Civilizational Conflict
October 14, 2023
Thirty years ago, a Harvard political scientist named Samuel Huntington published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Clash of Civilizations. ” Foreign Affairs is one of the most highly regarded periodicals in the field of geopolitics. In a nutshell, Huntington argued that future wars would be fought between civilizations rather than countries.
His prediction about the future was tightly argued and logically appealing, but many of his academic peers considered it to be misguided and argued against it. In particular, Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning Indian economist, contended that Huntington’s thesis was too simplistic since its focus was on culture and religion whereas the world was in the process of developing a global identity. Sen went on to criticize Huntington for making a gross generalization with little regard for particulars on the ground -- in short, too much attention on the forest and not enough on the trees.
Ideas and mental constructs do have a powerful influence on world events. The prism through which individuals view the nature of the world very much affects the sorts of actions they will take. Over the last few decades, more and more people have become receptive to the notion that that notorious “arc of history” is bending towards more internationalism in both economics and politics and a consequent decline in the autonomy of the individual country.
But as it happens, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to think in terms of their locale far more often and with far greater emotional investment than they do in terms of global issues. In other words, wherever globalist agendas thrive, they have been imposed from above and hardly ever have sprung from the grass roots.
Throughout history, ideas advanced by the intellectual class have strongly influenced the agendas and the actions of most societal institutions — and have done so more successfully in larger countries with more complex economies. Thus it is that the more powerful countries have been, and continue to be, the prophets of globalization whereas the multitude of less powerful countries typically only mouth the globalist pronouncements out of dependency rather than belief (and because their own internal elite have been bought off).
At the same time, the power centers of the world — due to their massive size and scope — inevitably confront internal disagreements arising from the cultural diversity of their own populations. Exceptions are few (Japan, may be one). Cultural divisions within a powerful state tend to limit its effectiveness at shaping the outside world. Projecting the ideas of globalism, for example, is confronted by not just the inattentiveness of those on the outside who lack power but also the resistance of those on the inside who deplore its deployment.
Countries no longer command the high level of patriotism that used to be the norm in their national populations, and globalists have been quick to view this as a sign of increasing commitment to the global agenda. In fact, however, specific global agendas have not attracted widespread international support. Climate change, environmental protection, eradication of national borders, allegiance to the pronouncements of the United Nations, international law eclipsing national laws, wealth transfer from rich nations to poor ones — obviously globalist agendas such as these have not captured the imagination or solidified the commitment of the world’s population. Only that small proportion of humanity that has materially benefited from globalism appears to be enthusiastic about it.
A civilization is any culture that has become highly complex — typically having spawned such things as writing and urban living. Most of humanity now possesses these things — either directly and personally or as reasonably attainable objectives. In short, civilizations were slow and fitful to emerge in early history but have now become the norm. Most everybody these days is “civilized” in the sense that they are literate and can readily adopt an urban way of life if they so choose.
But does everybody belong to the same civilization? Indeed not. There is a multiplicity of civilizations that are distinguishable one from another primarily based on the values that they cherish rather than the material wealth that they enjoy. Value differences define the differences between civilizations, and it was this reality that underlay Samuel Huntington’s thesis.
For sure, the categorization of civilizations is a messy business that can never conclusively define the boundaries between them. Nonetheless, in practical terms there is widespread recognition that certain key value differences form obvious red lines separating two different civilizations.
For example, the West tolerates both the absence of religion and differences between religions whereas the world of Islam does not; the world of Islam believes in theocratic government whereas the West does not; Islam believes laws must originate from Allah (sharia) whereas the West believes in laws established by the will of the people.
In spite of its Judeo-Christian roots, the West has evolved to become a largely secular civilization that nonetheless continues to embrace the underlying values of that religious tradition. The world of Islam judges Western secularism to be an affront to God and favors submission to the will of Allah over the freedom of individuals to make their own choices.
For secularized Westerners, this focus on religious ideas is anachronistic since they no longer explicitly value the Judeo-Christian origin of their beliefs. Denizens of the world of Islam, however, wholeheartedly support the Islamic emphasis on submission of personal will to that of Allah. In a world that was globalizing, Huntington expected political and economic differences to gradually diminish, but did not think that cultural values regarding how one should live one’s life would do the same. In short, he was skeptical of the secular belief that God-given values were becoming emasculated.
Secularization rejects the idea of obeisance to a higher authority, and this Western illness has weakened the civilization by stripping it of the will to defend itself against competing centers of power. Secular Westerners no longer answer to the call of patriotism or respond to the need for sacrifice in defense of a way of life. And sadly, the more secular the individual, the more enamored he or she is likely to be with the siren call of globalism — a trend they are delighted to support as long as they don’t have to fight for it. And it is among the elite in the West that secularism has become most pervasive.
With all this in mind, it is time to look at what is happening in this new conflict between Israel and Hamas in the West Bank. Israel is a sort of subspecies of Western civilization -- distinctive in some ways but fundamentally committed to the West’s liberal ideas of individual rights and representative government. Hamas, on the other hand, is a sort of holy order that believes in strict adherence to the literal word of Allah. Its political control of Gaza has allowed it to indoctrinate the local Palestinian population regarding the right of Islam to control all of the land of Israel and the West Bank and of course Gaza.
There is a hadith (a saying or action of Mohammed) in Islam that translates as follows:
“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.”
Whereas in Christianity and Judaism even the true believers have largely abandoned any such inhumane notions that appear in their holy texts, the absolutist nature of Islam does not permit such forms of willful neglect by its followers. Most Muslims do indeed avert their gaze from this chilling mandate but they recognize that their belief system does not tolerate avoidance of personal responsibility to kill the Jews.
