Clash of Civilisations topic one

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Topic 1: The ‘Clash of Civilisations?”

Core Reading for this Topic:

S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations?, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, no. 3 (1993),

pp. 22-49. [e-reserve].

S.P. Huntington, ‘If not Civilisations, What?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 5 (1993),

pp. 186-194. [e-reserve].

Fukuyama, F., ‘The End of History?’, Quadrant (August 1989), pp. 15-25. [e-

reserve]

Then look at a critical analysis of the “Clash of Civilisations?’ idea and reactions to it

in:

H. V. Brasted with Adeel Khan,’Islam and ‘the clash of civilizations’? An historical

perspective’ in Shahram Akbarzadeh (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Political Islam,

Abingdon, 2011, pp. 273-89. [e-reserve].

In an attempt to explain the phenomenon of resurgent Islam and to try to

predict the shape of global alliances and rivalries into the twenty-first century,

observers such as Professor Samuel Huntington have raised some interesting

questions in a provocative way. These questions have excited considerable

discussion and debate in recent years, and your task is to consider the nature of

this debate.

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Orientalism: a barrier to understanding?

Of the challenges Samuel P. Huntington threw down in his provocative and

testing essay ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, published in the summer 1993 issue

of Foreign Affairs , the least contentious was the exhortation for the West to:

develop a more profound understanding of the basic

religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other

civilisations.1

The civilisation Huntington wanted us to get to know in particular was the

Islamic, ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring a state of peaceful co-existence

in the world, but ultimately as a strategic move to prepare for the next world

conflict.

According to Peter Mansfield and others our perception of Islam has been

coloured by a process of stereotyping both in the past and the present that has

served to reduce Islamic civilisation to a number of stock images. These have

collectively defined Islamic culture but in a way that has disfigured it. [Edward

Said calls this kind of misrepresentation ‘Orientalism’].

1S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations?, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, no. 3 (1993), p. 49.



In the past, that defining was basically dismissive and pejorative, since it arose

mainly out of the West’s imperialist encounter with what was called the Orient,

and still these days is called the Middle East. During the period 1850-1956

Europe not only subjugated the Oriental world, it came also to despise it.

Islam as a religion – compared with Christianity – was negatively

classified as ‘fanatical’, ‘blood thirsty’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘destructive’.

And the people who embraced it – Muslims – were indiscriminatelylumped together as ‘dirty’, ‘deceitful’, ‘irrational’ and ‘uncivilised’2.

In short the focus was on Islam as a fallen world system, a civilisation in

marked decline.

Today, the focus is very much on Islam as a rival world system, a reviving

system that is no longer despised and is beginning to be taken seriously, even

feared – but mostly for the wrong reasons. A new typology of images to

accommodate past colonial changes and circumstances has emerged to

categorise Islam as intrinsically fundamentalist, militant, anti-West, and sociallyand politically repressive. That Muslims seem everywhere poised to engage in

an insurrectionist crusade to ‘Islamicise’ the world, along the lines established

by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1979, is a spectre conjured up time and

again in newspaper headlines, photographs, cartoons and video clips. And what

Islamicisation accordingly seems to presage is the installation of religious

leaderships at the political level, the full reintroduction of the sharia, the

dismantling of liberal-democracy, the infliction of punishments such as public

flogging, stoning and amputation, the seclusion of women: mediaeval and

frightening developments in the Western perception.

A few visual images might illustrate the point I am making:

3

2See, for example, P. Mansfield, The Arabs (London, Penguin, 1992), ch. 29. ‘Through

Western Eyes’.

3 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 1989.



4

5

4 The Australian, May 23-241992. ‘A young volunteer’s chilling story of the Arab death

squads’.

5 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 May 1992. ‘Front line now is between Capitalism and Islam ’.



6

6 Australia, 15 June 1992. ‘Should the world be afraid?’



In this sample the relationship between Islam and violence is variously

established. Mosque and Kalashnikov rifle go hand in hand. Thus Islam is

treated as essentially monolithic, resulting, as John Esposito points out, in the

rather facile equation that ‘Islam’ equals ‘fundamentalism’ equals ‘terrorism and

extremism’7.

