Huntington and his critics: the West and Islam.

• Author: Perry, Glenn E.
• Position: Samuel H. Huntington

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM A.D. HAS STARTED with the specter of a clash among civilizations haunting humanity. Already, during the 1990s, as bewildered intellectuals, used to looking through the lens of the Cold War, were trying to make sense of the changed shape of the world, few notions gained more attention than Samuel H. Huntington's proposition--first publicized in the form of articles (Huntington 1993 a; Huntington 1993b) and then elaborated on in a volume (Huntington 1996 *) which in October 2001, five years after its publication, the British magazine New Statesman picked as the book of the week--that conflict among civilizations is emerging as a dominant pattern of world politics. This is in line with Huntington's stress on the importance of culture in politics, and particularly for democratization, in many other works (see Huntington, 1987: 21ff; Huntington, 1991: passim; Huntington, 1984: 207ff and Harrison and Huntington 2001), although his concept of civilization has more to do with shared identities of large groups of peoples ("super tribes") than, as is sometimes imagined, with broader cultural differences, i.e., irreconcilable "value systems" (see Ruthven, 2000:352-353). (Western, Latin American, Orthodox, and Islamic civilizations are closely related and arguably part of the "West" in the broadest sense of the word.) For many, the dramatic events of Autumn 2001 indeed confirmed Huntington's warning that the world seemed to be "poised on the brink of a global intercivilizational war without battlefields and borders" (Falk, 2001).

Huntington has spawned a new vocabulary as well as a thesis. Major concepts include not just the old idea of distinct civilizations but also of a "member state" (e.g., Egypt as a part of Islam or Germany as part of the West), "core state" (a country, such as China, that constitutes the main representative of a civilization), "lone country" (Japan, which coincides with a whole civilization), "cleft country" (one so unfortunate, as in the case of the Sudan, to be split into two or more civilizations), and "torn country" (one such as Turkey whose leadership has--unwisely from Huntington's point of view--tried to uproot it from its own civilization and transplant it in alien soil).

Drawing fire particularly from many who--incorrectly, as I argue--interpret him as inciting intercivilizational conflict, particularly between the West and Islam, Huntington's thesis has inspired a clash among wielders of pens, if not swords. Responding to a general combination of misconceptions about and prejudice against Islam, which Huntington identifies with one of the major civilizational entities or "super tribes," along with its Western, Orthodox, Hindu, Sinic, Japanese, Latin American, African and (sometimes) Buddhist counterparts (and at a time when others were already debating whether the so-called Red peril was being replaced by a Green, that is, Islamic, one, e.g., Hadar 1993; Miller, 1993), there has been a tendency for enlightened scholars to strike back at his thesis as the main incarnation of such bias. However, at least one student of United States foreign policy who is sympathetic with the aspirations of non-Western peoples invokes Huntington in his analysis of the influence of American prej udice against "culturally different 'others'," particularly the Islamic world (Payne, 1995: xiii, 6, and passim). Exemplifying the tendency to read the worst into Huntington's thesis, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (1999: 632)--generally one of the finest, most careful scholars in the field (and writing for a first-rate volume on Islam)--dismisses it as:

...a rehash of a century-old myth that under girded European hegemonic policies justifying wars of colonial expansion and missionary crusades during the nineteenth century under the rubric of 'civilizational mission,' 'white man's burden,' or Manifest Destiny. It posited the superiority of European man, the acme of human civilization, who willingly assumes the burden of sharing his values and achievements with the rest of the backward world. In the process, this myth justified the ransacking of the cultures of the conquered people and confining Muslim achievements to ethnological museums or the dustbin of history.

