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 THE CLASH OF IGNORANCE �

sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the war against its haters. despoilers. destroyers. with scant
rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and con­ attention to complex histories that defy such reductive-
stricted warfare that "the clash ofcivilizations" argues ness and have seeped from one territory into another,
is the reality. When he published his book by the same in the process overriding the boundaries that are
title in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a supposed to separate us ali into divided armed camps

The ash lgnorance little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; ali
he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate
This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam
and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind.
what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was. which is trying to make sense ofa disorderly reality that
The basic paradigm ofWest versus the rest (the cold won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as ali
Edward W. Said war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, that. 1 remember interrupting a man who. after a lecture
from The Nation (2001) and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and 1 had given al a West Bank university in 1994, rose
implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of from the audience and started to attack my ideas as
September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he
pathologicaliy motivated suicide attack and mass espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was
slaughter by a smali group of deranged militants has the first retort that carne to mind. "They're Western
the lion's share ofhis attention. In this belligerent k:ind been turned into proofof Huntington's thesis. Instead too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his
Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civiliza­ of seeing it for what it is - the capture of big ideas face. but I recalied the incident when information on
tions?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue ofForeign of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the
veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological (1 use the word loosely) by a tiny band ofcrazed fanatics the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how
Ajfairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising for criminal purposes - international luminaries they had mastered ali the technical details required to
amount of attention and reaction. Because the article colors are manifest in its title, "Toe Roots of Muslim
Rage." In both articles, the personification ofenormous from former Pakistaní Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto inflict their homicida! evil on the World Trade Center,
was intended to supply Americans with an original to ltalian Prime Minister Silvia Berlusconi have pon­ the Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered.
thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the entities calied "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly
affirmed, as ifhugely complicated matters líke identity tificated about lslam's troubles, and in the latter's Where does one draw the line between "Western"
end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument case have used Huntington ·s ideas to rant on about technology and. as Berlusconi declared, "lslam's"
seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where
Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and inability to be a part of "modemity"?
very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-ma.king Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since One cannot easily do so, of course. How finaliy
ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper
hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington made a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.") inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural
"end ofhistory" ideas. as well as the legions who had But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less assertions. At sorne leve!, for instance, primitive pas­
celebrated the onset of globalism. tribalism and the nor Lewis has much time to spare for the interna!
dynamics and plurality ofevery civilization, or for the spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin sions and sophisticated knowhow converge in ways
dissipation of the state. But they, he aliowed. had Lacten and his foliowers in cults like the Branch that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only
understood only sorne aspects of this new period. He fact that the major contest in most modern cultures
concerns the definition or interpretation of each cul­ Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and
was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the present, us and them, to say nothing of the ve1y
aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the ture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal
of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in normaliy sober British weekly The Economist, in its concepts ofidentity and nationality about which there
coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on: issue of September 22-28. can't resist reaching for is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral
presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization.
the vast generalization. praising Huntington extrava­ decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake
lt is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of No, the West is the West. and Islam Islam.
The challenge for Western policy-makers, says gantly for his "cruel and sweeping. but nonetheless crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to
conflict in this new world wili not be primarily acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic
ideological or primarily economic. The great divi­ Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger
says with unseemly solemnity. Huntington writes vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the
sions among humankind and the dominating source and fends off ali the others. Islam in particular. More
troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspec­ that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced supposed entities any easier to see; rather. it speaks
ofconftict will be cultural. Nation states will remain of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with to how much simpler it is to make beliicose statements
the most powerful actors in world affairs, but tive. which is to survey the entire world from a perch
outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, the inferiority of their power."' Did he canvas 100 for the purpose ofmobilizing coliective passions than
the principal conflicts of global politics wili occur Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty to retlect. examine, sort out what it is we are dealing
between nations and groups of different civiliza­ is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying
Bosnians? Even ifhe did, what sort ofsample is that? with in reality, the interconnectedness ofinnumerable
tions. The clash ofcivilizations wili domínate global around look:ing for the answers that he has already
found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist. someone Uncountable are the editorials in every American lives, "ours" as weli as "theirs."
politics. The fault lines between civilizations will and European newspaper and magazine of note adding In a remarkable series of three articles published
be the battle lines of the future. who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into