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The doomsday image

In the 1990s a new image began to take shape. With the collapse of the Soviet

Union, as Esposito has pointed out, ‘fundamentalist’ Islam began replacing

‘expansionist’ communism as the new, virulent enemy threatening life, liberty

and property in the so-called ‘free’ world. It was as if the old threat has re-

emerged, but in Islamic form – with ‘religious’ Stalinists replacing ‘secular’

Stalinists, and Das Capital giving way to the Quran as the ideological battle

manual.

This is where Huntington’s hypothesis about the nature of future conflict in the

world fits into the picture. Francis Fukuyama had earlier predicted that with

communism collapsing the West had finally won the ideological battle and that

in liberal–democracy the ultimate political model for the world had been

determined. A new world order based on it was at hand.

Rejecting this scenario, Huntington put the case that with the cold war gone,

war would manifest in a different form. Indeed, the future battle-lines would be

drawn up at the civilisational level. ‘Civilisations’,8 he defines, as the largest

units of identity to which people adhere, each unit consisting of groups of culturally compatible, contiguous countries. In the worst-case scenario there

would be the ‘mother-of-all’ conflicts, with the Western civilisation lining up and

coming to blows with the Islamic civilisation (possibly allied with the Confucian)

along the ‘fault lines of contact’ and over issues of culture. According to

Huntington, the next world war will in effect be a culture war.

This article and his 1996 book caused considerable controversy and still does;particularly after 9/11 and partly because of it. Both Muslim and non- Muslimscholars have consistently derided it. Yet Niall Ferguson nonethelessacknowledges that ‘as works of academic prophecy go’, the ‘clash of

civilizations’ has been ‘a real winner’ 9. Why is that do you think? Is it because,

that as he also observed, it seemed to ‘make sense of an impressively highproportion of the news’?

7J.L. Esposito, ‘Political Islam: Beyond the Green Menace’, Current History, (Jan. 1994).

8Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?, op .cit., and his follow up article, ‘If not

Civilisations, What?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, no. 5 (1993), are among the set readings in

Unit 462-8, pp. 108-121, 134-38.

9 Naill Ferguson, ‘The Crash of Civilizations’, Los Angeles Times , 27 February, 2006



Issues to address

1. How much is Islam adapting to modernity, and to what extent ismodernity adapting to Islam?

2. What has been the impact of the fall of the Soviet Union and thecollapse of communism on perspectives of the future?

3. What aspects of Western ‘civilization’ do Muslims tend to find faultwith?

4. What aspects of Islamic ‘civilisation’ do ‘westerners’ tend to find faultwith?

5. How does 9/11 fit into the picture?

Further Reading:

i. Media and other Images of Islam:

Howard Brasted, ‘Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000’, in Shahram Akbazadeh (ed.), Islam inAustralia (Sydney, UNSW Press, 2001), pp. 206-227. [e-reserve].

Howard Brasted, The Politics of Stereotyping. Western Images of Islam’,

Manushi, No. 98 (1997), pp. 6-16. [e-reserve]

Shakira Hussain, ‘Cybercrusades: Islam and anti-Islam on the Internet’, Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 5, no. 2, 1999.

Kalin, I., ‘Roots of Misconception: Euro-American Perceptions of Islam Before andAfter September 11’ in Lumbard, J.E. (ed.), Islam, Fundamentalism, and theBetrayal of Tradition: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars (Bloomington, WorldWisdom, 2004).

Ii. Additional Reading

Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society ,

(Routledge, 1988), chs 1, 11. [E-Book].

Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam (London, Hurst, 2004).

Amin Saikal, Islam and the West (London, Palgrave, 2003).

F. Halliday, ‘Orientalism and its Critics’, British Journal of Middle EasternStudies, Vol no. 2, 1993.

Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West , Oxford, OUP, 1993.

IV. A BBC Report



From the ABC: Multi-culturalism in the UK and the challenge of culture

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/10/06/3334026.htm

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Clash of Civilisations topic one