[Assam] Amartya Sen on the 'Clash of Civilizations' - Wash. Post

[Ram Sarangapani]

If there really isn't a Clash of Civilizations as Sen claims, how does he
explain away the constant and continuing clashes amongst religions.

Sen, does, however make a point in saying that 'civilizations' are not that
cut & dried, and there are many influences and mixes. But by looking at the
situation in today's context, there are some clearly defined broad
categories of religions.

--Ram
**
*Enemies, a Love Story
*A Nobel laureate argues that civilizations are not clashing.


Reviewed by Fouad Ajami
Sunday, April 2, 2006; BW07

*IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE*

*The Illusion of Destiny*

*By Amartya Sen*

*Norton. 215 pp. $24.95*

**

Nowadays the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen travels the world,
opinions at the ready. His subjects are rarely economic. In the main, he
works "out of area," taking on a wide range of political and social issues
that have little to do with the dismal science. He is serene and confident,
full of good cheer, ready to see the best in everyone.

Over this discursive little book lies the shadow of Sen's formidable Harvard
colleague, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with his celebrated
theory of the "clash of civilizations." Sen has assigned himself the role of
the anti-Huntington: Sen sees Huntington's thesis of cultural conflict
yielding a one-dimensional approach to human identity -- and leading to the
"civilizational and religious partitioning of the world," which can only
occasion greater global disorder.

ere, in contrast, is Sen celebrating the complexity of human identity: "The
same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of
Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a
vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a
novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights,
a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician,"
etc. One's civilizational identity is not one's destiny, Sen observes, and
civilizational "partitioning" -- seeing the planet culture by culture --
does not capture the messiness of the world. This Earth of ours, he says, is
made more "flammable" by warring definitions of human identity, rather than
an embrace of the many different facets that make us human.

Sen's faith in the multiplicity of claims on human loyalty is admirable, but
it can hardly stand up to the fury of the true believers. In our combustible
world today, Huntington's outlook has much greater power. His "cartography"
of civilizations may have been too sharply drawn and he may have been a bit
cavalier about modernity's appeal across cultural lines, but he came forth
with a formidable work. Nor did he fail to see the fissures at the heart of
particular societies -- hence his category of "torn countries," places like
Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where the matter of loyalty and identity is
fiercely contested. But Sen needs his straw man, and Huntington is pressed
into the role.

Sen is a product of Western (British) education. But he sees no clear
demarcation between the West and the rest (the language is Huntington's).
There is nothing peculiarly Western about democracy, Sen argues. It has
global roots; there were antecedents of it in India and in the Muslim world
at about the same time when "Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe,
and heretics were still being burned at the stake." In his most intensely
argued assertion, Sen sees the democratic inheritance as a truly universal
enterprise. "The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic
ideas," he writes. "While modern institutional forms of democracy are
relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public
participation and reasoning is spread across the world." Western practice
was not "sequestered" then, and it has not developed in some "splendid
isolation."

It is the unease of Islam, of course, and the violence of some of its
radical adherents that have given the question of identity its contemporary
global relevance. On that issue Huntington was at his most prophetic,
writing of Islam's "bloody borders" and of the "youth bulge" in Muslim
societies that had unhinged and radicalized the Muslim world. He did so in
the early 1990s, and then history -- 9/11 and all that followed -- provided
his thesis with cruel compliance.

Sen, however, wishes to rescue Islam from this "confinement." He makes his
way through Islam's history and its wide geographic sweep in order to find
great Muslim practitioners of tolerance and periods of genuine
enlightenment. There is Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, who "insisted in
the 1590s on the need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged
recurrent discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu
thinkers, but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists." In
the face of the anti-Semitic bigotry of today's radical Islamism, Sen offers
the example of Muslim rule in Córdoba and the Iberian Peninsula -- that time
of *convivencia* , where a Judeo-Islamic civilization in court life, letters
and philosophy had a genuine flowering.

Sen works with the anecdote: His potted history is tailored for interfaith
dialogues. He writes of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who, when
forced to emigrate from "an intolerant Europe" in the 12th century, was able
to find "a tolerant refuge in the Arab world" in the court of the great
Muslim ruler Saladin. But this will not do as history. Maimonides, born in
1135, did not flee "Europe" for the "Arab world": He fled his native Córdoba
in Spain, which was then in the grip of religious-political terror, choking
under the yoke of a Berber Muslim dynasty, the Almohads, that was to snuff
out all that remained of the culture of *convivencia* and made the life of
Spain's Jews (and of the free spirits among its Muslims) utter hell.
Maimonides and his family fled the fire of the Muslim city-states in the
Iberian Peninsula to Morocco and then to Jerusalem. There was darkness and
terror in Morocco as well, and Jerusalem was equally inhospitable in the
time of the Crusader Kingdom. Deliverance came only in Cairo -- the
exception, not the rule, its social peace maintained by the enlightened
Saladin.

Here, for Sen's benefit, is a passage from Maimonides's seminal *Epistle to
Yemen* : "Our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and our strength
wanes because of the dire misfortunes that have come upon us in the form of
religious persecution in the two ends of the world, the East and the West."
Maimonides's geography was Islamic: The East in the Epistle was Yemen, then
a battleground between Sunni and Shiite Islam, a place where Jews were being
subjected to forced conversions to Islam; the Western lands were the burning
grounds of Andalusia. The Almohads' pitiless warriors were in every way the
Taliban of their age, the ancestors of today's religious radicals in the
world of Islam. They put to the sword the fabled world of Andalusian
tolerance, and young Maimonides witnessed the shattering collapse of that
culture. There had been Andalusian bliss, and Muslim rulers with Jewish
courtiers and poets, and philosophers who believed in the primacy of reason,
but that world was scorched.

Inspirational history can go only so far; it will not bend to Sen's good
cheer. ·

*Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at the
Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. His
books include "The Arab Predicament" and "The Vanished Imam."*

**
(c) 2006 The Washington Post Company
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