Resisting the Western challenge

International Herald Tribune (France) ^ | March 6, 2003 | William Pfaff

[liberallarry]

Modernizing Islam

 

With an American war with Iraq presumably days away, the idea that the United States is actually launching a war against Islamic civilization is being promoted in the Arab Middle East and elsewhere in Islamic society - and is part of the doctrine on offer from some American neoconservatives and some elements on the Israeli right.

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The latter groups say that Saddam Hussein has to be defeated as the first step in a campaign to overthrow other anti-Western governments and inspire a great modernizing reform of Islamic society and political culture. This implies a demand upon Muslims to make their society over in order to be fit for membership in Western-defined global society.

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The conceptual error is the same one made in Samuel Huntington's original argument that war between civilizations will replace wars between nations: It treats civilizations as responsible political entities, capable of conducting wars.

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Civilizations clash on cultural issues, but wars have political causes and are conducted by governments, or even by nonstate groups, for tangible purposes and on the decisions of responsible leaders.

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The theory also misinterprets what makes societies change. They do change, but only when the change is generated inside the society. There has to be intellectual conversion where values are concerned.

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The problem of the West in the current situation - the American problem, in particular - is that its democratic political culture is a single element in a huge package of secular values, a great many of them implacably hostile to the core values of orthodox Islamic religion, and indeed to religion itself.

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It is not an accident that on a great many international value issues, an implicit alliance has existed for many years between Muslim authorities, the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, and Orthodox (and some other) Jewish leaders and institutions. This alliance has been influential or even decisive in a number of international deliberations.

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On value matters, the lines of division are not primarily geographical, but cultural and religious. This is true even in societies where formal religion has lost adherents and become something of a cultural relic.

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As this "relic" actually created the society's values, a surviving, if transmuted, version of those values often remains very powerful, transformed into secular assumptions or prejudices that perpetuate essential elements from the historical religion.

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Scots may not go to church in the numbers of the past, for example, but Presbyterian values are still a social force, as are Catholic social values and notions of "solidarity" in post-Catholic France and Germany. That is why the EU stubbornly defends the so-called "European social model."

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Islamic intellectuals understand (and said so, in a United Nations report last year), that there has been a terrible failure in their society to find an accommodation with Enlightenment ideas and the scientific culture of the modern Western world. But this failure will not be repaired by another military defeat by the West. That defeat will only intensify what the West sees as negative forces at work in the Islamic world.

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The real modernizing force in Islam today may prove to be resistance to the West, or to be more exact, resistance to the United States and Israel.

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The fact is, Mediterranean, Persian and Central Asian Islamic civilization has already been changed by the United States and the West, but in ways the West has not particularly liked.

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The Islamic fundamentalist revolt in Iran, for example, may eventually prove to have been a modernizing event, throwing off foreign control and asserting an Iranian identity lost for generations, in turn able to make its own accommodation to the modern world.

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Al Qaeda's activists are mostly educated people with Western experience. Their movement in another context might be called prerevolutionary, signal of a young elite's determination to replace old and failed leaders.

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If history is a guide, any dramatic change that does come in Islamic society will be caused by people who resist the Western challenge - not by people who collaborate with Western governments. Societies are more often changed by violence than by good advice.

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Tribune Media Services International

[liberallarry]

I think he's wrong - civilizations change greatly as a result of military defeat - but it's an interesting article.

[CasearianDaoist]

You really should put a Barf alert on any Pfaff editorial - he is a hard core leftist, and deeply anti-american in outlook.

[Rudder]

Well, maybe we can't make them change. But we can make wish they did.