The Clash of Ignorance

by EDWARD W. 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 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.