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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 reductive ness 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." |
