundamentalist digressions.” Balic draws on the Vienna publication “Islam and West,” touching on the return to origins, Islam’s universal dimension, education, God as not merely “Lord of History,” Islam’s ways of coping in a secularized society, warnings against blind progress, the rejection of fatalism charges, Muhammad’s mi’raj as vertical direction, and ibn-Rushd on the accord between science and revelation. The author also wrote the Islamic Declaration. The academic apparatus remained unfinished because of his arrest, with incomplete citations marked “n.p.d.”
About the Theme
The modern world, the author writes, faces a sharp ideological encounter among three integral world views: religious, materialistic, and Islamic, reflecting conscience, nature, and man—manifesting as Christianity, materialism, and Islam. The first starts from spirit, the second from matter, the third from both at once. Islam is the unity of spirit and matter, highest in man. Dualism is closest to human feeling but not the highest philosophy; all great philosophies have been monistic. Life is dual, and the question is not whether we live two lives but whether we live so with understanding. Two lines of thinking run through history: Plato through Christian medieval thinkers, al-Ghazali, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Fichte, Cudworth, Kant, Hegel, Mach, and Bergson; against Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Gassendi, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Spencer, and Marx. Humanism and progress represent the practical extremes: religion does not lead to progress, science does not lead to humanism. Historical materialism opposes Christian personalism; creation opposes evolution; ideal opposes interest; freedom opposes uniformity; personality opposes society. Religion and materialism are two elementary views, like the two seas “which cannot prevail one over another.” Neither can be rationally proven. Christianity offers only inner salvation, socialism only external salvation. Modern utopias in China, Korea, and Vietnam took over traditional moral norms, especially modesty and respect for elders, and appeals for humanism, justice, equality, freedom, and human rights are of religious origin. Dangers lie in “obviousnesses.” Socialism and freedom are not compatible. Islam means first to understand and admit the primeval dualism of the world, then to overcome it; “Islamic” terms the basic principle, a method rather than a ready-made solution—synthesis of opposite principles. Salah connects ablution and prayer. Europe could not find a middle way, though England tried.
Creation, Evolution, and the Human–Animal Distinction
The argument turns to abstention from speech as a form of fasting, such as the Christian “vow of silence,” and to Qur’an 6:38, which calls animals “communities like you.” Primitive hunters and their families submitted to taboos, fastings, prayers, dances, dreams, and signs before hunting, while women at home observed taboos whose breach could endanger the expedition. Primitive men painted animals before hunting; Hubert and Mauss describe initiation ceremonies in three phases: purification, initiation, acceptance. Animals act “logically,” but primitive man was also a creator of cults, myths, superstitions, dances, and idols—a difference in essence, not developmental stage. H. G. Wells is quoted on Neolithic human sacrifice at seed-time, usually of a chosen youth treated with deference and worship; Aztec civilization offered thousands of victims yearly, hearts torn out dominating public life; Flaubert’s Salammbo describes Carthaginians throwing children into Moloch’s mouth for rain. Sacrifice exists in all religions, is absurd and unexplained, and marks the border between the zoological and human eras: interest is zoological, sacrifice human. Wells also notes paleolithic and neolithic self-mangling, unlike a fox biting off its leg—reason versus irrationality. This is “the primitive man’s complex,” source of religion, poetry, and art.
