Is Islam the cause of the 'Clash of Civilizations?'

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

Is Islam the cause of the ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ By Namit Sachar

Following the end of the cold war, several thinkers proclaimed that the world had entered a new phase in which there would be no major conflicts; Francis Fukuyama wrote a book proclaiming that it was the ‘end of history’ (The end of history?,1989). The idea was that in a unipolar world, with no superpower rivalry to fuel them, economic activity would be everyone's prime concern and any conflicts would be localized and brought under control. This utopian vision was soon contradicted by the outbreak of religious and ethnic conflicts in many parts of the world including Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Kashmir, Indonesia and parts of Africa. These, especially the conflict in Yugoslavia seemed to indicate that old ethnic and religious rivalries that had been kept in check under superpower dominance were now coming to the fore. Faced with this reality, some political scientists in the west tried to explain them in terms of civilizations rather than economic and political terms or ideologies that dominated the cold war era. One of these is Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis expounded in his well-known book clash of civilizations (1993).

According to Huntington the world may be seen as being composed of civilizations that overlay nation states. He identifies several of these civilizations including the western-Christian, eastern-Christian, Islamic, Hindu and others. In the case of nation states like Germany and France belonging to the same civilization, there is little likelihood of conflict. On the other hand, when two or more civilizations meet on the ground, as in former Yugoslavia, it can give rise to conflict. The boundary where two or more civilizations meet is to be seen as a ‘civilization fault line.’ Yugoslavia furnishes a particularly good example as it is the meeting ground of three civilizations (as conceived by Huntington); western (Croatia), eastern (Serbia) and Islamic (Bosnia Herzegovina). This seemed to furnish a particularly elegant vindication of Huntington’s thesis when it first appeared. It was assumed that future conflicts would follow the same model.

When talking about the fault lines between civilizations. Huntington brings the idea that ‘The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.’ He defines one line that exists in Europe, he shows along the north and west the people are mainly catholic, and along the east and south the people are Islamic. ‘They are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems’ in this statement he points out countries that are only economically underprivileged and not democratically stable ...

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At two points in the book, Huntington blames the Islamic civilizations for causing cultural clashes; ‘it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict,’ he points out in trying to clash between the fault line that exists in Europe between the Islamic south-west end and the catholic north-east end. Later within the same heading he states “Islam had bloody borders.” His statement is very vague and unsupported in this case.

An Un-stated Assumption

With the growth of terrorism in the world, there has been a rush to identify and explain it based on Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis. For Americans and non-Americans alike still struggling to discover meaning from the ashes of Sept 11, the temptation has been to point the finger at an identifiable - Muslims - even when to blame an entire community is manifestly illogical.

Human nature prefers certainty to doubt, and will manufacture its own certainty to fill the chasm of unknowing that yawns within.

“Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his network of secret agents have been ‘surgically’ excised but when an authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam,’’ Said Jack Miles.

The assumption in all this, though generally un-stated, is that terrorism is to be equated with the Islamic civilization. There are several problems with this equation. To begin with, there have been and continue to be conflicts within Islam that make it difficult to identify it as a monolithic civilization. Anyone who has traveled in the middle-east can see that countries such as Iran, Egypt and Syria are worlds apart. In recent history, Bangladesh broke away from, and Iran and Iraq were engaged in brutal war that lasted nearly a decade. Also, with terrorism striking in places as far apart as New York, Kenya, Moscow, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Bali, there is no discernible ‘fault line’ where civilizations neatly fall in place. The reality is that terrorism represents no civilization and follows no boundaries.

Geopolitical theories like the clash of civilizations make the facile assumption that human beings everywhere think and behave the same way and have similar priorities dominated by economic interests. To scholars in the secular humanist west, it is inconceivable that people would lay down their lives for religious or cultural beliefs. So they tend to attribute economic and social motives to acts that lie beyond the realm of their experience and comprehension.

It was refreshing, therefore, when the respected Malaysian academic, Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, made it clear that he thought such thinking was irrelevant - and that there was no clash of civilizations, only a clash of ‘two moral types – the predatory and the constructive – and these can be found in all societies, all civilizations’.

‘Islam has always been cautious of terrorists,’ he said, noting that Caliph Ali, Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, became the first victim of terrorism within the religion, in AD 661, when he was assassinated, ‘Despite efforts by the Western media to portray it as such, history was not a clash between Islam and the West, any more than it had been a clash between communism and capitalism, or East and West,’ he said.

An article by the former in the January 2002 special edition of Newsweek magazine, entitled ‘,’ was a ‘very subtle attempt to create misunderstanding.’

That article, published in conjunction with the meeting of the prestigious World Economic Forum in New York, focused on the period from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the present as an age when Muslims fought Muslims and many others.

It conceded that the causes of contemporary Muslim wars lie in politics, not seventh-century religious doctrines’, but not before creating the impression that the Muslim persona was central, not incidental, to the protagonists in the conflicts. ‘And they make up only one fifth of the world's population,’ Huntington wrote.

Prof Alatas’ counter to Huntington’s statement was ‘I would suggest that the most violent civilization today is Western civilization. It caused the most conflict in the 20th century - Nazi persecution of the Jews, heartless totalitarian regimes, the Cold War.’ The professor also pointed out ‘The Taliban was created by the US, as a means of resisting Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.’

Western fear of things Muslim, stemmed, in short, from a restricted view of history and a tendency to extrapolate based on prejudice. There is also Muslim misunderstanding of the West, he acknowledged, but because Muslims do not form a world power, that misunderstanding is limited in its spread.

A prescription: for the constructive types to work together across all communities to counter the annihilative impact of the predatory types.