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A Confused and Misleading Forecaster
By Jacob Thomas
In 1996, Samuel P. Huntington, Professor of the Science of Government
at Harvard University, published ³The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order.²* This work was an expansion of an article he
had written earlier for ³Foreign Affairs² Journal.
Huntington divided the world's cultures into seven current
civilizations: Western, Latin American, Con****ian, Japanese, Islamic,
Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox. Huntington¹s thesis was criticized by many
writers and intellectuals. I single out Thomas Friedman¹s critique that
appeared three years later in his book, ³The Lexus and the Olive
Tree.²** I quote from his ³Opening Scene: The World is Ten Years Old.²
³This book is an effort to explain how this new era of globalization
became the dominant
international system at the end of the twentieth century --- replacing
the Cold War --- and to examine how it now shapes virtually everyone¹s
domestic politics and international relations. In that sense, it is
meant as a contribution to the body of literature that has been
attempting to define the post-Cold War world. Among the most widely
read of this genre are ŠFrancis Fukuyama¹s ³The End of History and the
Last Man² Š and Samuel P. Huntington¹s ³The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order.²
Friedman disagrees with the theses of the above mentioned works:
³Huntington tried to divine the future too much from the past and the
past alone Š Huntington¹s view was that, with the Cold War over, we
won¹t have the Soviets to kick around any more, so we will naturally go
back to kicking the Hindus and Muslims around and them kicking us
around.
³Fukuyama¹s pathbreaking book contained the most accurate insight about
what was new --- the triumph of liberalism and free-market capitalism
as the most effective way to organize a society but his title (more
than the book itself) implied a finality to this triumph that does not
jibe with the world as I find it.² Pp. xvi-xviii
Fast forward to the Third Millennium, and notwithstanding all the
shocking atrocities committed by Islamists in several continents, some
Western scholars continue to deny the role of Islam in world terrorism.
The Wall Street Journal of 4 January, 2008, published a summary of an
article in the January/February issue of FOREIGN POLICY, ³Civilizations
Clash, With or Without Religion.² Here are excerpts, followed by my
comments.
³What would the world be like without Islam? No clash of civilizations?
No 9/11? No holy wars?
³Actually, all of these events would likely have occurred, says Graham
Fuller, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,
British Columbia, and a former forecaster for the Central Intelligence
Agency. Take away Islam, and the world would still be left with the
main forces that drive today¹s conflicts, including colonialism,
cross-national ideologies, ethnic conflicts and terrorism, Mr. Fuller
says.
³True, without Islam, the people of the Middle East would lack a
powerful, crossborder unifying force that sometimes is co-opted by a
small number of people inclined toward violence. But the Middle East
would have access to similar forces, such as Marxism or ethnic
nationalism, that have served that purpose in other parts of the world.
In 2006, the crime-data clearing house Europol said, only one of the
498 terrorist acts in the European Union was Islamist. The rest were
largely committed by separatist and left-wing groups.²
Thus far my quotations from Graham Fuller¹s article in Foreign Policy.
Comments
It is evident that Professor Fuller aimed his remarks at Huntington¹s
thesis; specifically on those parts of his book that pointed to the
Islamic propensity to be in perpetual conflict with the ³Rest of the
world.² For him to ask, ³What would the world be like without Islam? No
clash of civilizations? No 9/11? No holy wars?² and then give the
following answer ³Actually, all of these events would likely have
occurred² is highly irresponsible. Does this former ³forecaster for the
Central Intelligence Agency² really know Islamic history? I doubt it.
He writes from a standpoint that posits moral equivalence between
Christianity and Islam.
I have commented several times in my op-ed articles on the FFI website
that Islam, from its very beginnings, has been involved in violence.
First against the Jews of Arabia, and then, in Islam¹s far-flung
conquests in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Christianity, on the other hand,
was severely persecuted by the Roman authorities for 300 years; and
many of its adherents died as martyrs for their faith. Furthermore, it
must be emphasized that the authoritative texts of Islam, Qur¹an, and
Hadith, sanction war and violence against the Infidels. Muslims
acknowledge the existence of ³Ayat al-Sayf² (The Sword Verses) in those
parts of the Qur¹an that ³descended² on Muhammad after he moved to
Medina in 622 A.D. Later on, Muslim jurists codified the concept of
violence against the ³Others² by dividing the world into two distinct
realms: Daru¹l Islam and Daru¹l Harb, (The Household of Islam and the
Household of War.)
While Professor Graham Fuller wants to detach the civilizational
conflicts from their religious roots, Samuel Huntington¹s thesis is
more convincing. In Chapter Nine of his book, Huntington wrote:
³Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that
the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent
Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate
otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox
and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other¹s Other.
