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_http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/16/12635/421_
(http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/16/12635/421)
Until that September 11, 2001, the two men most responsible for popularizing
the idea of a clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington,
were regarded as curiosities by mainstream national security and foreign policy
experts. Their Ivy League credentials and access to prestigious publications
such as Foreign Affairs, and the edgy radicalism of their theories, guaranteed
that they would generate controversy, and they did. But few took their ideas
seriously, except for a scattered array of neoconservatives, who, in the 1990s,
resided on the fringe themselves. The Lewis-Huntington thesis was hit by a
withering salvo of counterattacks from many journalists, academics, and foreign
policy gurus.
Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book The Clash of Civilizations
amounted to a neoconservative declaration of war, wrote that the enemy was not
the
Islamic right, but the religion of the Koran itself:
The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is
Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority
of
their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem
for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a
different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of
their culture and believe that their superior, if declining power imposes on
them
the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.
What followed from Huntington's manifesto, of course, was that the
Judeo-Christian world and the Muslim world were locked in a state of permanent
cultural
war. The terrorists--such as Al Qaeda, which was still taking shape when
Huntington's book came out--were not just a gang of fanatics with a political
agenda, but the manifestation of a civilizational conflict. Like a modern
oracle of
Delphi, Huntington suggested that the gods had foreordained the collision,
and mere humans could not stop it.
Huntington acknowledged--without mentioning the role of the United
States--that Islam had been a potent force against the left during the Cold
War. "At one
time or another during the Cold War many governments, including those of
Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Israel, encouraged and supported Islamists
as a
counter to communist or hostile nationalist movements," he wrote. "At least
until the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states provided massive funding
to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist groups in a variety of countries."
But he had a neat explanation of how the alliance between the West and the
Islamists unraveled. "The collapse of communism removed a common enemy of the
West
and Islam and left each the perceived major threat to the other," he wrote.
"In the 1990s many saw a `civilizational cold war' again developing between
Islam and the West." Huntington, who is not an expert on Islam, observed a
"connection between Islam and militarism," and he asserted: "Islam has from
the
start been a religion of the sword and it glorifies military virtues." Just to
make sure that no one could miss his point, he quoted an unnamed U.S. army
officer who said, "The southern tier"--i.e., the border between Europe and the
Middle East--"is rapidly becoming NATO's new front line."
Huntington quotes his guru on matters Islamic, Bernard Lewis, in order to
prove that Islam presents an existential threat to the very survival of the
West:
`For almost a thousand years,' Bernard Lewis observes, `from the first
Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was
under
constant threat from Islam.' Islam is the only civilization which has put the
survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice.
How exactly the weak, impoverished, and fragmented countries of the Middle
East and south Asia could "put the survival of the West in doubt" was not
explained. But it was a thesis that Bernard Lewis had been refining since the
1950s.
Lewis, a former British intelligence officer and long-time supporter of the
Israeli right, has been a propagandist and apologist for imperialism and
Israeli expansionism for more than half a century. He first used the term clash
of
civilizations in 1956, in an article that appeared in the Middle East Journal,
in which he endeavored to explain "the present anti-Western mood of the Arab
states." Lewis asserted then that Arab anger was not the result of the
"Palestine problem," nor was it related to the "struggle against imperialism."
Instead, he argued, it was "something deeper and vaster":
What we are seeing in our time is not less than a clash between civilizations
-- more specifically, a revolt of the world of Islam against the shattering
impact o
