CULTURE

In a sense, the modern era was brought to the Middle East in 1798 in the form of a small expeditionary force commanded by a young French general. The ease in which Napoleon and his army were able to not only conquer the ancient lands of Egypt, but to establish a colonial regime and hold power over a large part of Islamic civilization was a humiliation the region is still yet to fully recover from. The overpowering military dominance of the West, driven by new technologies and schemes of economic development, were a dramatic expression for the end of an era in Islam. The civilizational struggle that had been going on for centuries had, for the time being, been won. The two centuries to follow would bring about even more blatant examples of this victory. The Golden Age of Islam was over.

What makes this historical turnabout all the more remarkable is the fact that in the centuries prior to Napoleon’s expedition, Islam had been more dynamic, inquisitive, and prosperous than the Christian Civilization of the West. It was Islamic scholars who had preserved the storehouse of the Greek and Roman scientific and philosophical knowledge during the Medieval Era in the West, when Christian Civilization had devolved into the barbarity of the Inquisition, and was going about burning its women for the crime of “witchcraft.” Yet something happened around the time of the Renaissance. As new discoveries were bringing a greater grasp of the universe, and the wondrous powers of science were opening up inventions and innovations, Islam began to stagnate. A once vibrant society became increasingly backward-looking, tending to perceive all the problems of society as being caused by a turning away from the Islamic purity of a bygone era.

The great Western scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, writes, “The reluctance of the Islamic Middle East to accept European science is all the more remarkable if one considers the immense contribution of the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages to the rise of modern science.” He goes on to observe, “In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil, and in a sense a dependant of the Islamic world.” This age of superiority led to a form of cultural arrogance in Islam, according the Lewis. Islamic society came to view the Christian West as a backwater; a land of barbarians and heretics who could quite simply offer no improvements to the purity and perfection embodied in the Koran and Islamic society. What was true in the teachings and culture of Christianity had already been incorporated and improved by Islamic civilization. This assumption led to an almost complete rejection of, or isolation from, the tectonic shifts that the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were making in West.

The Napoleonic conquests in the Middle East were a tangible expression of the power of Western science to innovate superior technologies. The ability to project violence and subdue armies and populations is understandable in any culture or language. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington explains, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas of values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

The superiority of the organized violence that Huntington speaks of led to over a century of colonization and humiliation in the Middle East. The empires of the West divided up the land and resources of the region, creating artificially-imposed borders cutting across tribal and religious affiliations. The result was an assortment of “nation-states,” that lacked anything like the coherence and historical meaning of nations in the West. The journal Foreign Affairs has noted, “When the European oversea empire dissolved, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns and settlements.” The legacy of this colonial era is widely viewed in the region to be the root cause for the lack of economic and political progress in the modern Middle East.

The decades following the end of the European colonial era has, according to Lewis, led to “a string of shabby tyrannies” throughout the region, “ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.” The Middle East, and Islamic civilization as a whole, rank among the world’s most repressive in political and religious freedoms. The modern Middle East has also starkly failed in its efforts towards economic development in the age of the global economy. According to the World Bank, “The region still lags behind the world in investment, job creation, productivity, exports and income.” One study concluded the total non-oil exports from the Arab world “amount to less than those of Finland, a country of just six million people.”

This political and economic performance has led to a sense of disillusionment and alienation from the modern world. As a result, we have witnessed throughout Islam a rising tide of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism; this trend has been one of the most significant sources of instability to the international order since the end of the Cold War. Huntington writes, “To ignore the impact of the Islamic Resurgence on Eastern Hemisphere politics in the late twentieth century is equivalent to ignoring the impact of the Protestant Reformation on European politics in the late sixteenth century.”

The impact Huntington is talking about forms the core of his theory on “the clash of civilizations.” In 1994, in an essay under that title in the journal Foreign Affairs, Huntington proposed one of the most talked-about and controversial theories as to the dominating trend driving international conflict in the Post-Cold War era. His theory suggests that the end of the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West has led to a resurgence in ethnic and civilizational identity. Individuals and nations no longer attach the same significance to their political or economic system, according to Huntington’s theory. They are finding meaning and identity in older cultural and religious ties.

It is as if the map of the world is being redrawn along the lines prior to European colonization. “People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions,” according to Huntington. This realignment will naturally cause a revival of more ancient rivalries and animosities, such as the age-old struggle between the Christian West and the Islamic East. “The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

But the lingering sense of isolation and desperation that has led to the rise in Islamic extremism is not purely a clash between the East and the West. One of the most troubling observations in the theory of the “clash of civilizations” is that virtually everywhere Islam comes into contact with a different civilization, there is violence going on today. Whether that be in Chechnya, where Islam meets Russian-Orthodox civilization; or Kashmir, where it meets Hindu civilization; or in Western China, Israel, or the Sudan… the trend indicated on the map leads to some of Huntington’s most controversial observations: there is some religious, historical, political, or economic force that has led to a civilizational animus between Islam and the rest of the world.

Huntington’s theory has not been embraced in all quarters, to be sure. Johns Hopkins political scientist Fouad Adjami states quite clearly, “Huntington is wrong. He has underestimated the tenacity of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these ways at great odds, always perilously close to the abyss, the darkness never far.” Adjami sees in Huntington’s map of civilizations a gross over-simplification of the nature of international conflict. “It is easy to understand Huntington’s frustration with this kind of complexity, with the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion that the West breeds, and his need to simplify matters, to mark out the borders of civilizations.”

Yet Huntington’s map speaks for itself, and the trend towards inter-civilizational violence only seemed to be magnified on September 11th, and the eight years of war that have followed. Where this struggle will ultimately lead is an open question. The Islamic nations of the Middle East could find a more productive relationship working within the global economy. Political reforms could be introduced giving voice to the grievances of the disenfranchised. Or we could be entering another era of civilizational “crusades” modeled after the historic and bloody wars that have defined the centuries-old relation between the Christian West and the Islamic East.