Atkinson’s The First Law reports universal prohibitions and purification; taboos were originally ethical prohibitions. Man is a stranger in nature, feeling spiritual, cosmic fear—Heidegger’s “eternal and timeless determinant of human existence.” Concepts of impurity, sublimity, damnation, and holiness contradict the known world and evidence another origin. Plutarch observed cities without walls, kings, literature, or theaters, but never without worship; Bergson wrote no human society has existed without religion. Henri Simle concluded Neanderthal man’s psychological life differed little from modern man’s, suffering “metaphysical giddiness.” Nietzsche’s superman, inspired by Darwin, is a creature without inner life; Voznesensky said future computers could do everything except be religious and write poetry. Ape “art”
Art Repays Its Debt to Religion
Architecture, the most functional and least spiritual of the arts, still proves its sacred character through the temple. From ancient India and Cambodia to Islamic mosques and pre-Columbian American temples, the impulse holds. Modern architects meet the same challenge: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom Synagogue, Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp and his Dominican monastery at Evre, Mies van der Rohe’s chapel at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Aalto’s Lutheran church in Finland, Philip Johnson’s Presbyterian church and synagogue, Niemeyer’s Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Brazil, and works by Torroja and Candela. Painting, sculpture, and music repay the debt too—Renaissance art is almost wholly religious, Michelangelo’s work is the Gospel in paint and stone, and Handel’s oratorios stand beside Debussy, Stravinsky, Chagall, Messiaen, Rembrandt, and Yves Klein. Art is surrational and sacral: a painting is a ritual on canvas, a symphony a tonal ritual. Its purpose is not the creation of beauty—the opposite of beauty is falsehood—but an authentic search for truth and transcendency. Against this stands state atheism, which expands education while art recedes: Soviet socialist realism, the 1932 party resolution, the Union of Soviet Writers, Stalin’s purges, Zhdanovism as an inverse Inquisition, and the suffering of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Being sacral, art opposes a materialistic universe without God.
Intention and Deed
Alyosha Karamazov is wonderful, almost perfect; his brother Misha is fully human, and despite his passions and sins no one can say with certainty which stands nearer to God’s grace. Two questions follow: how many things we did without really wanting to, and how many we intended but never did. From this come two worlds—the heart and nature. An unfulfilled desire becomes complete reality in the world of the heart; an accidental deed happens fully in the world of nature and not at all within. This contact between desire and deed mirrors the primeval opposition between man and the world, and it recurs in ethics, art, and religion. Intention, artistic desire, and piety belong inwardly together, standing in the same relation to their worldly projections: behavior, a work of art, a ritual. The soul holds the experience; the world holds the happening. Hence the question whether deeds are judged by intentions or consequences—the first the message of every religion, the second the motto of every ideology or revolution, one negating the world, the other negating man. Science and materialism question intention’s authenticity, finding it a consequence rather than a cause, its source beyond consciousness in general determinism. Religion holds that every man has an inner center, the soul, where an action is adopted, verified, or inwardly fulfilled; it may then be done or not, but inwardly it has been done once and forever. Without this consultation with himself, a man’s action is a mechanical act, a coincidence in an outer and transient world. A man is not what he does but what he wants, what he earnestly desires; a writer who penetrates his hero’s hidden motives writes literature, otherwise a chronicle. Arnold Geulincx held that our true being consists only of cognition and will, that deeds lie almost beyond our power and completely in God’s hands, so morality rests not in the honest act but only in the honest intention. Hume said much the same: an action has no moral merit in itself, and since we cannot look directly inside a man, we attend to actions, which remain only signs of inner will. An intended act is already performed in eternity; its outward performance bears an earthly, conditional, accidental, even meaningless aspect. Intention is free; performance is subject to limitations, laws, and conditions. Intention is completely ours; performance has something alien and casual in it. A man is good if he wants to be good as he understands it, though that good may seem bad to another; he is evil if he wants to do evil, even if others call it good. Within that inward, spiritual relationship every man is completely alone and equally free—the meaning of Sartre’s claim that every man is absolutely responsible, that there are neither innocent victims nor innocent convicts in hell.
Drill and Upbringing
The most striking stories in old books concern conversion and moral revival: worst sinners and tyrants turned overnight into humble martyrs and defenders of justice. It is always spontaneous—no process of reforming or influencing, but a move in the depths of the soul, an experience with a completely inward energy that by its own force changes a man. Its essence is freedom and creativity. Good and evil lie within man; there are no drills, laws, or outside influences by which a man can be improved—only his behavior can be changed. Virtue and sin are not products like sugar and vitriol, as Taine and Zola held. In Resurrection, Tolstoy shows that the reeducation of prisoners means manipulating them, resulting only in deprivation. Revival and conversion are spontaneous, the soul being moved; from the religious point of view every outside influence to remove evil is fruitless, which is the correct meaning of Christian and Buddhist nonresistance to evil. Drill has no influence on moral attitude: a soldier can be drilled tough, skillful, strong, but not honest, dignified, enthusiastic, brave—those are spiritual qualities. Belief cannot be imposed by decree, terror, pressure, or force. Pedagogues can give examples of children resisting persistent guidance and developing interest in the opposite behavior, owing to the human quality of man; man cannot be drilled like an animal. The inefficiency of drill and the uncertainty of education are palpable proof that man is an animal endowed with a soul—that is, with freedom. Every true upbringing is essentially self-upbringing and a negation of drill; its aim is not to change a man directly, which is strictly impossible, but to incite an inner stream of experiences and cause an inner decision for good by example, advice, or sight. Beyond that, man cannot be changed; only his behavior may be, and that could be feigned or temporary. Behavior not engaging our deepest will is not upbringing but drill. Upbringing includes our participation and effort; its result is always different and cannot be foreseen. Individualists believe in man’s conversion and inner renewal; positivists believe in changing his behavior.