Kill the Jews? Kill the Jews? Most Muslims are reluctant to execute such a pogrom, but there is no denying the mantle of bigotry that cloaks this infamous hadith. Only fanatics would strive to bring on Judgment Day by adhering to such a mandate, but an unknowable yet significant proportion of all Muslims try to meet expectations by thinking of Jews as less than human. A similar attitude, although substantially diminished in recent times, also exists in the West. But the widely accepted values of the West maintain that it shouldn’t whereas Koranic injunctions imply that it should.
“Kill the Jews” was quite obviously the objective of the Hamas insurgents who invaded southern Israel a few days ago. In addition to indiscriminate slaughter, they took hostages back to Gaza. Their unforced return back to Gaza indicates that they had no other aims in mind.
Early on in its history, Islam was poisoned by its own good fortune. In the century following the death of Mohammed, his Arab followers — relatively unsophisticated desert nomads driven by their religious conviction (and presumably a host of other, more selfish motives) — invaded surrounding areas and in a breathtakingly short time managed to conquer a territory as vast as the former Roman empire had been. The new religion was “brought to” not just the entirety of the Middle East but also all of North Africa, the whole of the Persian Empire, and most of Central Asia.
Muslims took this rapid expansion as a sign from Allah that theirs was the true religion. Traumatic it was, therefore, when centuries later the relatively primitive peoples of Europe grew to global ascendancy and eventually took political control of almost all the traditional Muslim lands. That Allah would permit such a thing could only be a sign that the Islamic world had strayed from its commitment to the commands of the Koran and the example set by their prophet.
Enter, Islamic fundamentalism — new movements dedicated to living by the Word. And the Word was that all humanity must adopt Islam. Those who refuse should perish. Nobody should be forced to accept Islam, but any who reject it are fair game for execution. Jews and Christians, as people of the book, are exempted from this, but their destiny is to become second class members of society, obliged to practice their abhorrent ways in private and treated in public as inferior beings. Their special status disappears, however, if they fight against the Muslims.
This mentality characterizes not just Hamas but virtually all fundamentalist movements in Islam, and the vast majority of all Muslims who are more moderate find it hard to resist the guilt trip that organizations like Hamas and ISIS and Boko Haram lay on them.
Because mainstream Muslims are attached to the idea that worldly success is a measure of their religion’s worth, they cannot fathom any other explanation than that offered by the extremists for why Islam should have been so badly humiliated in recent centuries. Since Islam is thoroughly politicized by its belief that in the end a divinely guided Calif will rule everything this side of heaven, any actions taken to advance Islam’s political project are viewed positively. In the abstract, they believe, acts of terrorism should be condemned, but when the global Caliphate is the aim one must think in terms of “the greater good.”
Islam harbors a grudge against the West for the way it humiliated the world of Islam in the last century. The grudge is particularly ugly when it comes to the Jews in Israel since they are viewed as the West’s (America’s) surrogates in a recolonization of the Middle East. For most Muslims, Israel is an illegitimate colony, not a valid country. When this is combined with the innate prejudice against Jews that resides in the hearts of many Muslims (review the above hadith), the sin of intentionally killing innocent civilians is viewed as minor in comparison with the displacement of so many Arabs living in what is now Israel.
There are, furthermore, many Koranic directives encouraging violence against non-believers. Some interpretations of them — widely embraced by many Muslims — contend that it is only in the context of self-defense that war is justified. However, both aggressive actions by Mohammed himself and the expansionist conquests by his believers following his death do compromise the idea that violence should only be used to defend the faith.
In fact, Israel is the ideal target for proactive attack since Israel’s very existence is viewed as an attack on Islam, and thus justifies any and all means to repel the invasion. Most Muslims view the recent emergence of Israel in the Middle Eastern heartland as the West invading the world of Islam, no different in its essential nature from the Christian Crusades that occurred many centuries ago. Such aggressiveness, they believe, justifies their attitude that violent acts against Israel are approved by the Koran when it states that Muslims should physically fight against non-believers who invade their lands. It is easier to understand this attitude when it is remembered that in Islam religion and politics are inseparable.
For people in the West, it is hard to understand the intractable nature of the ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors, but in the world of Islam the conflict is recognized as a battle between its civilization and that of Christendom. Muslims clearly view the Christian world as a different civilization and the Arab-Israeli flash point as a struggle between two very different belief systems. The people of the West, on the other hand are blinded by their preoccupation with either the sacred rights of individual countries or the Utopian emergence of a new global order.
Because Muslims are all on the same page — whatever page in the Koran that may be — their allegiance to their religion is at least as strong as it is to their country. In reality, the countries of the Middle East are often at war with each other over religious interpretation (Sunni vs Shia) or ethno-linguistic cleavages (Arab vs Turk) or control of resources (Egypt vs Sudan) or any of a number of other issues, but the teachings of Mohammed place great emphasis on the regrettable nature of such things and stress the need for all Muslims to be united and present a common front to the world of the unbelievers. This is why Muslims so readily agree that the very existence of Israel is intolerable.
The current war between Israel and Hamas (Gaza) is so dangerous because it is more than a local conflict. The world of Islam recognizes it for what it is: a war between civilizations. But the West has yet to come to terms with this reality. In no way should one interpret this to mean that the West must fight all of Islam, but it does strongly suggest that if the West does not morally and physically — and consistently — support Israel’s right to exist, then its prospects for survival in the long run are poor.
