Edward Said gives a good thumbnail of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, then takes grave exception to the much-touted notion that Sept. 11th confirms Huntington’s conception. The Clash of Ignorance:
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington’s thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is–the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes–international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam’s troubles, and in the latter’s case have used Huntington’s ideas to rant on about the West’s superiority, how “we” have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don’t. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to “Islam.”) The Nation [via AlterNet]
Hintington’s Clash of Civilizations essay is reprinted here.
Prolific ‘public intellectual,’ perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the U.S., secular Protestant born in Jerusalem and educated there and in Cairo, ‘doggedly optomistic’ University Professor at Columbia, and all the while struggling against chronic leukemia. Edward Said is interviewed in late September in The Progressive. I think the Moby Dick metaphor he describes here is very much to the point:
Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in mind there.
Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him–which had torn his leg out–to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis–“wanted, dead or alive,” “a crusade,” etc.–suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences. And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden–who has been turned into Moby Dick, he’s been made a symbol of all that’s evil in the world–a kind of mythological proportion is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people. Punish him accordingly, and don’t bring down the world around him and ourselves.