The twentieth century conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical
phenomenon compared to the continuing and conflictual relation between
Islam and Christianity. At times, peaceful coexistence has prevailed;
more often the relation has been one of intense rivalry and of varying
degrees of hot war.² P. 209
³The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict lie not in transitory
phenomena such as twelfth-century Christian passion or
twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of
the two religions and the civilizations based on them. Conflict was, on
the one hand, a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept
of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and
politics versus Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God
and Caesar.² P. 110
Having quoted from Huntington¹s book, I turn to the works of an expert
on Islamic history, Bat Ye¹or, the author of ³The Decline of Eastern
Christianity under Islam: from Jihad to Dhimmitude.²*** In this work,
as well as in her ³Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations
Collide,²**** she has do***ented the intrinsic relation****p between
Islam and violence. The late Professor Jacques Ellul, of the University
of Bordeaux, France, wrote about war (Jihad) as an institution in
Islam, in his Foreword to ³The Decline of Eastern Christianity under
Islam²:
³I have greatly stressed the characteristics of this war, because there
is so much talk nowadays of the tolerance and fundamental pacifism of
Islam that is necessary to recall its nature, which is fundamentally
warlike! Moreover, the author provides us an enlightening explanation
of ³Islamization,² a complex process whereby Islamicized populations
supplanted peoples, civilizations, and religions in the conquered
countries. This comprised two phases: amalgamation processes
(massacres, slavery, and so on). The conflictive and amalgamative
situations could in fact co-exist. Nevertheless, there are actually two
phases: the first is war; the second is the imposition of the dhimmi
status.
³These are the foundations on which were developed both the expansion
of Islam and then the evolution that resulted from the relation****p of
this empire with the West --- an evolution that nothing could prevent
and that seemed to reverse the current, since, on the one hand, the
West would conquer several Islamic countries, and on the other, Western
³values² would influence this world of Islam. But if some of these
values (tolerance, for example) are a sort of challenge intending to
prove that Islam practices them, others act in another manner to
strengthen the dominant trend: nationalism, for example. But whatever
the evolution, it must never be forgotten that it can only be
superficial because doctrine and conduct are based on a religious
foundation: even if this may seem to be weakened or modified,
nevertheless what I have elsewhere called the Œpersistence of
religiousness¹ remains unchanged. In other words, even if the rites,
structures, and customs are all that continue to exist of a once-strong
religion --- today, seemingly neglected --- these visible survivals
only need a spark for everything immediately to revive, sometimes
violently. And this process is described in a masterly fa****on in this
book. The situation that was thought to be dislocated and lapsed
suddenly revives, and we are again faced with the fundamental choice:
the world is still divided between the world of Islam and the world of
war. And inside the umma, the only possible existence for the infidel
is dhimmitude.
³This leads the author to pose the question which has become so
alarming today: ŒDhimmitude of the West?¹ After having thus covered
thirteen centuries of history, read in the light of this question, we
reach our present situation, actually feeling its ambiguity and
instability. We misunderstand this situation, for lack of a clear
vision of the alternative which, whether explicit or not, existed
throughout the centuries and which the present book has the immense
merit to analyze rigorously. The author has the courage to examine
(summarily, because this is not the purpose of the book) whether a
certain number of events, structures, and situations that we know in
the West do not already derive from a sort of Œdhimmitude¹ of the West
vis-à-vis an Islamic world that has resumed its war and its expansion.
Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity,
the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to
destroy Israel), and conversely, Europe¹s defensive reaction
(antiterrorist infrastructure, the psychological impact of intellectual
Œterrorism,¹ political and legal restraints regarding terrorist
blackmail): all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the
traditional policy of Islam. Indeed many Muslim governments try to
combat the Islamist trend, but to succeed would require a total
recasting of mentalities, a desacralization of jihad, a self-critical
awareness of Islamic imperialism, an acceptance of the secular nature
of political power and the rejection of certain Koranic dogmas....This
book thus allows us to take our bearings, so as to understand more
easily our present situation, as every genuine historical study should
do --- without, of course, making artificial comparisons and by
remembering that history does not repeat itself.² Pp. 20, 21
Having quoted these realistic analyses of the role of Islam in
promoting violence across history, I conclude that the thesis of Graham
Fuller is both confusing and misleading. I pity the students at Simon
Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia; they need an accurate
and unbiased introduction to the history of Islam. I trust that they
would consult the works of Bat Ye¹or, Samuel Huntington, and other
scholars who have escaped a Western Dhimmitude mindset. This is what
our world desperately needs today!
REFERENCES
1. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of Word Order, by Samuel
P. Huntington. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996
2. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, New York, 1999
3. The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to
Dhimmitude, by Bar Ye¹or. Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ,
1996
4. Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, by Bat Ye¹or.
Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, 2002
=================
One Comment by Marie:
Take away Islam and much of the world's conflicts would be eradicated.
Take away Islam and 9/11 would have never happened.
Take away Islam and European citizens would be able to roam freely in
immigrant communities.
Take away Islam and there would not be religious intolerance in the
Middle- East, Africa, and Asia.
Take away Islam and the number of poor countries would be lower.
Take away Islam and there would be no human rights violations in the
Middle-East, Africa, and Asia.
Take away Islam and most of the world would live in freedom.
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