Indeed, there is much to object to in Huntington's writings on this subject, but critics--some of whose otherwise excellent books, cases in point being those of John L. Esposito (1999), Fawaz A. Gerges (1999), Fred Halliday (1996; also see Halliday, 2000), and Shireen T. Hunter (1998) appear at least in large part to be inspired by and designed as responses to Huntington's thesis (and in some cases, are simply attempts to refute Huntington)--often demonstrate little evidence that they even have read his work. Ironically (as will become apparent), it is those commentators who are committed to maintaining cultural Westernization and/or Western political hegemony in the Islamic world who would rightly be angered by Huntington's thesis insofar as they actually have read his writings on the subject. While providing excellent responses to the writing of Islamophobes in general, some of the critics' (Secretary General Kofi Annan's [1999] observations stated in a speech at Oxford University providing one partial exce ption, as do some serious reviews of Huntington's book [e.g., see McNeill 1997]) (1), many commentators fail to deal with Huntington's specific ideas but only launch broadside attacks against him. They sometimes seem not to realize that he has, in fact, already denounced the very ideas that they have accused him of having articulated. Thus in his fall convocation address at the University of Virginia in 1994, R.K. Ramazani (n.d.: 4) lambasted Huntington's thesis as "a reincarnation of the old Cold War [but now against the Islamic and Confucian worlds] under a new name." Responding during the Autumn 2001 crisis to what he believed was a call for an inevitable conflict with Islam, Edward W. Said characterized the Huntington thesis as a "Clash of Ignorance." (Said 2001). Huntington's critics repeatedly and unwittingly hurl back the same ideas that Huntington himself has espoused and sometimes demonstrate how poorly they have done their homework both by misquoting him on the simplest matters (2) and--more serious ly--by vituperatively attacking him, as in the case of Haddad (see above) for what they think are his basic themes but which in fact epitomize the opposite of what he says. Admittedly, some of the hostile reactions to Huntington's civilizational thesis appeared before he elaborated on it in the book published in 1996, but a careful reading of his articles reveal that from the onset, at least in a rudimentary way, he was expressing themes that his critics failed to notice.

The slogan of those who are shocked by what they perceive as Huntington's call for a new crusade has gained the label "dialogue among civilizations." A clear attempt to rebut Huntington, this phrase apparently was first articulated by President Muhammad Khatami of Iran in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1998, with the year 2001, on his suggestion, being designated by the world organization as the "Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations." The Iranian government established an International Centre for Dialogue Among Civilizations (ICDAC) in 1999 in order "to promote ...mutual understanding and tolerance" (IDAC website). Although proposed as a refutation, this concept of "dialogue"--as I show below--ironically in many ways is consistent with much, though not all, of what Huntington says. Huntington may even be waiting for an invitation to participate in these activities, the initiation of which in fact he has given himself "some small credit by frightening people as to the dangers of clashes o f civilizations." (Huntington, 1998). While abhorring (like Huntington) the prospect of a "clash," proponents of "dialogue" also implicitly accept the centrality of civilizations as the major units into which the world is divided. Even, as in his address to a conference in Tehran in 2001, when speaking of the goal of "pav[ing] the ground for setting the foundations of a global civilization in which all nations and civilizations can actively participate," President Khatami seems to accept the fact that there are separate civilizations and that they will continue as separate entities when a future world civilization comes into being (see the ICDAC website).

A more nuanced analysis by a scholar who shares those critics' concerns is consequently overdue. The sensational nature of warnings about a "clash of civilizations" as well as of some specific statements that Huntington makes notwithstanding, much of what he says might evoke anger, even accusations of appeasement (though not civilizational disloyalty, for one of his main concerns is the West's self-interest even as he condemns its attitudes and policies toward "the rest"), from proponents of continuing Western domination of the world. Within the Islamic world, it is the West's copycats ("Kemalists") that Huntington writes about most contemptuously, similarly he also condemns the West's client regimes in general and his prognosis for them is particularly pessimistic. From the side of those in the Islamic world who resent the erosion of their culture and their religion by Westernization, Huntington would understandably win loud applause to the extent that his writing might come to be known within their ranks. I t is ironic that Huntington's Islamophile critics find Fuad Ajami (1993: 2ff)--an analyst now famous as a spokesman for Western militancy against those whose roots he shares and dismissed by Huntington (citing Edward Said) as "a White man's nigger"(p. 66)--joining them in their denunciations of the civilizational approach, demonstrating that Ajami at least had read and understood Huntington's writing. Those in the non-Western civilizations, perhaps most of all in the Islamic world, who are...