Welcome to the blog After the Clash!
This blog is about the social and cultural impact of conflicts and interactions between Western and non-Western societies. Its specific entries may not relate to any specific social or political conflict or interaction. Many of the posts should, however, reflect the perspectives I’ve gained from them.
Many Western scholars, politicians and policymakers have viewed the West’s encounters with Eastern, especially Muslim, peoples negatively. A lot of them have used Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a “clash of civilizations” to assess those interactions, portraying Eastern societies as adversaries and Eastern values and cultures as low-grade or abhorrent. But much of Huntington’s concept is flawed. Many of us won’t even agree with his division of the world into eight civilizations. Is Israel, as he views it, a civilization unto itself? He says the eastern half of New Guinea belongs in the West but the western half doesn’t. I have yet to be convinced of that.
Huntington focuses mainly on the clash between Islam and the West. Islam has, however, been in conflict with a host of non-Western societies, too: Israel, India, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and so on. On the other hand, in all the three post-Cold War wars the West has fought since the publication of his “Clash of Civilizations” article in Foreign Affairs magazine – the first and second Gulf wars and the war in Afghanistan – a host of Muslim countries supported America and the West against their fellow Muslim nations. And in the conflict between the Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina and Christian Serbia, the West sided with the Muslims.
More curiously, Huntington ignores the many blessings from the encounters between Western and Islamic and other societies, including the Sinic and Indian. That doesn’t, of course, absolve the West of its barbarity toward Easterners and the subjugation and exploitation of those societies during the colonial era.
All the same, I see the peoples in Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh, where I’ve lived for many years, benefiting enormously from their association with the British, who had subjugated and ruled over them. I feel embarrassed to admit this as I resent British colonial rule over us to this day. Having fought against British colonialism, though, these peoples have adopted the British Westminster model of democracy and bureaucracy, English education and Western technology and business models to transition to the modern age. In neighboring Hindu-majority India, where I was born, British colonial rulers were thrown out in a more spectacular struggle under Mahatma Gandhi. Yet India embraced British parliamentary democracy and bureaucratic structure. After flirting for four decades with a pseudo-socialist economic system, India adopted the American capitalist economic structure to emerge as a major world power.
Simultaneously, all these societies have revived their indigenous religious, ethnic and cultural values and moral standards. Unfortunately, India, the so-called “world’s largest democracy,” has elected and reelected the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Party (BJP) government, which has jettisoned Western secularism and religious freedom and has all but subjugated and marginalized Muslim and Christian minorities. Pakistan, Bangladesh and just about all other Muslim countries have also anchored their Western-inspired modernization process to different brands of Sharia law and ubiquitous observance of Islamic rites and cultural patterns. In the process, they also suppressed religious minorities and many freedoms of Muslims themselves. The Buddhist-majority societies of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand and Shinto Japan remain embedded in their religious and cultural values and institutions alongside their march to Western modernity.
No country displays a more glaring pursuit of this dual process of modernization and cultivation of religious and cultural heritage than the post-colonial state of Israel. Israeli Jews began their national journey in the late 1940s as a robustly secular, socialist country in which a majority of Jews didn’t care about religious practices. Today, Israeli voters have used parliamentary democracy to elect a religious, mostly fundamentalist, Cabinet under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Originally a pluralist society, Israel has imposed an apartheid system to exclude Muslims and Christians from many public institutions and persecute them brutally and treat them as second-class citizens. It’s as though Israeli Jews boarded the train of parliamentary democracy and got off at the Apartheid station!
The challenge that faces Western and non-Western societies is to develop social and political models that facilitate rapport and understanding among them. America should initiate what the former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called a “dialogue of civilizations” and stop reaching for bombs, missiles and fighter jets to try to resolve its feuds with non-Western other nations. The East should continue to thrive from their collaboration with the West while savoring the meaning of life through the cultivation of their religious and communal values and cultural patterns. At the same time, they must allow their citizens, regardless of their religious and ethnic backgrounds, to enjoy freedom, equality and human dignity.
Had Huntington been alive, I would’ve asked him to write a book or article on “Concert of Civilizations.”
- Mustafa Malik
