Leave religion out of it.
The Clash of Civilisations and the War on Terror(ists): An Imperialist Discourse - Centre for World Dialogue. Mark B. Salter teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ottawa. His most recent book is Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Lynne Rienner, 2003). T he 11 September 2001 attacks on America triggered the US “war against terror”. The flux of the post–Cold War era was fixed in place with a new economy of danger. This essay makes two chief arguments.
In Huntington’s Footsteps The “clash of civilisations” thesis has become a touchstone for contemporary theorising about America’s role in world politics. However, the designation “civilisation” only makes sense with the construction of marginalised “others”. 2 In the imperial discourse which Huntington disinters, barbarians and barbarism are the natural enemies of civilisation. Huntington’s description of the post–Cold War world also assigns a place for America at the head of Occidental, or Western, civilisation. Urging American Primacy 1. 2. 3. Internal Subversion Disavowing the Model. Jay Rubenstein: Clash of Civilizations or Nuisance? Medieval Crusading and the War on Terror.
As the never-ending war on terror enters its second decade, commentators and opinion continue to seek insight from the medieval crusades, when European Christian armies marched to the Middle East to make war against Muslim adversaries. To the casual observer, the crusades would seem to be the origin of all today's problems. Simply put, they look too much alike to be a coincidence. To the cautious historian, these medieval wars have nothing to do with modern jihad or with the Western response to it and their opinions have tended to shape the broader discussion. But maybe my colleagues are too cautious. Let us consider, for example, the question of whether the crusades were a clash of civilizations, if not the beginning of "The Clash of Civilizations" -- a massive war for survival between East and West -- or were they merely a series of minor military imbroglios of no real consequence in the grand narrative of world history?
And the story did not end there. The Clash of Ignorance. Labels like "Islam" and "the West" serve only to confuse us about a disorderly reality. 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. About the Author Edward W. We mourn the loss of Edward Said, who passed away on the morning of Thursday, September 25, 2003. Also by the Author This essay--Edward W. The biggest threat to Western values. The paranoid style in politics often imagines unlikely alliances that coalesce into an overwhelming threat that must be countered by all necessary means.
In Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington conjured an amalgamated East - an alliance between "Confucian" and "Islamic" powers - that would challenge the West for world dominance. Many jihadis fear the Crusader alliance between Jews and Christians. They forget that until recently, historically speaking, populations professing the latter were the chief persecutors of the former. Now Anders Breivik has invoked the improbable axis of Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism, together colonising Europe.
As he sees multiculturalism as essentially a Jewish plot, Breivik has managed to wrap up the new and old fascist bogies in one conspiracy: communists, Jews and Muslims. Like his terrorist counterparts who kill in the name of various Islamic sects, Breivik is willing to slaughter people for an invented purity. Shut up, obey, and collaborate. Sadik J. Al-Azm: Time Out of Joint. There is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion—like schadenfreude—of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11.
I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion. I never had any doubts, either, about who perpetrated that heinous crime; our Islamists had a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center since their failed attack on it in 1993. As an Arab, I know something about the power of vengeance in our culture and its consuming force. In the end, no. Terrorism, Joseph Conrad once wrote, is an act of madness and despair. Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World. Is this how Newsweek hopes to get raised from the dead? Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War. For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century.
Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.” Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek. “The War on Christians” is splashed across the cover, but the actual target of Hirsi Ali’s piece becomes more clear in the title provided for the online version of the piece: “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.” The terms of Hirsi Ali’s argument, such as it is, are all set out in her opening paragraph: "We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny.
The criminally careless tossing out of the term “genocide” gives us a clue about what is to come. Hirsi Ali, Berman, and Ramadan on Islam. Was the prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant? Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular Enlightenment?
Should Muslims consider converting to Christianity? For the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!” She is not hopeful that Americans will heed her warning. Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West. The emotions of the moment dissipate soon after she leaves the hospital, when, driving down Whitechapel Road with her bodyguards, Hirsi Ali glimpses covered Muslim women on the pavement and long-bearded men outside a large mosque. “The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind,” Hirsi Ali writes.
“Nomad” is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. The book had its liberal critics. Comment: The Attack on “All-American Muslim” Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage. Some still work in the auto industry, including Angela Jaafar, who is a marketer, and is married to Mike, a deputy chief in the sheriff’s office.
The Jaafars and their children form one of five Dearborn families featured on “All-American Muslim,” a reality show, on TLC, created by some of the same team behind “Real Housewives of New York.” The show has become the target of an ugly campaign by a group called the Florida Family Association, which calls it “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.”
The Florida Family Association says that Lowe’s is not the only sponsor it has driven away. Raymond Ibrahim vs. Hamid Dabashi part 1 of 7. War Post :: Lawrence Wright: “Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it.” :: April :: 2008. John Calvert on Sayyid Qutb. On Rorotoko, John Calvert. author of Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, offers a fascinating discussion of the subject of his book and his ambitions in writing the book. While recognizing the faults of Qutb’s fundamentalist thought, he also challenges many preconceptions Westerns have regarding his role as a progenitor of Osama bin Laden and the tactics and beliefs of al Qaeda.
Qutb, Calvert suggests, would have rejected the use of indiscriminate violence. While Qutb decried the influence of Western secularism in the Islamic world and challenged the legitimacy of secular regimes in Muslim nations, he also looked to Islam to restore “a sense of religious meaning to an immoral and disenchanted colonial world.” Calvert also describes his critical but empathetic approach to Qutb, which emphasizes his contemporary context of Nasser-led Egypt as well as his own emotional state and his simmering discontent regarding the state of the Islamic world. The Clash of Civilizations? - Programmes. Edward Said, "Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified," Harper's, July 2002. Edward Said, "Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified," Harper's, July 2002 Discussed in this essay: Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong.
Modern Library, 2000. 222 pages. $19.95. What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis. Oxford University Press, 2002. 180 pages. $23. The history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange.
What wasn't immediately noted at the time was how Huntington's title and theme were borrowed from a phrase in an essay, written in 1990 by an energetically self-repeating and self-winding British academic, entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage. " Except for anachronisms like Lewis. But it's really worse than that. And what proof is offered of this 200-year "search," which occupied the whole of Islam?
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