FWD: The Clash of Ignorance by Edward Said

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Thema:        Fwd: [LNC] Edward Said and The Clash of Ignorance
Datum:  06.10.01 12:25:23 (MEZ) - Mitteleurop. Sommerzeit
From:   eldon at PANIX.COM (el don)
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Reply-to:   NETDYNAM at MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU (NetDynam / Network Group Dynamics 
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To: NETDYNAM at MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU

thought this comment-essay on the latest cultural shit slinging
might be of interest to some.
the time of 'no boundaries', jim, seems a bit far off yet...

>
>Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 17:02:12 -0700
>Reply-To: lnc-l at yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [LNC] Edward Said and The Clash of Ignorance
>
>The Clash of Ignorance
>by EDWARD W. SAID
>
>
>Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the
>Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a
>surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was
>intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in
>world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument
>seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye
>on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and
>his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the
>onset of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he
>allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about
>to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global politics
>is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on:
>
>"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new
>world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great
>divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be
>cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world
>affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between
>nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations
>will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be
>the battle lines of the future."
>
>Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of
>something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions
>among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict
>between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his
>attention. 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
>reductiveness 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."
>
>But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others
>alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow
>or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is
>better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular
>politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and
>injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give
>momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The
>Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds,"
>better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding
>of the bewildering interdependence of our time.
>



Kurt-Werner Pörtner