Morality Without God
Morality without God cannot be tested in practice, since no completely irreligious community has ever existed in history. A society raised in total ignorance of religion would behave drastically differently from anything known today, and many nonreligious people would be shocked by the laws of a truly atheistic society. There are moral atheists, but there is no moral atheism. The morality of nonreligious people still draws from an earlier, forgotten religion radiating through family, literature, film, architecture, and language—warmth at night from a sun that has set, a room still warm though the hearth fire is out. Morality is past religion as coal is the sum of past centuries. To produce a pure atheistic generation would require complete isolation: no Bible, Qur’an, or religious texts; no art, symphonies, or drama from Sophocles to Beckett; no architecture or literature. Even one of Hamlet’s monologues, Michelangelo’s frescoes, or the legal principle nullum crimen could evoke a different universe. Science poses no such danger.
The Two Ways and the Turn Toward the World
Christianity, the argument runs, demands an undivided orientation toward the spirit. Matthew’s warning that no man can serve two masters, God and mammon, is extended by Tolstoy: one cannot tend the soul and worldly goods at once, and riches, rank, and reputation do not free a man but imprison him in a cell of sins, passions, and superstitions. Church authorities long noted the gulf between the spirit of the Old and New Testaments. Some hold that the Marcionian gospel behind Saint Mark taught that Jesus abolished the Law of Moses, setting the God of love who made the invisible world against Jehova, God of justice and savior of the visible one; Couchoud finds in it asceticism, nonviolence, and nonresistance to evil. Pure religion therefore abandons the perfecting of the outer world and judges the belief that external organization improves man as self-deception. It answers how to live within oneself, not how to live in the world—a temple on a mountaintop, a shelter from a world governed by Lucifer. Its resemblance to socialist principles is only apparent: religion speaks of a man and his soul, revolution of society; religion calls for giving, revolution for taking. The road is too hard for most, and the Qur’anic line that God lays on no soul a burden greater than it can bear is aimed at Christianity. All pure religions know two ways—Buddhism’s great road for the elite and small road for the common, Christianity’s priesthood and orders against lay life, celibacy against marriage, celibacy the only true solution and marriage an obvious compromise. Being against violence, religion could not directly better man’s social position, since social change comes through force; hence the historically justified but morally unjustified charge that it serves the ruling class. Christianity is not a practice and must not be judged as one; the Qur’an calls it the announcement of the deepest truths of existence. “Love thy neighbor,” “Love thine enemies,” “Resist not evil” defy practical logic and point to another world: “My kingdom is not of this world.” The Gospels first brought mankind to full consciousness of man’s value, a qualitative rather than historical progress, and Western civilization bears the seal of those teachings. Religion can touch the world only by becoming worldly—and Islam is Christianity reoriented toward the world.
From the Cave of Hira’ to Medinah
Islam carries a Judaic component and many non-Judaic elements. Hegel saw it as the direct continuation of Judaism; Spengler called the Book of Job an Islamic writing; Eliade placed Muhammad at the transition between the second and last periods of mankind’s spiritual development, history being a process of general secularization. Setting Eliade’s one-dimensionality aside, Islam and Muhammad occupy an inevitable middle position. Jesus avoided Jerusalem, a city of Pharisees and shallow believers; socialism addresses city dwellers, not villagers; Muhammad goes to the cave of Hira’ but each time returns to the godless city of Mekkah. What happened in Mekkah could not yet be called Islam; Islam culminated in Medinah. In the cave he was a hanif, an ascetic, a mystic; in Mekkah a herald of religious thought; in Medinah a herald of Islamic thought, the message crystallizing into the start and source of the entire Islamic social order. Had he not returned from the cave he would have remained a hanif; because he came back he became a preacher of Islam—the meeting of mysticism and reason, meditation and activity. Islam began as mysticism and ended as a state. Man and his soul is the relationship between Muhammad and Jesus; between the Scriptures and the soul lies a sameness of nature, each illuminating the other. Islam is the repetition of man, possessing its divine spark yet also a teaching of shadows and the prose of life. The Qur’an is realistic, almost antiheroic; without man to apply it, Islam is incomprehensible. Where Plato’s ideas and Christianity’s angels signify the timeless and immobile, Islam does not idealize that world—the angels’ bow to man taught by God to know the names of all things confirms the prevalence of life and drama over eternalized perfection.
