It’s sad to see a highly regarded scholar holding to his neo-con misbegotten worldview, despite mountains of new contradictory evidence pilling up on top of old ones. Fouad Ajami, a leading scholar at Johns Hopkins University, just stated that he has come to agree with Sam Huntington: there is a clash of civilizations, between our free world and the brutal Muslim one.
The essence of prejudice, the mother of discrimination, is to tar all the members of any given group with attributes that some of its members may well indeed exhibit. Thus the cardinal flaw in Huntington’s thesis is to treat whole civilizations as if they were of one kind. Huntington argued that “fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate” that the West has problems not only with violent Islamist extremists, but Islam itself. But actual data from many sources (which I summarized in Security First’s Part III) show that most Muslims reject violence, terrorism, suicide bombing and the ways of bin Laden. This is especially true for Muslims in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Morocco -- where most Muslims live. For instance, many Muslim view Jihad as a spiritual journey and not a war against infidels. Moreover, there are those who favor violence in all civilizations.
And then comes Professor Ajami, writing in the New York Times on January 6th that recent history has validated Huntington’s work: young Arabs and Muslims are the “shook-troops of a new radicalism” and Islam as a whole has grown “belligerent and assertive.” And the West is destined to clash with Islam, not some, not most, but all of it.
Huntington had posited that Turkey would redefine itself, moving back towards a position as the “principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.” Ajami, looking at the recent development in Turkey, sees Huntington’s prophesies coming true. Islamists, as opposed to modernists, have prevailed. In fact, the governing party in Turkey is so moderate, its view are regarded as heretical by many devout Muslims. It already did more for women rights than the last three previous Turkish governments combined. Also Turkey just expanded the right to free speech. Much has been made about the fact that the wife of the President—who is not an official—is wearing a head scarf. However, no one in Turkey is required by law to wear one.
The neo cons’ cardinal folly arises out of making whether a people subscribe to a democratic regime the litmus test of those who are with us and not against us -- and many in most “civilizations” (China included) do not subscribe to democracy. However, if one makes the litmus test whether a people reject terrorism, do not seek to invade other countries, and forgo the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, one finds that most people—around the world—qualify as Partners in Peace. Lumping these pro-peace groups with our enemies leads to an expansion of the clash we face from select terrorists, which is troubling enough, to a clash of civilizations. It is a clash that exists only in the minds of a few neo cons and their followers, who by now should know better.
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