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.