Sun,
There are some people here who will claim that there is no clash of civilizations. I think the writer put it brilliantly:
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic -- or so I will argue.
The problem lies in the fact that jihad is, well, jihad. Protest, rebellion, a touch of terror, animosity, paranoia, and, ultimately, oppression of men and particularly women. In a word, regression. We can see the results in the fundamentalist places where jihad has its base.
McWorld, on the other hand, for all its faults offers a measure of hope, change, enfranchisement which, though admittedly not on the scale one would like to see, is higher by far than the bleakness offered by jihad.
I believe that it is ultimately poverty and not Islam that drives jihad. McWorld offers a bit of hope in his regard; jihad offers none.
In addition, jihad has become a more or less permanent fixture of Islam--McWorld is new. Here's the great Chesterton writing many decades ago on this point. His words could have been written yesterday. Just substitute OBL for Abdullahi:
"There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets. Of these the mightiest in modern times were the man whose name was Ahmed, and whose more famous title was the Mahdi; and his more ferocious successor Abdullahi, who was generally known as the Khalifa. These great fanatics, or great creators of fanaticism, succeeded in making a militarism almost as famous and formidable as that of the Turkish Empire on whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign of terror such as can seldom be organised except by civilisation…" |
