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Esmail Nooriala

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Is the

"Clash of Civilizations" Inevitable?

A lecture

at Colorado University - Boulder

A terrorist will

not

tell the immigration officer in New Yorks

airport that he is a terrorist

, exactly

American sp

Taliban land will

not disclose that

he/she is an

American sp

. Many people fabricate passports and

only

to prove that

they are not what they really a

all

refuse to disclose our

true

identity or respond positively to a question

about it

that implies some kind of danger for us.

In all these situations, the answer we give is

shaped and conditioned by the question we receive.

Since the horrible catastrophe of September 11 in New

York and Washington, the people who are Arab or Muslim or merely come from

the Middle East (not to say all dark skinned people and all those who have a

turbine on their head, notably Sikh

and Hindus who neither are Muslim nor

Middle Eastern) have been trying to find an answer for an increasingly

threatening inquiry into their identity.

The other day, an American friend of mine asked me

about the curious insistence of Iranians to show that they are not Arabs.

Some go to such extremes to explain that all Iranians hate Arabs. Afghan

try

the same. Although the regime holding to power in their country has been a

host

Mr. Osama bin Ladan and thousands of his Arab flowers who have gone to

Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia, Afghans are not Arabs.

Last weekend, everyone familiar with the history of the

Middle

ast and North Africa was set for a big surprise when Colonel

Moamar Qadaafi, the ruler of Libya

declared that Libyans are African and

not Arabs. For the last 35 years or so he has always been

staunch defender

of what is known as Pan-Arabism.

My answer to my American

friend's

question was simple: It is

the way you ask your question, or it is the circumstances in which your

question i

posed, that makes you get that kind of an answer. None of the

above utterances are wrong. Neither Iranians and Afghans nor North Africans

are Arabs. Even the majority of the population of an Arab country like Iraq

is non-Arab. You are astonished to hear this kind of answers because you

have your own assumptions about the identity of those people. You

actually

are

imposing an identity on them. At normal times they may not bother to explain

that you and your assumptions are wrong. But, at a time when a

witch

hunt

for Arab terrorists is on and allied countries planes are destroying the

Arab settlements of Osama bin Ladan in Afghanistan, every one who is not an

Arab will spend time to prove to you that he is not an Arab.

In actual fact, the catastrophe of September 11 has

opened a can of worms for my friend. And he, as a responsible

American, has become engaged in a research to get more information about

these peoples.

Let me ponder a few minutes on the nature of such

researches. We, as members of human

race

, have been empowered by the

natural evolution or God, the creator, to use concepts. Concepts are

things that only exist in our mind and have not concrete representation in

the real material word. Lets take an example. When I talk about a

tree

I am

talking about a concept. In the real world out of our minds there

are

only

different

kinds

of trees and none of them are the same. Each has its own

shape, structure and

parts

. But I have a mind that is capable of

extracting the similarities common between all individual trees and make a

metal tree out of those similarities. This mental tree is a concept. 99

percent of the time, we are dealing with concepts rather than actual

concrete entities of the real world. Language is built on the basis of

concepts and functions through their usage. Without concepts we had no

language, no culture, no civic life and no civilization.

Concepts get together to create higher abstract

concepts. Can anyone point to a

culture

or a

civilization

by her finger? She

can show us different material things with different shapes and functions

but the relation between those concrete things and

the

culture or civilization

that they belong to

a mental entity. Indeed, culture and civilization are

two major highly abstracted conceptions. They are vast fields of amalgamated

facts and fictions, sensory apprehensions and imaginary creativeness.

As soon as the Soviet Union, and the Communist block

were dismantled at the beginning of the 1990s and the threat of the Cold

was removed from the life of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, we have

been dealing with new contemplations about concepts like New World Order and

all the prerequisites attached to them. What is the nature of this New World

Order and who are the main players in its arena? Social scientists,

especially political scientists who usually are involved in foreign policy

making, have put forward different scenarios. The one scenario that has

captured the attention and imagination of many people has been designed by

professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University who was a foreign policy

advisor of Carter administration in 1970s. He believes, and emphatically

says so, that 20

century was the age of ideology

and

came to its end by the demise of the Soviet

block.

Now, t

he new world arena is

ess-

board

with

new political entities that are called

civilization

. Professor

Huntington does not go into a detailed and in-depth description of what he

calls a civilization. He rather ponders about the main powerful existing

civilizations of the planet Earth and comes up with his famous formulation

of The Clash of Civilizations in which the main skirmish happens between

the West and the

est.

