Clash of civilisations? Bunkum
FOR Americans and non-Americans alike still struggling to discover meaning from the ashes of Sept 11, the temptation has been to point the finger at an identifiable - Muslims - even when to blame an entire community is manifestly illogical.
Human nature prefers certainty to doubt, and will manufacture its own certainty to fill the chasm of unknowing that yawns within.
It was refreshing, therefore, when the respected Malaysian academic, Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, at 74 a Fidel Castro look-alike, made it clear last weekend that he thought such thinking was bunk - and that there was no clash of civilisations, only a clash of 'two moral types'.
'It's the ultimate prejudice to think that Islam is inherently violent,' he declared.
'Islam has always been wary of terrorists,' he said, noting that Caliph Ali, Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, became the first victim of terrorism within the religion, in AD 661, when he was assassinated.
Despite efforts by the Western media to portray it as such, history was not a clash between Islam and the West, any more than it had been a clash between communism and capitalism, or East and West, he said.
'History is a conflict of two moral types - the predatory and the constructive - and these can be found in all societies, all civilisations,' he said.
There was no need for Muslims to fear or fulminate against all things Western, only those elements that were predatory, said the Java-born professor, who was in Singapore at the invitation of the Ba'alwi Mosque, a small, influential mosque in Lewis Road attended by many in the diplomatic community.
The West has its good points, he said, such as its consciousness of human rights, and empathy towards other parts of the world.
Anti-Muslim attitudes were also confined only to small groups, but these, alas, tended to be magnified by the power of the media.
He highlighted two names as contributing to the misunderstanding of Islam - Harvard University don Samuel Huntington, and Japanese-American writer Francis Fukuyama.
An article by the former in the January 2002 special edition of Newsweek magazine, entitled 'The age Of Muslim Wars', was a 'very subtle attempt to create misunderstanding', he said.
That article, published in conjunction with this year's meeting of the prestigious World Economic Forum in New York, focused on the period from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the present as an age when Muslims fought Muslims and many others.
It conceded that 'the causes of contemporary Muslim wars lie in politics, not seventh-century religious doctrines', but not before creating the impression that the Muslim persona was central, not incidental, to the protagonists in the conflicts. 'And they make up only one fifth of the world's population,' the American don wrote.
Prof Alatas' counter: 'I would suggest that the most violent civilisation today is Western civilisation. It caused the most conflict in the 20th century - Nazi persecution of the Jews, heartless totalitarian regimes, the Cold War...'
The other writer, Mr Francis Fukuyama, wrote in The Guardian last October: 'Islam, by contrast, is the only cultural system that seems regularly to produce people like Osama bin Laden or the Taleban who reject modernity lock, stock and barrel.'
He made that assertion in response to those who said his theory of 'the end of history' had been disproved by the events of Sept 11.
Standing by his claim, he said: 'We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic West. This does not imply a world free from conflict, nor the disappearance of culture.
'But the struggle we face is not the clash of several distinct and equal cultures fighting among one another like the great powers of 19th-century Europe. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by modernisation... But time is on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of US will to prevail.'
Prof Alatas' rebuttal was short and cut to the chase: 'The Taleban was created by the US, as a means of resisting Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.'
Many radical organisations, which the Western media now portrays as Muslim-oriented, are in fact non-Muslim in genesis, he pointed out, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which is led by Mr George Habash, a non-Muslim.
So why was there this tendency to identify the entire Muslim world as a threat?
Prof Alatas offered a tentative suggestion: Many of the conflicts that the West had were with countries that happened to have Muslim majorities, such as Iran and Iraq. The West had been 'occupied' only once - and that was by Muslims under the Ottoman Empire in several parts of Europe.
Western fear of things Muslim, stemmed, in short, from a restricted view of history and a tendency to extrapolate based on prejudice.
There is also Muslim misunderstanding of the West, he acknowledged, but because Muslims do not form a world power, that misunderstanding is limited in its spread.
His prescription: for the constructive types to work together across all communities to counter the annihilative impact of the predatory types.
What was his vision on 'The future of the Muslim world', the topic of his talk last Saturday? 'My eyesight is very short,' said the unassuming don.
Now that's a man with no need for false certainties.
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