A
clash of civilizations is
wrongheaded
By
Jonathan
Power
August 29, 2003
LONDON - Too many observers look at Iraq as if it were
a boxing match. Invasion - one up for the "West", well at
least America and Britain. Sabotage of electric pylons -
one down for the West. Blowing up the UN headquarters in
Iraq - one down for humanity. And so it will go on,
doubtless for a long, long time. Only one thing is sure
and clear: in the cold searching light of history each of
these incidents that absorb us will not even rank as
footnotes.
Whatever one thinks of the exaggerations of Samuel
Huntington's book, "The Clash of Civilizations",
nevertheless a competition of civilizations it is and has
long been. And we need to know that history if only to
absorb its greatest lesson- military success on either
side has never determined the direction of the
civilization in question for more than a century or two
at the most. That is the lesson of the Crusades and it is
also the lesson of the great Ottoman Empire which started
to lose intellectual momentum in the fifteenth century
when its military reach was at its zenith.
Yet even if the Christian West is now in the
ascendancy, it has never honestly come to terms with how
much it owes Islamic civilization. It was the Abbasid
dynasty, founded after an internal Muslim coup in 750 AD,
that absorbed the Hellenic legacy at a time when, under
Charlemagne, Europe simply intellectually withered. In
Charlemagne's Europe reading and writing were not highly
regarded as they were in the Islamic world. The
scientific, medical and philosophical learning of
classical antiquity were almost entirely forgotten.
Christian culture was deeply retarded and conservative
and intellectual life was dominated by the bible and the
Latin fathers of the church.
The Western world didn't begin to regain its
intellectual luster until the 12th and 13th century when
it borrowed back from the Islamic world the repositories
of scientific and intellectually knowledge it had
forgotten about, including, for example, Euclid's
"Elements", said to be the most influential book on
geometry ever written. Then the rise of the West took the
Islamic world by surprise.
Once the fifteenth century was under way Europe
started to find its pace. This was the age of printing,
of exploration and western hegemony. Even though the
Ottoman Empire was emerging as the most powerful state in
the world, following the conquest of Constantinople,
Islam started to regress intellectually. Historians find
it difficult to explain this contradiction but it should
act as a warning to western hubris now. The West,
particularly the U.S., is militarily strong, yet it seems
not to have the political leverage it did only a
generation or so ago.
It doesn't help, as George Bush and Tony Blair have
tried, in a mistaken attempt to fudge history and to
appear conciliatory, to say that Islam is not a religion
of the sword. In part it is. Muhammad himself became a
warrior and within twenty years of his death the Muslims
had captured much of the Roman and Persian Empires.
Neither does it help to infer, as both Bush and Blair
have done, that the West is motivated by its Christian
principles. Christ, in marked contrast to Muhammad, was a
man of non-violence, as were his early followers. It was
only once Christianity became the official religion of
the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine in
AD 312 that it changed its philosophy. Then it became,
and has long continued to be, as much a warrior religion
as Islam.
Their breath would be better spent in educating
electorates as to the likelihood of the Islamic world
regaining its foothold in history and becoming again a
mighty intellectual, scientific and, inevitably, military
force. In fact this is what Saddam Hussein in his own
idiosyncratic, violence-infused, way was trying to bring
off- as before him Nasser in Egypt had tried to do. These
are today's missteps but this renaissance of Islam will
come to pass in one not too distant day, if only because
the roots of civilization in the Islamic world run very
deep. The brain power is certainly there. It is just a
question of the right political structures. Perhaps in
the modern world democracy can be the key to unlock the
stored up potential, as modern Turkey seems to be
demonstrating. And the West should unreservedly welcome
it.
The West should take its cue from scholars of
fifteenth century Renaissance humanism, especially the
Spaniard, John of Segovia and the German, Nicholas of
Cusa, as Richard Fletcher in his new book, "The Cross and
the Crescent" has suggested. John argued it was important
to find points of contact between Christianity and Islam.
Convergence not divergence was the key. Nicholas, who
became a cardinal, argued that despite the differences
between the two faiths we had to realize that human
knowledge can never be more than conjectural. If there is
a Truth it can only be understood by means of mystical
intuition.
These eternal questions of civilization are the ones
we should be concentrating on. Which side is up and which
is down in Iraq are, by comparison, truly ephemeral.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
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