Theology and the Clash of Civilizations

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Jack Miles

In the 1940s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the United States was George E Kennan. Kennan, who served briefly in the Truman Administration, was among the first to recognize that the United States could not defeat communism outright but could contain it and the nations infected by it, beginning with the Soviet Union. What came to be called the Cold War seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, but it was not inevitable at all. Instead of the Cold War, the world could all too easily have fought World War Ill. Containment was the bold and politically creative alternative to that war. The 1947 article in Foreign Affairs in which Kennan, writing as "X," first laid out containment as a strategy remains, unsurprisingly, the most popular article ever published in that periodical.

In the 1990s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the United States may yet prove to have been Samuel P. Huntington. The second-most-popular article in the history of Foreign Affairs has been his controversial 1993 "The Clash of Civilizations," an attempt to see what lay beyond the end of Kennan's Cold War. What Huntington saw was, on the one hand, economic and cultural globalization and, on the other, resistance to it by those who saw it as merely the latest form of Western, historically Christian, and at this late date specifically American imperialism. Though Huntington noted that many non-Western powers had cast their lot with the emerging global order, it seemed equally clear to him that China and world Islam had not done so, might never do so, and might even join forces in a joint counteroffensive against the West.

"The Clash of Civilizations" was ferociously criticized when it appeared, and events have not entirely confirmed it. Thus, though relations between China and the West remain strained, many informed observers now predict that the aging leadership of the People's Republic will soon be succeeded by a generation open to the West politically as well as economically. The Beijing Olympics may yet become the symbol of this rapprochement. A week after the World Trade Center was destroyed, China was admitted to the World Trade Organization.

But what of world Islam? The border separating what Muslims call dar al-islam, the "House of Submission (Islam)," from dar al-harb, the "House of Warfare" seems increasingly to define a long irregular battlefront, one that as of September 11, 2001, stretches across four continents. With striking frequency, those post-Cold War conflicts typically termed "local" or "parochial" or at most "sectarian" turn out to be battles between historically Muslim and historically non-Muslim populations. An incomplete list would include, moving from east to west:

Roman Catholics vs. Muslims on Mindanao in the Philippines

Roman Catholics vs. Muslims on Timor in Indonesia

Confucians and Buddhists vs. Muslims in Singapore and Malaysia

Hindus vs. Muslims in Kashmir and, intermittently, within India itself

Russian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Afghanistan

Russian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Chechnya

Armenian Catholics vs. Muslims in Nagorno-Karabakh

Maronite and Melchite Catholics vs. Muslims in Lebanon

Jews vs. Muslims in Israel/Palestine

Animists and Christians of several denominations vs. Muslims in Sudan

Ethiopian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Eritrea

Anglicans and Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Uganda

Greek Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Cyprus

Serbian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo

Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Algeria

Anglicans and Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Nigeria.

Left off this list are conflicts that, however bitter, have not risen to the level of outright civil war. On a list of this sort we might find, among others: Assyrian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Iraq and Coptic Catholics vs. Muslims in Egypt.

My point in drawing up this list is to suggest that for the umma -- an ancient Arabic term that has come to denote the totality of Muslims in the world at any given time -- the House of Islam must surely seem a civilization under siege. I use the word civilization, as Huntington did, because umma refers to so much more than our word religion comprehends. In the formulation of one contemporary scholar, it refers to "religion, shared values, and common concerns" yet "does not denote nationality, kinship, or ethnicity." The umma is Islam's version of what secular diplomacy likes to call the international community, and there is no third contender. India and China are each enormous, and each has a large diaspora, yet of neither can it be said that "it does not denote nationality, kinship, or ethnicity." Only the umma matches the international community in internal variety, geographical dispersion, and potentially global ambition.

The clash-of-civilizations question, from the Muslim side, is whether the umma can join the international community or whether it must incorporate the international community into itself. From the Western side, the clash-of-civilizations question, though essentially the same question inverted, must begin with the perhaps grudging recognition that there exist, in the first place, two bona fide international communities separated by a genuine cultural border along which for a long while now there has been more war than peace. No single statement in Huntington's Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than "Islam has bloody borders." In the subsequent book, Huntington wrote: "I made that judgment on the basis of a casual survey of intercivilizational conflicts. Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source conclusively demonstrates its validity." The book assembles that evidence, and further evidence has accumulated since.