Books
And the sun became black
by Paul G Buchanan
Life in these times is often presented to us as the fight between good and evil – meaning, Western civilisation versus fundamentalist Islam. But these flawed religious cultures have a lot in common: decadence, fanaticism and violent imperialism.
THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENTALISMS: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, by Tariq Ali (Verso, $39.95).
ROGUE NATION: American unilateralism and the failure of good intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz (Basic Books, $64.95); THE MAKING OF A TERRORIST, by Abd Samad Moussaoui (Serpent’s Tail, $39.95); 30 DAYS: A month at the heart of Blair’s war, by Peter Stothard (HarperCollins, $29.99).
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon drove home the fact that terrorism is the dark side of globalisation (along with drug and arms dealing). Although facilitated by the accoutrements of Western technology, this form of unconventional warfare is usually explained along cultural lines, as a conflict between the secular West and fundamentalist Islam.
The “clash of civilisations” poses the relationship between Western and Islamic cultures as a dialectic of opposites, one violent and one benign. But this is a false dichotomy, because the issue is more complex than the posing of antithetical viewpoints.
Ideological conflict within the West was resolved in 1989 with the collapse of Stalinism. Thereafter, long-cycle tensions between Islam and the West resumed with the advent of capitalist globalisation. For Islamists, it implied the end of their traditional way of life and the triumph of evil forces after a thousand years of Islamic decline.
Translated into material conflicts posing as a cultural clash, it has evolved into a defensive guerrilla war using terrorist weapons in order to avoid the infidel’s military strengths, and thereby erode his will to continue the subjugation of Muslim civilisation. But the underlying conflict remains ideological, albeit mostly hidden: metaphysical versus existential views, material versus spiritual orientation, determinacy versus indeterminacy in charting the human condition. The irony is that it occurs mostly within the counterpoised perspectives.
In the current relationship of the Western and Islamist worlds, transcendence of martyrdom and sacrifice is lost on secular psyches attuned to immediate gratification and commodity fetishism; style and image are more important than substance. The latter is the contradiction that Clyde Prestowitz tries to explain in Rogue Nation: US behaviour rooted in the purity of ideals, but banal, bullying and hypocritical in practice.
Given the loose origins and fractious history of Islamic thought and its corruption in practice, it’s not surprising that Islamism ignores the reality of progress, invention, social choice and material conditions in the formation of personal and collective identity. In its anti-materialism it is unreflective. For the Muslim Brotherhood who were the predecessors to today’s jihadists, as Tariq Ali writes in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, “… the enemy were materialists. What Hsan al-Banna, the Brothers and their numerous successors today can never accept is materialism: not as a school of thought or a doctrine in the narrow sense of the word, nor even as a chance occurrence, not as an undeniable reality.”
Current events are just the most recent distillation of this millennial struggle. Cultural, political, socio-economic, military and scientific ascendancy or descendency of one or the other civilisation is measured over centuries and graven upon the historic memories of its subjects, with an increasingly sharper Western advantage emerging after the Crusades and the Industrial Revolution (700 years apart). The ebb and flow of this relationship took on an increasingly desperate tone in the 20th century as the political and material interests of the West began to conquer Islam down to its holiest sites.
But only in a perverse way is this a global clash of cultural opposites. The conflict is between antithetical extremes who see their history as pre-destined: Western global homogenisation of consumer preferences and freedom of opportunity, versus the aesthetic purity of Allah’s spiritual vessel on Earth. Yet most organised religions argue for balance between the existential and metaphysical aspects of conscious life, whereby material presentation harks to the spiritual values underpinning human endeavour. Islam is no different from other faiths in this regard.
Explanation for the antithetical positioning of these views must therefore lie elsewhere. Islam and Christianity have been the most territorially expansionist in scope, converting or conquering infidels in various crusades and jihads, both hard pressed to find accommodation with the Jews in their midst. Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and other religions may exhibit equal fervour and murderous intent towards heathens from time to time, but none have had such strong proselytising designs. It is because they are imperialist that these flawed religious cultures clash.
The current ideological conflict occurs on two levels. On a macro-level it is between fundamentalist Islam and neo-imperialist Western secularism based upon Judeo-Christian mores. Judeo-Christians hold up the perfectibility of the human condition via self-invention in the material sphere, where Islamists see most material concerns as corrosive of the spiritual nature of the human subject. Confucians and Hindus agree with and absorb a little bit of both.
At a micro-level the conflict is between zealots and moderates within Islam, Christianity, Judaism and other sects. The fundamental dialectic that is the core of present struggles is within, rather than between dominant religious cultures.
In his book The Making of a Terrorist, Abd Samad Moussaoui, using the parable of the scorpion and the tortoise, notes that “Wahhabists use the Western world to attack the Muslim world, but the West is also their victim”.
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