A global majority
rebuffs Samuel P. Huntington's theory of an inevitable "clash of civilizations" along religious and cultural fault lines.
A poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries has found most believe political and economic interests - not religious and cultural diversity - are the underlying cause of violent conflict in the world today.
The Harvard academic's thesis struck a chord with Westerners looking for an easy explanation of global violence in the 21st century. The appeal of Huntington's dubious clash lies in its invocation of history, how it adds apparent depth to lazy pundritry analysis, and how it maps easily into simplistic, essentialist notions of the unfamiliar "other."
Economist Amartya Sen countered the civilizational approach, arguing that Huntington incorrectly assumes that people only identify with one civilizational system, that civilizations are monolithic, based mostly on religion, and that they will always clash. His theory rejects diversity, and is grossly confrontational. Edward Said called it
"the clash of ignorance."Akbar S. Ahmed, former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain, critiqued Huntington in the Spring 2003 issue of The Hedgehog Review:
Islam was singled out as a potential enemy civilization in an argument that was as deterministic as it was simplistic. Huntington's thesis dervied from established Orientalist thinking: "We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of cilizations," wrote Beranard Lewis in 1990. "Islam has bloody borders," concluded Huntington.
Bernard Lewis, Huntington's predecessor, originally coined the term. During a career spanning many decades of U.S. foreign policy blunders in the Middle East, Lewis fed (and, with a recent
inflammatory WSJ editorial on Iran, continues to feed) the neoconservative movement a wealth of revisionist history that conveniently rationalizes their expansionist endeavors.
Cheney commended Lewis as a scholar--"...in this new century, his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow academics, and the news media." His aggressive ideology for governing the Islamic world is enshrined by the "Lewis Doctrine," which consists of "
a Westernized polity, reconstituted and imposed from above...that is to become a bulwark of security for America and a model for the region." "Freedom" from without acts as a thin veil for securing strategic interests.
In a White House lunch honoring the historian,
Cheney beamed,
Bernard Lewis knows the greatness of Islamic civilization -- its tradition of learning and its towering cultural achievements. He refuses to condescend to the people that produced those achievements, and who have lately suffered such great torment at the hands of dictators.
But Lewis' selective reading of history
betrays his Orientalist ideological prejudice:
Lewis' presentation of his narrative of Middle Eastern decline without any context is a ploy. His objective is to whittle down world history, to reduce it to a primordial contest between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam. This is historiography in the crusading mode, one that purports to resume the Crusades-interrupted in the thirteenth century-and carry them to their unfinished conclusion, the triumph of the West or, conversely, the humiliation and defeat of Middle Eastern Islam. Once this framework has been established, with its exclusive focus on a failing Islamic civilization, it is quite easy to cast the narrative of this decay as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, which must then be explained in terms of specifically Islamic failures.
The conflict is not evidence of cultural superiority, the result of a fundamental clash of identity or ingrained values, but a byproduct of Western expansion and the quest for resources and capital:
Once Western Europe began to make the transition from a feudal-agrarian to a capitalist-industrial society, starting in the sixteenth century, the millennial balance of power among the world's major civilizations shifted inexorably in favor of Western Europe. A society that was shifting to a capitalist-industrial base, capable of cumulative growth, commanded greater social power than slow-growing societies still operating on feudal-agrarian foundations. Under the circumstances, it was unlikely that non-Western societies could simultaneously alter the foundations of their societies while also fending off attacks from Western states whose social power was expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Even as these feudal-agrarian societies sought to reorganize their economies and institutions, Western onslaughts against them deepened, and this made their reorganization increasingly difficult. It is scarcely surprising that the growing asymmetry between the two sides eventually led to the eclipse, decline, or subjugation of nearly all non-Western societies.
It's a relief to see that most of the world can see global conflict within the proper historical and political context, refusing to fall for reckless explanations that inflame polarizing tensions.
