Debate or Clash

Copyright © By Dr. Adel Elsaie, Book Title: "Please Revise the Bible, Again"

1.4 Debate or Clash

Karl Marx predicted the emergence of a society based upon materialistic explanation of history. His theory of “historical materialism” advocated that social and political changes were heavily influenced by the class clash between the proletariat and the bourgeois. The ideas of Marx started the Soviet revolution, and established the Soviet empire that failed miserably in just 70 years. No other empire in history collapsed in such a short time.

Another prediction was presented by Samuel P. Huntington, first published as an article in 1992 under the title “Clash of Civilizations?” It was expanded into a book and published the following year under the same title – but without the question mark. The significance of the omission will not be lost on the reader. The book was a publishing event, selling more copies and provoking more controversy than any other book that year (with the exception of fiction bestsellers). His motives, aims and intentions are questioned in various parts of the Islamic world. He insinuated that a world war between the West and the Islamic World backed by China could happen. One would only hope that this prediction does not take another 70 years to collapse.

Samuel Huntington defined civilization as a cultural entity. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the self-identification of people such as Western civilization that is localized in North America and Europe and is identified with Christian heritage. Islamic civilization exists in a band that runs from Indonesia to Morocco up to China and New Guinea and down to the southern tip of Africa. At the present time, Muslim minorities are present allover the globe in terms of emigrant and many converted Muslims.

The first century of Islam witnessed a great expansion to liberate Middle Eastern people from the tyrannical Roman and Persian Empires. As an example, when the Arabs conquered Egypt, they librated the Egyptian Christian Patriarch from prison because of his dispute with the Roman Church about the nature of Jesus. The Arabs were under strict order to stay outside the Egyptian cities and not to interfere in their life. Moreover, when the Arabs liberated Jerusalem, the third Caliph Omar refused an offer by the Christian authority to let the Muslim armies enter the city. They camped outside Jerusalem. This was true liberation, and that is why many races in the Middle East and North Africa are identified as Arabs for 14 centuries. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders invaded the Holy Land in Palestine to impose Christian dominance. During that time the term “Holy War” was coined by the Crusaders. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Caliphate changed the balance, extended its drive over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Ottoman Caliphate declined Britain, France, and Italy colonized most of North Africa and the Middle East. The British Empire included Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Sudan. The French Empire included Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algiers, and Morocco. The Italian got Libya.

After World War 2, the Western empires, in turn, began to disintegrate and the colonial empires disappeared. At first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves to reject the artificial state borders imposed by the colonial power. Most Muslims believe that they belong to one nation as decreed by God, and this belief exists from Muslims in Indonesia to Morocco. During the yearly Pilgrimage in Mecca, or in a mosque in the West, one would witness Muslims from different nationalities, all worshipping God in a striking unity. They all believe that borders that separate their countries are there only for the benefit of their dictators.

During the last half century, there were many wars in the Middle East:

· Four wars occurred between Arabs and Israel, a nation created by the West.

· France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950’s.

· British, French, and Israeli forces invaded Egypt in 1956.

· American Marines landed into Lebanon in 1958. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978. American military returned back to Lebanon in the 1982-1983.

· American Navy Jets and Navy ships attacked Libya in 1981 and in 1986 respectively.

· Iran-Iraq war in the 1980-1988. The secular Iraq was supported by the West to destroy the Iranian Islamic revolution, and to weaken two Muslim countries.

· America engaged in different military operations with Iran, and imposed economic sanctions against Iranians.

· In 1990, the United States organized a strong coalition force to defend Kuwait against aggression of Saddam Hussein. However, when Saddam Hussein informed the U.S. ambassador April Gillespie with his intention to invade Kuwait, her answer was "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She went on to say: "James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."

· In 2003 American and British forces arranged another “coalition force” to invade Iraq with a declared goal of getting rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction which were never found.

The process of the American foreign policy tends to exaggerate external dangers. The most obvious example was Vietnam with its theology of falling dominoes of the rest of the communist states. Similarly, in retrospect it is quite clear that the menace of Soviet military strength was overstated almost to the point of ludicrousness. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, it was declared that the intelligence information that was used to start the war was dead wrong!

The real danger is that the American foreign policy is falling in the trap of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization. Huntington's crucial error is to see the appeal of the West, which he fears is being rejected in the Islamic world, in terms of modern culture and contemporary financial priorities. He ignored the serious consequences of miserable human rights and nonexistent freedom inside the Islamic world, mostly governed by dictatorships supported by the west. While it is true that in its present form the human rights cause is primarily a Western construct, it is not true, as Huntington, argues that the Islamic world has for the most part shunned it. Freedom of religion and expression and expecting security are all human aspirations that have nothing to do with civilizations or races.

