Part Nine
(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
The Fabrication of the “Clash of Civilizations”
No sooner had the European grown weary of endlessly repeating the phrase “Judeo–Christian culture,” along with its alleged right to domination and his presumed authority to represent it, than he presented us with a new fabrication: the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.” What concerns me as much as the intention behind this fabrication is the eagerness with which a number of Arabs—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—as well as non-Arab Muslims, rushed to engage with it, falling straight into its trap. They displayed a readiness to enter into “dialogue” with the European in order to resolve this supposed clash or to find a compromise that would satisfy him. This new fabrication contains within it a myth no less baseless than that of the Judeo–Christian culture.
Although the European has attempted to present this fabrication as a historical analysis of the nature of global conflict in our time, it is in truth directed at us, serving primarily to justify his unrelenting desire to dominate us—or to preserve that domination.
If we pause briefly and examine the phrase “clash of civilizations,” we will find it to be a fabrication even at the level of language, before we consider its substance. The first thing that arrests attention is that if we are to speak of a clash between civilizations, we must first agree on what the term itself means. Without agreement on terminology, dialogue becomes futile and empty. Arabic—one of the great derivative languages—clearly distinguishes between ḥaḍāra (civilization), madaniyya (urbanity or civility), and thaqāfa (culture). Each term carries a distinct meaning, usually evident in its linguistic root. English, by contrast, is not a derivative language, and most of its vocabulary—particularly in the realms of thought, culture, science, and technology—is borrowed from Latin and/or Greek. This means that one cannot ascertain the meaning of a borrowed English word by tracing its root; the borrower simply assigns it a meaning of his own.
English makes no distinction, as Arabic does, between ḥaḍāra (civilization) and madaniyya (civility or urban development). The word civilization entered the English language only in the mid-eighteenth century, meaning “the process of emerging from savagery and lack of education.” It was borrowed from the Latin civitas, meaning “city.” Thus, its proper Arabic equivalent is madaniyya, not ḥaḍāra. This implies that prior to the nineteenth century, English possessed neither the word nor the concept in its modern sense—suggesting there had been no perceived need for it. Arabic, by contrast, has long possessed the concepts of taḥaḍḍur (civilization) and tamaddun (urbanization), allowing the Arabic speaker to grasp their meanings intuitively, without recourse to dictionaries or etymological explanation.
Despite these facts, a reader of Samuel Huntington’s book would conclude that this European believes that Europeans themselves invented the concept of civilization and employed it long before others—so much so that he feels entitled to write of a new historical phase defined by a clash between civilizations of his own choosing. He does so much as his colleague Fukuyama did when he wrote of the “end of history” following the supposed triumph of European capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is not the first time we have been asked to accommodate European inadequacy in expressing his ideas through vague and ill-defined terms—and then to reshape our own thinking and discourse to conform to the deficiencies of his language. Civility is not civilization; not every urbanized society is civilized. Were that the case, the United States—having surpassed others in material urban development—would have been the most civilized society of the twentieth century, and newly established states would qualify as civilized merely by constructing modern infrastructure. Yet human history, once the dominance of the United States inevitably fades, will record that a society capable of incinerating tens of thousands of children with nuclear weapons in Hiroshima proved itself among the most brutal and least civilized of all.
As for us—the peoples of the Fertile Crescent—we have no difficulty understanding either civility or civilization. We have possessed continuous urban life since our ancestors first settled in cities. Archaeologists have discovered in Mosul a city dating back nearly ten thousand years. As for civilization—the system of values, ethics, and order that gives meaning to urban life—our people have known it for millennia. It suffices to recall that the Code of Hammurabi stands among the earliest written legal systems, revealing the depth of civilization attained by humanity in our region.
I will not elaborate here on the distinction between civility and civilization, or on the role of culture in transforming urban life into civilization; that lies beyond the scope of this discussion. But I will say this: what the European seeks through this fabrication is, in reality, a clash of urban systems, not a clash of civilizations. And even then, for a clash of civilizations to exist, the civilizations involved must first be identified. Which civilizations, according to Huntington’s theory, are clashing in our region? Is there today an Islamic civilization with which Europe is in conflict? And is there a European civilization confronting it?
There is no Islamic civilization for Europe to confront. Islam is a religion, much like Christianity, and in this respect it differs little from Christianity in the diversity of its adherents. There is no intellectual bond between a Muslim in Egypt and a Muslim in Indonesia, for example, beyond shared rituals such as prayer and pilgrimage. Beyond that, there is little to unite them.
And what, precisely, is the European civilization Huntington asks us to accept as the opposing force in our region? The European capitalist, having failed to assert dominance through the fabrication of Judeo–Christian cultural superiority, now claims to possess a European civilization locked in conflict with us—yet he errs at every step. His first error is the claim that a collection of Christian peoples and states collectively constitutes a single civilization called “the West.” In truth, he excludes Catholic Christians from the center of this supposed civilization and regards Orthodox Christians with disdain. What he actually means by the European who embodies this alleged civilization is the figure known in the United States as the WASP—White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. These people have been, and remain, the vanguard of the assault against us. This is not to deny that others participate in that assault, but the Anglo-Saxons remain its spearhead.
This alone reveals that there is no clash between a Christian civilization and an Islamic one, as Huntington and his allies would have it appear. What exists instead is a renewed version of the same project that began with the Crusades: domination of our region in order to compensate for the inferiority complexes already described.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume the existence of a European Christian civilization, what are its defining features? What values, if any, unite European Christians? The simple answer is: none. The values of Slavic Christians, represented today by Russia, bear no resemblance to those of British Christians, for example. There is no common ground between a Bulgarian Christian and a Norwegian one. In short, there are no shared civilizational or cultural bonds among the peoples of Europe. One may identify political, military, or economic alliances—but these do not constitute the foundations of a shared civilization. They are merely the arrangements of urbanized societies locked in perpetual competition within the capitalist system to which they belong.
Had Europe truly constituted a coherent civilization, as proponents of the “clash of civilizations” claim, its societies would not have waged the most violent and blood-soaked wars against one another for three centuries—wars culminating in two world wars in the twentieth century that claimed tens of millions of lives. Where, then, is this imagined European civilization?
Advocates of this fabrication also ignore the Christians of our region. These Christians cannot be counted as part of the Islamic civilization allegedly targeted by the theory of clash, nor are they included in the Europeans’ supposed civilization. This is a dilemma the European prefers not to confront. He cannot explain why he abandoned the Christians of Palestine, Iraq, and Syria to the consequences of his aggression and his bankrupt theories. Nor is he any more capable today of answering for this than he was when he withdrew from Palestine after the Crusader settlement, leaving its Christian population behind—simply because they were never part of the Judeo–Christian culture, just as they are not today part of his imagined clashing civilization.
How, then, did the Arabs deal with all of this?
That is what I shall attempt to examine next…
To be continued…