The Clash of Civilizations... moving in unforeseen directions

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory created waves across academic circles when it was first published fifteen years ago. A former professor of Harvard University, Huntington, now incapacitated, lives near Boston. Considerable attention has been focussed on his thinking in recent times. It has often been pointed out that 9/11 and a sprout of "Islamic terrorism" across the globe provide ample validity for his 'Clash' theory.

Huntington provided an original thesis about ‘a new phase’ in world politics after the end of the cold war, but several of his arguments relied on a vague notion of something called "civilizational identity" and the “interaction among seven or eight major civilizations”, of which the conflict between two, Islam and the West, gets the lion’s share of his attention. As the late Edward Said put it: "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 religions and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing."

This brings us to a fundamental problem with the position of Huntington and his admirers, namely, the tendency to see reality in stark black and white. The tendency here is to disregard or gloss over the plurality of every religion. Labels like ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ are freely used. Which Islam are they talking about? Islam, for instance is not only Osama Bin Laden and “those 19 young Arabs who stuck America on 9/11” but also Asghar Ali Engineer of India, Eqbal Ahmad of Pakistan and numerous others who are trying to counter – often at great personal danger - the forces of fundamentalism in their own religions. How inadequate can labels, generalizations and cultural assertions be!

Like his contemporary Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History and the Last Man”), Huntington too seems to elevate Western culture as the normative value that provides the impetus to judge the validity of the cultures and religions of the world. In this clash, they have no doubt that ultimately, the Western culture and society would triumph.

Huntington had stated that of all the distinguishing characteristics of civilization, religion was the most powerful. It would be informative to review such a position in the light of a major survey undertaken recently by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The study finds that most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A strong majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, including the majority in nearly every religious tradition, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion.

More than at any other time in the past, today, there is traffic across the borders making irrelevant any neat divide between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ or any such categorization. Muslims (and the followers of other world religions) are no longer on the fringes of the Western society, but at the center. Large parts of North America and Western Europe have become highly pluralistic. Western cultural values too, on the other hand, have made deep inroads in recent decades into most other parts of the world. We no longer live in societies neatly divided on religious or cultural lines. If there is any divide today, that is between the powerful and the powerless, between the haves and the have-nots. As poverty grows in the Western world and pockets of affluence crop up in the non-Western world, the predicted clash is likely to move in unforeseen directions.