Observation, Science, and the Mosque-School
The Qur’anic verses turn entirely toward nature, expressing complete acceptance of the world. In Islam matter is lent to noble things—the body in salah, the estate in zakah; the material world is not Satan’s kingdom, the body not the seat of sin. Even the world to come is painted in this-worldly colors, which Christians read as sensuality but which only shows matter is not inwardly alien to Islam. Verses such as “We made from water every living thing,” and the same water yielding differing tastes, provoke the intellect, stating a problem at the base of all chemistry. Muslims thus ended Christianity’s endless dispute over substance and turned to chemistry, from mystical philosophy to rational science. The command of observation is the activity by which man’s power over the world began; the West’s strength lies less in armies than in observation and the experimental method inherited from Bacon. Islam cannot be practiced at a primitive level: salah requires orientation in time and space, zakah requires accounting, Hajj requires travel—so the community must reach a minimal civilization. In the Euphrates valley Islam met a three-thousand-year-old astrology and transformed it into astronomy; the Baghdad school flourished, Khayyam’s calendar approached the Gregorian, the Toledo tables long underlay European astronomy, Al-Biruni hypothesized the earth’s rotation, Ibn-Baijah claimed elliptical orbits. Mosques and schools were built together, ordered by ‘Umar ibn-al-Khattab and repeated by Haroun al-Rashid, producing the mosque-school, the material equivalent of Islam’s postulate of the unity of religion and science, beginning with “Read, in the name of your Lord.” Al-Azhar, founded in 972, became theological only in decadence, its 1961 reform restoring medical and technological faculties.
The Duality of Man
Islam’s realism accepts human nature, rejecting asceticism and making us not angels but human, using limited asceticism only for balance. It pleads for natural life, richness, and power over nature, imposing no ideal of poverty: “There is no monasticism in Islam.” Life has two coordinates—the natural desire for happiness and power, and moral perfection. The Gospels condemn instincts; the Qur’an brings them back with understanding. Freud proved sexuality can only be repressed, causing more trouble; Islam’s controlled sexual life suits man better. The Qur’an rarely addresses the individual, more often the people; man as social member is a child of this world, only as personality an inhabitant of heaven. Emphasizing justice rather than evangelic love, Islam wanted the education of Muslim as man and citizen to be identical, justice being both personal and social. Christian idealism leads to disappointment; Western neuroses partly stem from the conflict between Christian ideals and separate political models, letting Western man be Christian privately and Machiavellian publicly. Observers note harmony between man and society in the Muslim world despite poverty. Muhammad blamed extremes: “I am indignant with two things: the ignorant who is devout and the scholar who does not believe.” He ranked struggle against tyranny, ignorance, illness, misery, and dirtiness with moral virtues. Muslims are ordinary people, not retiring to caves, wanting physical as well as inner freedom. Man cannot live either according to Jesus or against him; Islam suits man by recognizing his duality—man is Islam’s most obvious argument.
Key Ideas
The book works through a set of paired concepts. The first is the primeval dualism of the world: spirit and matter are two substances, and while dualism is closest to human feeling, all great philosophies have been monistic. The question is not whether we live two lives but whether we live them with understanding. Islam, on this account, means first to understand and admit that dualism, then to overcome it—”Islamic” names a method rather than a ready-made solution, a synthesis of opposite principles.
