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| Volume X, Summer 2003, Number 2 |
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| EXCERPT: Beyond the Crusades: Why Huntington, and Bin Laden, Are Wrong |
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| Lisa Wedeen |
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Dr. Wedeen is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. This essay has benefited from discussions with Nadia Abu El-Haj, Saba Mahmood, Jar Allah Umar, Moishe Postone, Don Reneau and Anna Wuerth. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the United Nations, the University of Maine, Bangor and to Chicago alumnae. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Jar Allah Umar and to Muhammad Qahtan.
Samuel Huntington's 1993 article
"The Clash of Civilizations?" and
his subsequent book The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) may seem prescient at first glance. Declaring the onset of "a new phase in global history," Huntington defined "the fundamental sources of conflict" in the current world, not as economic or ideological in nature, but as "cultural." For Huntington, all civilizations have a primordial cultural identity so that the "major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures." He warned: "Culture and cultural identities . . . are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world . . . .The rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations." "The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future," Huntington predicted, and the two civilizations that are of particular importance in this narrative of battles and futures are Islam and the West.1
For Huntington, Islam and the West are construed as "highly integrated civilizations," as bounded entities in which sedimented essences inhere in monolithic groups. I will focus on three problems underlying such a vision: First, the sedimented-essences version of "civilization" or "culture" ignores the specific historical processes and particular power relations that have given rise to the recent phenomenon of radical religious expression. Second, the clash-of-civilizations story rides roughshod over the diversity of views and the experiences of contention among Muslims. Communities of argument arise over what makes a Muslim a Muslim, what Islam means, and what, if any, its political role should be. Third, Huntington's analysis neglects the terrains of solidarity and fluidity that exist between Muslims and non-Muslims, the ways in which political communities of various sorts have depended on the cross-fertilization of ideas and practices.
1 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, p. 22, and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 20, 28-29.
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