The Clash of Ignorance


by Edward Said

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the
Summer 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 "a 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 global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be
the battle lines of the future."

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 colors
are manifest in its 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 cartoonlike 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 civilization,
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 civilization. No, the
West is the West, and Islam is 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
were scurrying around looking for the answers that 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 countercurrents that animate
human history, and that 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-fertilization and sharing. This far less
visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously
compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues
is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996,
Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many
more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate
what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

The basic paradigm of West versus 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
September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated
suicide attack and mass slaughter 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's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority,
how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since
made a halfhearted 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 the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the
Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The
Economist, in its issue of September 22-28, can't resist reaching for the
vast generalization, praising 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 and fifty 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, after a lecture I had given at a West Bank
university in 1994, rose from the audience and 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 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 September 11 terrorists
started to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required
to inflict 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. How finally inadequate are the labels,
generalizations and 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 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 nihilistic 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 purpose of mobilizing
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 Eqbal Ahmad,
writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed 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
behavior 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-contextualized, 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 the
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 political 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
nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions
between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in
extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could
instantaneously fall 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 civilizations than most
of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic
across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often
terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism
about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable,
practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now. Hence the
altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil,
freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition
between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its
vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks. 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 increased 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
center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the
collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests,
which 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 civilization
dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission,
he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its
historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the
creation of this new line of defense 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 Mohammed, 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 Abrahamic
religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and
Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims,
Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent
history or demystification of the many-sided contest among 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 of
the ford, 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 plow
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.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2001 MIFTAH & Edward Said

by the same author:
American Zionism - The Real Problem - 1
American Zionism - The Real Problem - 2
American Zionism - The Real Problem - 3
The Tragedy Deepens
American Elections: System or Farce?
One More Chance
Palestinians under Siege
Too Much Work
The Right of Return, At Last
                      More in 'Perspective' or 'Archive'
Copyright © 2001 Media Monitors Network. All rights reserved.

With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
[log in to unmask]
May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. Ameen


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