Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 35 October 14 - 20, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
The Clash of Ignorance BY
EDWARD W. SAID
Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index 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 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. Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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