Mouood Mouood English Edition
3- The Challenge of Clash of Civilization
A small gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in October 1992 was the first to hear Samuel P. Huntington express an idea that would eventually become his now-famous article “The Clash of Civilizations?” which was published in the summer 1993 issue of the journal‘Foreign Affairs’. But even before the article appeared in ‘Foreign Affairs’,its argument was also set forth in an Occasional Paper prepared for the Olin Institute’s project on “The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests”. These details are important because they tell us a great deal about the institutional and personal affiliations and support behind this otherwise flawed description of the present global situation, as well as provide clues to the invisible hands behind its global projection that would take its author around the world. The article has since been expanded and “documented”, and the resulting book has drawn attention from every continent and been translated into almost all major languages.
Is a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West inevitable? Those Muslims desperately trying to avert one miss a crucial and obvious point: a full-scale war against Islam and Muslims, driven by the West’s inexorable drive for global domination, has been underway since last one thousand year years when Euro-Christians incited by Zionist Jews commenced the ruthless and barbaric Crusades against the Muslims to occupy the holy Land of Palestine. This war is being waged not only with guns and bullets – more than three million Muslims have been slaughtered in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar and elsewhere in the last decade alone – but by every other instrument at the West’s disposal, from political manipulation and propaganda to economic and cultural warfare. The West’s message is clear: accept western hegemony or else.
It is too late now to trying to avert a “clash of civilizations”, for it is well under way since last one thousand years, not through any action of Muslims, but because of the West’s determination to have all mankind subordinate to their exploitative hegemony.
The fallacy of the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’
At the most superficial level, a clash of any kind, especially of civilizations, has to be a confrontation wherein there are comparable aggressive intentions in the two opposing civilizations, along with comparable material resources available to carry out the aggression. No such conditions exist today. Thus one cannot really speak of a clash of civilizations; only of the aggression of one civilization bent upon wiping out all other ways of living. This is not merely a play on words, nor a distinction based merely on semantics; it is a logical consequence of historical reality.
We know that civilizations evolve, decay and disintegrate, but does a belief system also go through the same process? What is the belief system upon which contemporary Western civilization is based? Where did it come from? And what are the belief systems of the other civilizations with which the Western civilization is said to be clashing? Where did they come from?
To begin with, let us note that the belief system that produced the contemporary Western civilization first emerged in Europe around 1500 AD and since then has gone through numerous internal transformations. Its geographical expansion took it to North America, Australia and New Zealand. It is also to be noted that there are, indeed, various shades and hues of values, customs and beliefs in the societies and cultures which make up the fabric of contemporary Western civilization, but the concerns and values common to people who live in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America – the geographical region of Western civilization – have similarities which make these societies a civilizational unit, based on a specific belief system. The diversity of the contemporary West, then, is a diversity that is constrained within the broad framework of a common belief system.
Let us look next at the formation of this belief system. It arose through two revolutions: one in the natural sciences; the other through a reconstruction of Christianity. The former sought to achieve control over the physical world, the latter redefined values, ethics and worldview in order to establish a Kingdom of Man on earth. These two revolutions are intertwined. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the accompanying movement that sought to replace the older manifestations of Christianity with a new constructions, both originated in Europe, crossed the Atlantic and begat the contemporary West.
The real nature of the “clash”
This transformed belief system now operative in the West, and the civilization that is based upon it, claim universality for themselves. This claim to universality asserts that the cultures, values and ideals that have come into existence on the basis of this belief system are the most advanced form of human achievement. Furthermore, it claims that its political, economic and social systems, and institutions are the destiny of mankind. This claim is neither a localized phenomenon, nor a tacit or passive self-understanding; it is an aggressive contention that is expressed at various levels, through many means by the ideologues, politicians and intellectuals of this civilization.
This self-assessment, and the ingrained self-righteousness it engenders, is accompanied by a multi-billion dollar effort to spread the “fruits” of the Western civilization to the rest of the world through domination, control and occupation. This, the most massive and aggressive march of any civilization that human history has ever witnessed, is also viewed as the most natural outcome, as if the self-proclaimed fittest civilization has a birthright to extinguish all other civilizations as a process of natural selection. This extrapolation of the doctrine of “the survival of the fittest” into the domain of civilizations is based on the assumed superiority of three basic doctrines held sacrosanct by the West: democracy, individual liberty and free-market economy. It is these three components of the Western civilization which are now being exported to the rest of the world by force and hegemony.
America is not alone in asserting the universality of the Western civilization. This assessment is shared by all countries that perceive themselves as being part of Western civilization. Their mutual differences exist only in the realms of methods, strategies and tactics. Thus no one should be deluded by these superficial differences about how the propagation of the Western civilization should be achieved.
The root of the real “clash” that is a current global reality lies in two claims to universality. We have already seen how the belief system that sired the modern Western civilization claims to be universal; another belief system with a similar claim is Islam. Islam’s claim to universality is simply expressed in the Qur’anic statement that it is a message for all people (7:158). It should also be noted here that the Holy Qur’an claims to be the continuation of, and completion of, earlier Divine Revelations, and places itself in the grand tradition of other Revealed Books, with the important distinction that it was revealed to complete all earlier manifestations of a single Divinely ordained religion, al-Islam, and that it corrects the erroneous beliefs and practices that have crept into earlier belief systems through the corruption of the revealed messages or through their eclipse.
The civilization that came into existence on the basis of the message of the Holy Qur’an – the Islamic civilization – now does not possess military and economic strength comparable to the West, but it still holds that its belief system is the only valid one, and that it is for all of humanity. This claim is not presently asserted through any material prosperity and strength, but simply on the basis of the Qur’anic claim that it is a protected message, eternally safe in the “well-guarded tablet” (85:22), accessible to all through the “uncorrupted and incorruptible Book”, the actual Words of God, addressed to all human beings. This belief is simply unshakeable. Hence a materially superior West finds itself face to face with a civilization that had its golden days of strength and power but is now much reduced, yet refuses to accept the universalist claim of a civilization stronger in military and economic terms by several orders of magnitude. That is not all. This exhausted polity, now standing in the way of a universal expansion of Western civilization, itself believes that it will achieve a similar universal expansion because of a Divine promise that, in the end, it is the Truth that prevails. This, then, is the dialectic foundation of the contemporary conflict, erroneously called a “clash of civilizations”.