The second is the distinction between culture and civilization. Culture lies outside time and history; it has rises and falls but no development, and art shows no accumulation of knowledge—paleolithic art is more impressive than neolithic, and poetry preceded prose. Civilization, by contrast, accumulates. The book reads the record of the prosperous societies—rising crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, mental illness, environmental damage—not as accidents but as expressions of civilization’s nature. Sweden leads Europe in income and literacy and also in suicides, drunkards, and mental patients; Slovenia records 25.8 suicides per 100,000 against Kosovo’s 3.4.
The third is the moral weight of intention. Two logics stand opposed: deeds judged by intentions, which is the message of every religion, and deeds judged by consequences, which is the motto of every ideology or revolution. The first negates the world, the second negates man. A man is not what he does but what he earnestly wants; an intended act is already performed in eternity, while its outward performance carries something alien and casual. From this follows the book’s treatment of crime and punishment: the trial is a drama about freedom and responsibility, while the doctrine of social defense—”neutralizing” the delinquent, “purging” society of unwanted elements—is a mechanical procedure whose logic runs from Darwin rather than from the prologue in heaven.
The fourth is the formula that there are moral atheists but no moral atheism. Morality without God cannot be tested in practice because no completely irreligious community has ever existed; the morality of nonreligious people still draws on an earlier, forgotten religion radiating through family, literature, film, architecture, and language, like warmth at night from a sun that has set. To produce a pure atheistic generation would require total isolation from the Bible, the Qur’an, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the legal principle nullum crimen—and even then, science poses no such danger, which is precisely why the Cultural Revolution had to prohibit Tolstoy and Beethoven.
Themes
Running beneath the argument is a reading of modernity as a crisis of balance. The book treats nihilism not as the negation of God but as protest against His absence, and so as an implicitly religious stance: Sartre’s “futile passion” and Camus’ absurd presume a search for purpose that ends in failure, and Camus reads as a disappointed believer. The pessimism of the modern theater—Ibsen, Beckett, Bergman, Pinter—arises in the richest regions, where comfort is the outward image and absurdity the inward one.
A second theme is the sacral character of art. Art presupposes another world; it is nostalgia or memory, a search for truth and transcendency rather than the production of beauty. A painting is a ritual on canvas, a symphony a tonal ritual, and architecture proves its sacred character by its temples, from Angkor to Ronchamp. This is why state atheism expands education while art recedes, and why socialist realism, Zhdanovism, and the persecution of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn appear as an inverse Inquisition.
A third is the contrast between drama and utopia. Drama deals with man; utopia deals with the world, and in utopia man’s inner world is reduced to a fictitious auxiliary point. Since people have no soul—the presumption of every utopia—there are no moral problems, only functions; good and evil become meaningless. Marx holds communism to be history’s final issue, while Hegel holds its ultimate meaning to be the triumph of the idea of freedom, which is drama. A classless society, in this reading, is Clausius’ law of entropy projected onto social life, whereas religion sees at the end not equilibrium but the last judgment.
Finally, the book presents Islam as Christianity reoriented toward the world. Jesus avoided Jerusalem; Muhammad went to the cave of Hira’ but each time returned to the godless city of Mekkah, and the message crystallized in Medinah, the start and source of the entire Islamic social order. Had he not returned he would have remained a hanif; because he came back he became a preacher of Islam—the meeting of mysticism and reason, meditation and activity. Islam started as mysticism and ended as a state. It rejects monasticism, brings natural desire back with understanding rather than condemnation, emphasizes justice rather than evangelic love, and treats the education of the Muslim as man and citizen as a single task. Its realism, the book argues, is why the Qur’an rarely addresses the individual and more often the people: man as a social member is a child of this world, and only as a personality an inhabitant of heaven.
Why It Matters
The book ends where its author said it would, with submission to God. Its closing movement gathers the threads—intention, punishment, the soul that everyone implicitly believes in even when denying it—into the claim that a society which abandons the inner center abandons the person, and that the choice before modern man is between a dignified submission and a drift into either a drilled collective or a bodiless spirituality. The author’s own circumstances give the argument its weight: in August 1983 he and eleven other Bosnian intellectuals were sentenced to fourteen years in jail by a Sarajevo court for “fundamentalist digressions,” and the book’s academic apparatus remained unfinished because of his arrest. What survives is a study written from outside theology but inside conviction, asking whether the split between East and West can be healed in a principle older than either.