what they are not: shut-dovm, sealed-off entities that to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse. each between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's
have been purged ofthe myriad currents and counter­ use of which is plainly designed not to edify but most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing
Most ofthe argument in the pages that foliowed relied to inflame the reader's indignan! passion as a member for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the
on a vague notion of something Huntington called currents that anímate human history, and that over
centuries have made it possible for that history not of the "West." and what we need to do. Churchillian roots ofthe religious right. coming down very harshly
"civilization identity" and "the interactions among rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical
seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the only to contain wars ofreligion and imperial conquest
but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and combatants in the West's, and especialiy America·s, tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal
conflict between two ofthem, Islam and the West. gets
en EDWARD W. SAID THE CLASH OF IGNORANCE mJ
behavior promotes "an lslamic order reduced to a ofhate speech and actions, plus reports ofiaw enforce­ are part ofthe ocean ofhistory. trying to plow or divide tions that may give momentary satisfaction but
penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, ment efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but little self-knowledge or infonned anaiysis. "The Clash
inteliectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this Indians ali over the country, the paradigm stays on. it is better to think in terms of powerful and power­ of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of
"entails an absolute assertion of one, generaliy de­ One further reason for its persistence is the less communities, the secular politics of reason and the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive seif-pride
contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard increased presence of Muslims ali over Europe and ignorance, and universal principies of justice and than for critica! understanding of the bewildering
ofanother. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases the United States. Think of the populations today of injustice. than to wander off in search ofvast abstrae- interdependence of our time.
tradition. and twists the politicai process wherever it France. ltaly, Gennany, Spain, Britain, America, even
unfolds." As a timeiy instance of this debasement, Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer
Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, compiex, on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is
pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on so threatening about that presence? Buried in the
to show that in the word's cunent confinement to coliective culture are memories ofthe first great Arab­
indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century
impossible "to recognize the lslarnic- religion, society, and which, as the ceiebrated Belgian historian Henri
culture, history or politics - as lived and experienced Pirenne wrote in h.is landmark book Mohammed and
by Muslims through the ages." The modem lslarnists, Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for ali the
Ahmad concludes, are "concemed with power, not ancient unity of the Meditenanean, destroyed the
with the soul; with the mobilization of people for Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civil­
political purposes rather than with sharing and alle­ izati.on dominated by northem powers (Gennany and
viati.ng their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be
limited and time-bound political agenda." What has saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its
made matters worse is that similar distortions and h.istorical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne ieft out, alas,
zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes is that in the creation of this new line of defense the
of discourse. West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy,
It was Conrad, more powerfuliy than any of his sociology and historiography of Islam, which had
readers at the end of the nineteenth century could already interposed itseifbetween Charlemagne's world
have imagined, who understood that the distinctions and classicai antiquity. Islam is inside from thé start,
between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to
quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart
heights ofEuropean civiiization could instantaneously of his Jnfemo.
fall into the most barbarous practices without prepa­ Toen there is the persisting iegacy of monotheism
ration or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The itself. the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon
Secret Agent (1907), who described tenorism's affiníty aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and
for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what carne
for "Islam" or "the West"), as weli as the tenorist's before; for Muslirns, Islam fulfills and ends the line of
ulti.mate moral degradation. prophecy. There is stili no decent history or demys­
For there are closer ties between apparently warring tification of the many-sided contest among these
civiiizations than most of us wouid like to believe; both three foliowers - not one of them by any means a
Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across monolithic, unified camp - of the most jealous of ali
carefuliy maintained, even policed boundaries moves gods, even though the bloody modem convergence
with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, on Paiestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what
ful! of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we has been so tragicaliy ineconcilable about them.
hold on to, scarcely fumish us with suitabie, practica! Not surprisingiy, then, Muslirns and Christians speak
guidelines for situations such as the one we face now. readily of crnsades and jihads, both of them eliding
Hence the aitogether more reassuring battle orders (a the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance.
crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) Such an agenda, says Eqbai Ahrnad, is "very reassuring
drawn out ofHuntington's alieged opposition between to the men and women who are stranded in the middle
Islam and the West, from wh.ich officiai discourse drew of the ford between the deep waters of tradition and
its vocabulary in the first days alter the September 11 modemity."
attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation But we are ali swimming in those waters. Westemers
in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters
 HITllERE!
WE'RE TAKING
APOLL TO
GAUGE lHE
LEVEL Of
fEAR,
OUT 1'ílERE ...

C:�ttocn $ Fear Leve! Tangerine

In the age of terror geopolitics, govemments and mass media feed off each other to amplify fear, reducing politics to a
primordial choice between candidates vying to appear tougher than the other. In such a climate, demagogues, extremist
discourse and militarism thrives.
Source: M. Wuerker
Esta obra está protegida por el derecho de autor y su reproducción y
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Esta obra está protegida por el derecho de autor y su reproducción y
comunicación pública, en la modalidad de puesta a disposición, se
ha realizado con autorización de CEDRO. Queda prohibida su
posterior reproducción, distribución, transformación y comunicación
pública en cualquier medio y de cualquier forma, con excepción de
una única reproducción mediante impresora para cada usuario
autorizado.