WORLD VIEW:THE PHRASE "Islam and the West" sounds innocuous to many European ears. So does another often used about Turkey: a "moderate Islamic state". In fact they both contain assumptions offensive for other peoples, as I learned at a forum organised by the Alliance of Civilisations in Istanbul this week.
Set up in 2005 on the initiative of the Spanish and Turkish governments after the terrorist atrocities in Madrid, it is now sponsored by the United Nations and has more than 100 member states. This was its second international forum devoted to inter-cultural dialogue. Attended by more than 1,000 state and delegates from non-governmental organisations, it launched initiatives on youth, cultural and media exchanges and was a useful networking occasion.
At a session on reporting across cultural divides, a prominent Indonesian journalist explained why he finds the first phrase so objectionable. Islam is a religious category, the West a geographical one. So they are commensurable only if one assumes (as a Turkish journalist specialising in religious affairs put it at a separate briefing) that the East is doomed to be Muslim.
Seen thus, one can begin to understand what is taken for granted here. As the Indonesian explained, a hierarchy of values is built in: of the West as enlightened or civilised and Islam as medieval and regressive. Secularisation and modernisation are counterposed to religion.
This draws on the 18th-century origins of the word civilisation, defined as the opposite of barbarism by French and English writers. It also draws on the long history of Orientalism, the term used by Edward Said to describe deprecatory attitudes towards the East held by those who essentialised it in imperial and post-imperial times by reducing its varied cultures and traditions into a religious mould.
That tradition was revived during the Bush administration when neo-conservatives joined Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations popularised during the 1990s to the war on terror pronounced after the 9/11 attacks.
It was a disaster, according to Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League. Clashes occur on the extreme fringes of civilisations, he told the forum, not between their mainstreams. In fact the issue is not a clash between civilisations or religions like Islam and Christianity but a highly sensitive political issue – centrally finding a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Moussa welcomed Barack Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament in which he said the US is not, and will not be, at war with Islam. That certainly added topicality to this forum and Obama met some of those present informally. It was noted that he avoided using the phrase “moderate Islamic nation” in the speech. This offends Turkish secularists who say it ignores the modern nation’s origins in the last revolt against the Ottoman empire; Turkish Muslims resent the implication that their religion is normally more extreme, since they are regarded as exceptional.
Instead Obama concentrated on the geographical aspect of Turkey as a bridge between East and West, supporting its official nationalism which wants to join the European Union. It was noted also that Hillary Clinton last week officially endorsed the state department’s dropping of the phrase “war on terror”, used by Bush and Cheney to amalgamate Islamic radical groups and Iran into a monolithic enemy with a common identity and ideology.
In his recent comments on Obama’s foreign policy, Cheney lamented how the administration appears to be returning to the pre-2001 model of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue, rather than a military problem. “When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantánamo and so forth . . . they are very much giving up that centre of attention and focus that’s required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks,” he told CNN. Cheney discounts the evident loss of US soft, or diplomatic, power around the world highlighted by vice-president Joe Biden in his riposte to those remarks.
Obama is trying to extract US power from this stance – against which the Alliance of Civilisations is also directed. He concentrated instead on how entangled cultures are with one another, also a forum theme. In this sense both have to pay attention to the danger that by inverting the notion that civilisations will clash after the end of the cold war and in the subsequent war on terror – and specifically that Islam and the West will clash – they are simply reproducing the mindset which assumes civilisations exist as discrete and separate entities displaying a cultural unity capable of having a clash, alliance or a dialogue with one another.
In fact they are much more problematic than this. Huntington himself recognised that complexity, even though his intellectual methodology in analysing cultures and identities has a definite essentialist thrust – as was seen in his final book on US national identity, Who are we? America’s great divide. In an interview before his death last year, he dissociated himself from the neo-conservative stance on the Middle East. But he still defended his basic case that civilisations are in conflict.
For most political purposes it is better to speak of world regions or of continents rather than competing or co-operating civilisations. Regions, continents and civilisations overlap and interact in many different ways. This was emphasised by the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the forum when he said one of the main reasons for drawing distorted conclusions about their relations is simply that we are insufficiently informed about one another.
pgillespie@irishtimes.com