In this regard, Professor Huntington comes up with a

list of eight civilizations:

The West (comprised of the white Protestant

Christian US, Western and

Central Europe, Australia and

interference, the Jewish state of Israel) that is threaten

by the ambitions

of the

est

Islamic civilization (from North-Western Africa to

far South-Eastern Asia)

Orthodox civilization (that of

Russia and

other far eastern Europe)

Catholic Latin American civilization

Hindu civilization

Sinic civilization (that of

China)

Japanese civilization

African civilization.

The West is threaten by all of these members of the

est

lub because it is the strongest civilization on Earth and, as far as

its foreign policy is concerned, tries to impose its values upon other

civilizations. In his own words: What is universalism in the West is

imperialism to the rest.

In social sciences

with their vast treasures of concepts

, once you get into a web of

grand-scale theory, you have to come up with grand-scale suppositions and

assumptions that may not necessarily be scientifically provable. This is

inevitable.

And t

here is a concept in the social

sciences that is mostly neglected by the advocates and thinkers of this

vocation. It is called essentialism.

In the realm

of exact sciences, we can attribute certain qualities and potentialities to

material phenomenon. We can comfortably say that petroleum is flammable and

has burning property. Flammability is a potentiality of petroleum and is an

innate trait of its essence. But can we apply the same lingo to social

phenom

and look for their essences and essential

properties and potentialities? Most of the social scientist do not believe

in such a premise and here is where the concept of essentialism

as an aberration in social sciences

comes in. If

we believe that a social phenomenon has its own unique essence and that

essence manifests itself in the workings of that social phenomenon, we are a

social essentialist.

Professor Huntington is an essentialist social

scientist so far as he believes in some perpetual and unchanging traits in

civilization

. For example, he thinks that Islamic civilization is based on

intolerance and cannot produce democratic forms of governance. Therefore,

with regards to the belief of the West about the universalism of its values,

Islam becomes a challenger and a dangerous threat to the Western

civilization.

This is what has been advocated by influential social

scientist and policy makers of the United States of America during the last

20 years or so. It has provided the US policy a theoretical

frame-work

for trying to inflame and inflate the

conflicts that exists amongst other civilizations to reduce the

effectiveness of their enmity towards the West. The project of

creating a green belt around the Soviet block by encouraging religious

element of the societies neighboring that block has its roots in this mental

image of the human world. It has been responsible for deposing semi-secular

regimes and empowering religious factions that are thirsty for power.

Islamic republics of Iran and Pakistan, anti-Soviet fighters of Afghanistan

and the rise of Islamic fervor in Turkey are but a few

results

of this policy.

And although the ideological contender of the Cold-War

era was defeated in this way, the

winners

immediately lost their value and

function for the West and were left to themselves to become a grave

liability for the whole world. Fundamentalism and terrorism are but the twin

children of such foreign policy that now have turned to their creator and

threaten its values, institutions and civic formation.

The question that a social scientist should be asking

in such a heated period of time is, inevitably, about the validity of

essentialist theories such as the Clash of Civilizations. Is Islamic

civilization doomed to be perpetually shaped within the cast of its

intolerance and anti-democratic nature? Isnt there any other kind of traits

within this civilization that may advocate tolerance, brotherhood of men,

and peaceful coexistence with the members of other religions and cultures?

We already

know that civilization is a highly abstract conception. The creator of this concept, well confined within and

conditioned by his own values and

eltanschauung

, looks at different

societies that he wants to address as the members of his grand concept of a

civilization and tries to extract the similarities between actions and

reactions of this

adopted

civilization through history. Anything that is

different from those traits under our scientists focus are set aside as

non-similarities.

Professor

Huntington, of course, refers to the existence of sub-cultures and

sub-civilizations within each civilization of his choice. But he

intentionally ignores th

fact that having a bunch of

sub-cultures necessarily mean

accepting the existence of dissimilarities

that will work against our conceptualizing efforts within the social theory.

Our scientist puts his emphasis on the similarities and, in doing so, is

practically

eclectic and theoretically selective.

Muslims are essentially intolerant. The Arab terrorist

who created the infamous September 11 showdown were Muslims. This shows how

that intolerant trait within the mind of a Muslim works. So lets kill all

Muslims and Arabs. And how can we find a Muslim or Arab?