Following the steps of Samuel Huntington is a group of so called “terrorism experts” that frequently appears in the American TV News channels. Sometimes it seem that these days the shortest way for gaining fame and publicity is to write a book criticizing Islam or its militants! The Clash of Civilization is being upgraded to war of ideology. So, now we're not in the middle of a war on terror. We're not facing an axis of evil. Instead, we are in the midst of a war of ideology. It seems that this war of ideology is conducted between the radicals in both Christianity and Islam, which the average Christian or Muslim has nothing to do with it. In the war of ideology, as the theory goes, those terrorist groups are exporting their ideology of hate against the American freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom to vote. This leads to expanding the number of “potential terrorists” and dramatically increases the fear level in the Western public.

There are serious holes in the fabric of both hypotheses, clash of civilization and war of ideology. First, there is no clear definition of the problem. Is the problem political or religious? Who is the real enemy? Is it the Islamic militants, the Islamic faith, or the oil-rich countries? TV evangelists claim it is the Islamic faith. Many Muslims believe it is a war on Islam, its institution, and people. Some economists suggest it is directed towards the oil-rich countries for raising the price of oil. Next, what is the strategy of winning this war? Certainly, it is not by having a global clash between the west and over 1.5 Billion Muslim backed by 1.3 billion Chinese (these numbers are obtained from the CIA facts book, 2004) as predicted by Samuel Huntington. This war if it ever happened, God forbid, is unwinnable and will only lead to global catastrophe.

Second, if the enemy is ideologists, and not a terrorist army, either can impose their own rules. There is no time constraint. There is no territory to defend. They never have to win a battle on land but can profit from swaying the public opinion. We showed them how to use TV to attack ideology. So they know the struggle is really fought on satellite TV, and they are far more sophisticated than the Americans in using it.

Third, these hypotheses shift the blame for the September 11 attacks from the failure of the American intelligence and foreign policy in the Middle East to something else that may be defined later. Many Muslims believe that the West is using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin countries and a different standard to others.

Fourth, Huntington talks of Islam as though the Wahhabi model is the only Islam. In fact, Wahhabism was not a major trend in Islam until the alliance that took place between Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab and Mohamed ibn-Saud in the second half of the eighteenth century. Prior to that, there were ideas similar to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam but they were completely marginal. Mainstream Islam is quite distinct from the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam and its culture. The only relationship between the Ottoman Caliphate, which represented Islam politically as a superpower for several centuries, and Wahhabism was one of extreme animosity. It seems obvious that Huntington is not very well versed in the history and factors which led to the rise of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

Fifth, he did not present any evidence to support his theory of an impending clash between the West and what he calls ‘Confucian’ societies, making the theory closer to fiction, specifically the writings of H.G. Wells, than to political analysis. It also owes much to Noam Chomsky’s theory that the United States needs an enemy to survive, and that this role was filled by the eastern bloc from 1945 to 1990. Following the collapse of communism, Chomsky believes Islam is now the prime candidate for this role!

Sixth, the author did not devote enough space in his book to the largest conflict in the history of humanity, World War II, which was fought between forces belonging to the same Western civilization. It was a conflict within the Christian world, but nobody ever mentioned religion as a factor in this huge conflict, which was primarily a conflict between European Fascism and European democracies.

U.S. Administration attempts to convince the world of their success in fighting terrorism. However, Michael Scheuer who was a 22-year CIA veteran that ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, published a book “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terrorism”. He stated clearly that the west is, in fact, losing the war on terror. Moreover, until U.S. Administration recognizes the errant path they have irresponsibly chosen, he says, our enemies will only grow stronger. The greatest danger for Americans confronting the Islamist threat is to believe—at the urging of U.S. leaders—that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do. However, although aspects of the modern world may offend conservative Muslims, no Islamic leader has declared jihad to destroy American democracy, freedom of speech, the national association of credit unions, or coed universities. Instead, a growing segment of the Islamic world strenuously disapproves of specific U.S. policies and their attendant military, political, and economic implications. In this book he goes on to list instances in which American foreign policy has resulted in oppression, economic exploitation, and mass death for millions of Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia:

U.S. support for Israel that keeps Palestinians in the Israelis' slavery.
U.S. and other Western troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. support for Russia, India, and China against their Muslim people.
U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.
U.S. support for apostate, corrupt, and often tyrannical Muslim governments.

The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the harshness of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job. Michael Scheuer is one of the few voices in the west that understands terrorism, its causes and sources, and how to solve it in the most moral and economical way.

A new BBC poll taken by Globescan suggests there is a significant middle ground which rejects the view that Islam and the West are doomed to clash. The result of the poll was published in February 2007. The pollsters questioned some 28,000 people in 27 countries. An overall majority believes there is no inherent incompatibility between Islam and the West, and so no inevitable collision. Problems arise from intolerant minorities - on both sides - rather than from cultures as a whole. Muslims will welcome the finding that tensions are the result of conflicts over political power and interests, rather than differences of religion or culture. They often argue that Muslim radicalism is the product of global inequalities of wealth and power - and Western foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and elsewhere. The large Muslim minorities now living in the West also argue they are the victims of social disadvantage and "Islamophobic" prejudice.

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