Special Report on Islamophobia
There Is or Will Be a "Clash of Civilizations"
The political allies of these right-wing evangelical preachers have also been busy spreading the message of fear and hatred against Arabs and Islam. Here the Bernard Lewis thesis, popularized by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, holds that a "clash of civilizations" between the discrete and relatively homogenous political, cultural and geographical units known as the West and the Islamic world are or inevitably will be, and traditionally have been, in confrontation and conflict. This is variously blamed on the war-like or intolerant nature of Islam and/or the Muslims, or their resentment at the decline of Islamic culture and power and the rise of Europe globally over the past few hundred years. Either way, this thesis relies on pathologizing in some sense Islam and/or the Muslims.
It is highly significant that the list of conflicts around the world involving one group of another of Muslims – Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, the Philippines, etc. – and is supposed in the "clash of civilizations" thesis to demonstrate that Muslims find it almost impossible to get along with non-Muslims because they are inherently and violently intolerant (as Huntington put it, "Islam has bloody borders"), is precisely the same list presented to Muslim audiences by Osama bin Laden and other purveyors of a paranoid and chauvinist world-view in the Islamic world to demonstrate that "Islam is under siege" from the West, Israel, India, etc. In other words, both discourses use the same tactic of lumping together discrete conflicts that have arisen at very different times and places and for completely different reasons, as evidence of a "clash of civilizations," with one side blaming Muslim intolerance of non-Muslims and the other positing a conspiracy by non-Muslims to attack and destroy Islam. Both versions of this "clash of civilizations" thesis rely on the audiences' ignorance of the historical specificity of these various conflicts and substitute any actual historical and political analysis of these conflicts with generalized thesis that presupposes causes of violence based on a set of ahistorical and dogmatic ideological biases that amount to little more than paranoia.
One of the most ugly "clash of civilizations" documents to have been published after the September 11th attacks is a pamphlet entitled Why Islam is a Threat to America and the West (Free Congress Foundation, 2002), written by Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind. Weyrich is a leading figure in the conservative movement in United States, founding president of the Heritage Foundation, and widely recognized as one of the most influential voices in Washington on the far right. Their pamphlet, reminiscent of the worst forms of anti-Semitism, states plainly "we do believe Islam is at war with the Christian West, and we are proud to be considered spokesmen for that view." "Christendom is again in peril" from Islam, they warn. The authors pose as experts on, or at least serious students of, Islam but their sources are entirely drawn from two web sites -- an extremely obscure British Muslim student site and a virulently anti-Islamic Christian fundamentalist site called Answering-Islam.org. Drawing on these sources, the authors proclaim that "Islam is, quite simply, religion of war. While there are lax Islamics [sic], there is no such thing as peaceful or tolerant Islam." Moreover, they misinform their readers, "the two principal sources of Islamic belief, the Koran and the Hadith, ooze war and blood." Joining the attack on the person of Mohammed, Weyrich and Lind declare that "the history of Islam has been a history of violence against non-Islamics [sic]. It started with Mohammed himself. Not only did he personally wage war, he repeatedly called for 'hits' on anyone he did not like, in the manner of Mafia don." Islam, they conclude, "is a religion made for the 21st century -- as, perhaps, in some corner of Hell, it was."
The use of the term "Islamics" in place of the proper "Muslim" to describe followers of Islam as in the text cited above was a feature, briefly, of anti-Muslim rhetoric of this kind in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, now largely and thankfully passé. The reasons for its (mercifully short) use seem to me two-fold: first, it simply asserts a new word that is intended to connote defamatory content and to exercise the power to rename a community at will – a failed attempt at an ostentatious display of cultural hegemony; and second, a kind of linguistic objectification, since Islamic generally refers to abstractions and objects (i.e. Islamic art, Islamic philosophy) whereas Muslim refers directly to the human realm (i.e. Muslim artists, Muslim philosophers). Transforming Muslims into "Islamics" therefore not only arbitrarily renames them but also transforms them from subjects into objects, from people into things.
In the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric, the West is not only assumed to be right, but is also inherently more moral than the Muslims. This attitude is exemplified in comments made by the noted British historian John Keegan in a column published in The Times of London a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks entitled, "In this war of civilisations, the West will prevail." Keegan wrote:
Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go on until one side or the other gives in. They choose the crudest weapons available, and use them with appalling violence, but observe what, to non-Westerners may well seem curious rules of honour. Orientals, by contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy... The Oriental tradition, however, had not been eliminated. It reappeared in a variety of guises, particularly in the tactics of evasion and retreat practised by the Vietcong against the United States in the Vietnam war. On September 11, 2001 it returned in an absolutely traditional form. Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert raider ancestors, assaulted the heartlands of Western power, in a terrifying surprise raid and did appalling damage... This war belongs within the much larger spectrum of a far older conflict between settled, creative productive Westerners and predatory, destructive Orientals... It is no good pretending that the peoples of the desert and the empty spaces exist on the same level of civilisation as those who farm and manufacture. They do not.
In this passage not only the essentialism and simple-mindedness of the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric is amply displayed, but also the sheer bigotry that typically informs it as well. The West here is declared simply superior: "settled, creative productive Westerners" as opposed to "and predatory, destructive Orientals." Yet again, it's hard not to hear echoes of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries in Western societies, in which Christian Europeans, especially "Aryans," were deemed "productive" and "oriental," Semitic Jews were accused of being innately "predatory, destructive" and parasitical.