Unfortunately, Professor Huntington is not there to lead the mob by the

brilliance of his genius. Arabs put a turbine on their head so lets kill

however wears a turban. It was interesting to hear one very angry man who

was talking about the Arabs with their diaper headgear. A few days after

September 11, an Indian Sik

was murdered because

of his bear and turban.

Perhaps the people who have enjoyed reading and

implementing professor Huntingtons theories are

the very

elements of

other

civilizations

who

are now classified under the broad titles of

fundamentalis

and extremis

. They are more than happy to represent the

Islamic civilization and show how intolerant this civilization is. They,

thus, become the representation of a civilization and

naturally,

that civilization is

identified by them.

The dangers of essentialism does not confine to this

kind of reaction. It goes beyond all historical fact to create a fictional

world of attractive theories for those impatient soles that do not have time

for details. It is in the face of this danger lurking in the corridors of

the US

foreign policy making that we have to ask a lot of questions that

are not necessarily very pompous and eye-catching. They are innocent

question like these:

Is Islam a unified historical and cultural entity?

Why do we hear about different sectarian factions of

Islam?

What is the difference between Sunnism and Shiism in

Islam?

How does an advocate of peace and love like Rumi, the

poet, belong to the Islamic culture?

If Christianity has been able to produce three

distinctive civilizations according to professor Huntington, why Islam, with

its so-called 72 versions, is the mother of only one civilization?

How

and why

is the Muslim world divided into Arab and non-Arab

camps?

Who do we consider

an Arab?

Why Muslims have fiercely fought amongst themselves

throughout the history, with the war between Iraq and Iran on one hand

and

Iraq and Kuwait on the other

in our most recent memory?

To answer such question

, one has to abandon the ream of

grand theories and focus on the actual facts recorded in the annals of

history. One has to look at the ethnic formation of human societies that

have been bundled together under the auspice of great world religions by the

acts of aggression and sword.

Large scale religions like Islam and Christianity

cannot be considered as local and ethnic religions. They are vast umbrellas

that exceed the boundaries of nation-states through imposition of a

seemingly unified

identity

. But, this umbrella is only

unifying

factor

in the eyes of

the beholder, the passenger in

high-

flying

plane,

alien from another

planet.

If you be patient enough to penetrate th

cover and

enter inside, mingle with variegated nations that are classified under a

unified identity, you will see that there is nothing fixed and essential

about human societies. Every society has a major religion and several minor

ones. Every cultural has developed conflicting traits of identity through

its history. Every history is full of different actions and reactions of the

nations that live under the same umbrella but fight together more bitterly

than any alien army.

Arabs, Kurds, Irani

ans

, Afghans, Pakistanis, Malasians,

Turks, Tajiks, Mongols and

ny other ethnic groups are all Muslims. Islam

was created in Arabian Peninsula by an Arab prophet. It expanded into Middle

East, West Asia, Central Asia, South East Asia and North Africa by the force

of sword. This conquests turned many ancient nations into Muslim peoples

without removing their national pride and heritage. Islam had to become a

vast digestive system to swallow so many different cultural traits and

values and

turn

them into

ingredients of

a flourishing civilization that lasted for four

hundred years and came to its demise and disintegration 1000 years ago,

leaving behind a hotchpotch of Muslim nations full of enmity and hatred for

each-other. Yes, once, a 1000 years ago, there used to be an

Islamic

civilization

that

narrowly

gave harmony and unity to a spectrum of ancient cultures.

But it is long gone. What we now call the Islamic world comprises of members

that their common values and perspectives are much less than those traits

that put them at each-others throat.

In the first decade of the 20

century,

the last semi-Islamic empire, that of Ottomas of Anatolia came to an end

after centuries of war with its Muslim neighbor

Iran. In 1950s and 60s, the

Pan-Arabism of Jamaal Abd-al-Nasser was an ambitious venture to creat

another Islamic power. It died away in the Six-

ar of the late 60s. The

Islamic Revolution of Iran was another ambitious attempt to recreate a

Muslim universe. But it created the worst wars between Arab and non-Arab

Muslims. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, by emphasizing on the Arabic nature of his

cause and attempting to defeat the heretic Iran, had an eye on the

leadership of the Arab Muslim world. His aspiration was also evaporated in

the Golf war in which other Arab Muslims ganged against

him

through helping

the West.

lash

of Civilizations? If we can create them we also can prevent their

actualization. This is what I sincerely believe.

Q&A in audio

firmat

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