The Clash of Ignorance (1)\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/p>
\n<\/p>
\r\n\n\t <\/p>\n <\/td>\n \n | \n \n\t\tPrinted from http:\/\/www.thenation.com \n\n\n\n FEATURE STORY<\/span>\n\n | October 22, 2001\n\n<\/b><\/p>\n\nThe Clash of Ignorance\n\n \nby EDWARD W. SAID\n<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n \n Samuel Huntington's article \"The Clash of Civilizations?\" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs<\/i>, where it immediately attracted a \nsurprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was \nintended to supply Americans with an original thesis about \"a new \nphase\" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's \nterms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He \nvery clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, \ntheorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his \"end of history\" ideas, as \nwell as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, \ntribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had \nunderstood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to \nannounce the \"crucial, indeed a central, aspect\" of what \"global \npolitics is likely to be in the coming years.\" Unhesitatingly he \npressed on:\n<\/p>\n \n \n\"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental \nsource of conflict in this new world will not be primarily \nideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among \nhumankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. \nNation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, \nbut the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between \nnations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of \ncivilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between \ncivilizations will be the battle lines of the future.\"\n<\/p>\n \n \nMost of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion \nof something Huntington called \"civilization identity\" and \"the \ninteractions among seven or eight [sic<\/i>] major civilizations,\" \nof which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets \nthe lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of \nthought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran \nOrientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in \nits title, \"The Roots of Muslim Rage.\" In both articles, the \npersonification of enormous entities called \"the West\" and \"Islam\" is \nrecklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity \nand culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto \nbash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist \ngetting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither \nHuntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics \nand plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major \ncontest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or \ninterpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility \nthat a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in \npresuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West \nis the West, and Islam Islam.\n<\/p>\n \n \nThe challenge for Western \npolicy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets \nstronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. More \ntroubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is \nto survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary \nattachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone \nelse were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has \nalready found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who \nwants to make \"civilizations\" and \"identities\" into what they are \nnot: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the \nmyriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and \nthat over centuries have made it possible for that history not only \nto contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one \nof exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible \nhistory is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously \ncompressed and constricted warfare that \"the clash of civilizations\" \nargues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title \nin 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety \nand many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse \nhimself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he \nwas. \n<\/p>\n \n \nThe basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold \nwar opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has \npersisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the \nterrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and \nhorrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass \nslaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into \nproof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it \nis--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band \nof crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries \nfrom former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime \nMinister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, \nand in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on \nabout the West's superiority, how \"we\" have Mozart and Michelangelo \nand they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for \nhis insult to \"Islam.\")\n<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n But why not instead see parallels, admittedly\r\nless spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers\r\nin cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones\r\nat Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British\r\nweekly The \nEconomist<\/i>, in its issue of September 22-28, can't resist reaching \nfor the vast generalization, praising Huntington extravagantly for \nhis \"cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute\" observations about \nIslam. \"Today,\" the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington \nwrites that \"the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the \nsuperiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of \ntheir power.'\" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 \nEgyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is \nthat?\n<\/p>\n \n \nUncountable are the editorials in every American and \nEuropean newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of \ngigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not \nto edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of \nthe \"West,\" and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used \ninappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and \nespecially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, \nwith scant attention to complex histories that defy such \nreductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the \nprocess overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us \nall into divided armed camps.\n<\/p>\n \n \nThis is the problem with unedifying \nlabels like Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse \nthe mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that \nwon't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I \nremember interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a \nWest Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started to \nattack my ideas as \"Western,\" as opposed to the strict Islamic ones \nhe espoused. \"Why are you wearing a suit and tie?\" was the first \nretort that came to mind. \"They're Western too.\" He sat down with an \nembarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when \ninformation on the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how \nthey had mastered all the technical details required to inflict their \nhomicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the \naircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between \n\"Western\" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, \"Islam's\" inability \nto be a part of \"modernity\"?\n<\/p>\n \n \nOne cannot easily do so, of \ncourse. How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and \ncultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions \nand sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a \nfortified boundary not only between \"West\" and \"Islam\" but also \nbetween past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very \nconcepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending \ndisagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in \nthe sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, \nto extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic \nvocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed \nentities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it \nis to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing \ncollective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we \nare dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable \nlives, \"ours\" as well as \"theirs.\"\n<\/p>\n \n \nIn a remarkable series \nof three articles published between January and March 1999 in \nDawn<\/i>, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, \nwriting for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of \nthe religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of \nIslam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with \nregulating personal behavior promotes \"an Islamic order reduced to a \npenal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual \nquests, and spiritual devotion.\" And this \"entails an absolute assertion \nof one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total \ndisregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases \ntradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds.\" As \na timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present \nthe rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad<\/i> and \nthen goes on to show that in the word's current confinement to \nindiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible \"to \nrecognize the Islamic--religion, society, culture, history or \npolitics--as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages.\" The \nmodern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are \"concerned with power, not \nwith the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes \nrather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and \naspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political \nagenda.\" What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and \nzealotry occur in the \"Jewish\" and \"Christian\" universes of \ndiscourse.\n<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his\r\nreaders at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood\r\nthat the distinctions between civilized London and \"the heart of darkness\"\r\nquickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European\r\ncivilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices\r\nwithout preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent<\/i> (1907), who described \nterrorism's affinity for abstractions like \"pure science\" (and by \nextension for \"Islam\" or \"the West\"), as well as the terrorist's \nultimate moral degradation.\n<\/p>\n \n \nFor there are closer ties \nbetween apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like \nto believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across \ncarefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often \nterrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and \nskepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with \nsuitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face \nnow. Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, \ngood versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of \nHuntington's alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from \nwhich official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after \nthe September 11 attacks. There's since been a noticeable \nde-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount \nof hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts \ndirected against Arabs, Muslims and Indians all over the country, the \nparadigm stays on.\n<\/p>\n \n \nOne further reason for its persistence \nis the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United \nStates. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, \nSpain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam \nis no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what \nis so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective \nculture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which \nbegan in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian \nhistorian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and \nCharlemagne <\/i>(1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity \nof the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and \ngave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany \nand Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to \nresume defense of the \"West\" against its historical-cultural enemies. \nWhat Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line \nof defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, \nsociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed \nitself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is \ninside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to \nconcede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his \nInferno<\/i>.\n<\/p>\n \n \nThen there is the persisting legacy of \nmonotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly \ncalled them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a \nsuccessor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills \nand ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or \ndemystification of the many-sided contest among these three \nfollowers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified \ncamp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern \nconvergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what \nhas been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, \nthen, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and \njihads<\/i>, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often \nsublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is \"very \nreassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the \nford, between the deep waters of tradition and \nmodernity.\"\n<\/p>\n \n \nBut we are all swimming in those waters, \nWesterners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are \npart of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with \nbarriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think \nin terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics \nof reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and \ninjustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may \ngive momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed \nanalysis. \"The Clash of Civilizations\" thesis is a gimmick like \"The \nWar of the Worlds,\" better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than \nfor critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our \ntime.\n<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n <\/p>\n\n\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/www.thenation.com","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"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.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2001\/10\/edward_said.html","filesize":"15.8 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2001\/10\/12420.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]} |