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By
Professor Edward W. Said
However reassuring they may be,
monoliths help us understand nothing.
Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of
Civilizations" appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "the new phase"
in world politics after the end of the Cold War, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly
had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis
Fukuyama and his end-of-history ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism, and the dissipation of the
state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central aspect" of
what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly
he pressed on:
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great
divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world
affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between
nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate world politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be
the battle lines of the future." (p. 22)
Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of
something Huntington called "civilization identity," and "the interactions
among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his
attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990
article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colours
are manifest in the title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the
personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and
culture existed in a cartoon-like world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper
hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilisation,
or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the
definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is
involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilisation. No, the
West is the West, and Islam Islam. The challenge for Western policy-makers,
says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off
all the others, Islam in particular.
More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is to
survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and
hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else was scurrying around looking for the answers which he has already found. In fact,
Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and
"identities" into what they are not, shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and counter-currents that animate
human history, and over centuries have made it possible for that history not
only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of
exchange, cross-fertilisation, and sharing. This far less visible history is
ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted
warfare that "the clash of civilization" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996, he tried to give his argument
a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however,
was to confuse himself, demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was. The basic paradigm of West vs the rest (the Cold War
opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted,
often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of
11 September.
The carefully planned mass slaughter and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide bombing by a small group of deranged militants has been
turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it
is, the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes, international luminaries from former
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's
case have used Huntington to rant on about the West's superiority, how
"we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (He has since made a
half-hearted apology for his insult to "Islam.")
But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama Bin Laden and his followers in cults like the
Branch Davidians or the disciples of Reverend Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo. Even the normally sober British weekly The
Economist, in its issue of 22-28 September, can't resist reaching for the vast generalisation and praises Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and
sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's
billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power'." Did he canvas 100
Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians, 50 Bosnians? Even if he did, what
sort of sample is that?
Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and
magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each
use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do.
Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants
in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers,
destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the
process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into
divided armed camps.
This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: they mislead and confuse the mind which is trying to make sense of a disorderly
reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I
remember interrupting a man who had risen from the audience after a lecture
I had given at a West Bank University in 1994 and had started to attack my
ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why
are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first simpleminded retort that came
to mind; "they're Western too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his
face, but I recalled the incident when information on the 11 September terrorists started to come in, how they had mastered all the technical
details required to do their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's"
inability to be a part of "modernity."
One cannot easily do so of course, but how finally inadequate are the labels, generalisations, cultural assertions. At some level, for instance,
primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the
lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts
of identity and nationality about which there is literally unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the
sand, to undertake Crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilist vocabulary, to end
nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for
the purposes of mobilising collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the
interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."
In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March
1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Samuel Huntington,
writing for a Muslim audience, analysed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by
absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal
behaviour promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its
humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And
this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualised, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts
religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to
present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad, and then goes on to show that, in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate
war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize... Islamic religion, society, culture, history or politics as lived and experienced by
Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people for
political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings
and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time bound agenda." What has
made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of discourse.
It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the 19th century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions
between civilised London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme
situations, and that the heights of European civilisation could instantaneously reverse into the most barbarous practices without
preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also in The Secret Agent (1907)
who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and
by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate
moral degradation.
For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilisations than most
of us would like to believe, and as both Freud and Nietzsche showed, the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with
often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and scepticism
about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now,
and hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a Crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's
opposition between Islam and the West from which in the first days official
discourse drew its vocabulary. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation
in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts, directed against Arabs,
Muslims and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.
One further reason for its persistence is the disturbing presence of Muslims
all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France,
Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West, but at its centre. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the
collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests that began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian
historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne
(1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean,
destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis, and gave rise to a new civilisation
dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission,
he seems to be saying, is to resume defence of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne leaves out, alas, is that in the
creation of this new line of defence the West drew on the humanism, science,
philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam
is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohamed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.
Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamanic religions as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and
Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before: for Muslims,
Islam fulfils and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or
demystification of the many-sided contest between these three
followers -- not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp -- of
the most jealous of all Gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on
Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically
irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of
Crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad,
"is very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle...
between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."
But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others
alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plough or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it
is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of
justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary
satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. The "clash of
civilizations" thesis is a gimmick, like "The War of the Worlds," better for
reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.
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