Chapter Five

Militant Islam, Terrorism, and Clash of Civilizations

To say that an effective cure of a disease requires a sound diagnosis is to state the
obvious. Yet, in the face of the 9/11 plague, and of the scourge of terrorism in general,
the Bush administration has utterly failed to shed any light on some of the submerged
factors that might have provoked such heinous attacks. Not only has the administration
not shed any light on the political issues behind terrorism, but it has, in fact, created more
heat and confusion by attributing it to simplistic and politically expedient factors such as
hatred of our freedom, or good versus evil, or the Islamic incompatibility with the
modern world. The administration further compounded the confusion by shifting the
focus of the narrative on terrorism from the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities to the U.S.defined global terrorism in general, and to Saddam Hussein and Iraq in particular.
Media analysis and political punditry have likewise been dominated by the
dubious theory of the clash of civilizations that has been proposed by Samuel
Huntington and his co-thinkers since the early 1990s.1 War debriefings, administration
spokespersons, news reporters, editorials and talk shows harp on the themesome
directly, like Fox News, others in subtle waysthat the roots of conflicts in the Muslim
world must be sought in Islam itself. In discussing the sociopolitical turbulence in the
Middle East, these manufacturers of public opinion are quick to ask, "What in Islam has
led to these convulsions?" But they rarely bother to ask, What is it in the recent

developments in the Middle East that has led political opposition to take a distinctly
religious form?"
Instead of calling the 9/11 attacks mass murder criminal acts, the administration
does not seem to have been able to resist the politically expedient temptation of calling
them acts of war on America, on our way of life, or on our civilization. Accordingly,
instead of responding to those criminal acts through coordinated international
investigative police and/or intelligence work, as many suggested both at home and
abroad, the trigger-happy administration launched its own wars on Afghanistan and Iraq
that have claimed many more innocent lives than those claimed by the 9/11 atrocities,
thereby drastically increasing acts of terror and violence.
The Bush administrations drive to war is a logical policy prescription based on
its own diagnosis of terrorism as being driven by a hatred of our way of life, as
President Bush and his militarist advisors have repeatedly stated. This is essentially a
popularized version of the theory of the clash of civilizations, which implies that Islam
is inherently incompatible with modernization and Western values. The theory, initially
expounded by Samuel Huntington in the early 1990s, sets out to identify new sources
of international conflicts in the post-Cold War world. During the Cold War years, major
international conflicts were explained by the threat of communism and the rivalry
between the two competing world systems. In the post-Cold War era, however, argue
Huntington and his co-thinkers, the sources of international rivalries and collisions have
shifted to competing and incompatible civilizations, which have their primary roots in
religion and/or culture. Thus, in his initial written work on the subject, Huntington

envisioned a future where the "great divisions among humankind and the dominating
source of conflict will be cultural."2
An obvious weakness of this theory is that it views culture as static and
immutableimmune to social, economic, and historical changes. More importantly, it
ignores (or denies) the role of economic, territorial and geopolitical factors in
international conflicts. It is on the basis of these dubious assumptions that Huntington can
argue that international conflicts erupt not because of imperialistic pursuits of economic,
territorial, or geopolitical advantages but because of non-Western civilizations reactions
to Western power and values. To fend off such threats to its civilization, Huntington
concludes that the West needs to further reinforce its power.3
Huntingtons theory of the clash of civilizations is essentially a subtle version
of Richard Perles strategy of de-contextualization. Perle, a leading neoconservative
militarist (and a prominent advisor of the Likud party, the hard-line Zionist party of
Prime Minister Arial Sharon of Israel) coined the term de-contextualization as a way to
explain both the desperate acts of terrorism in general and the violent tactics of the
Palestinian resistance to occupation in particular. He argued that in order to blunt the
widespread global criticism of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, their resistance to
occupation must be de-contextualized; that is, we must stop trying to understand the
territorial, geopolitical and historical reasons that some groups turn to terrorism. Instead,
he suggested, the reasons for the violent reactions of such groups must be sought in the
arenas of culture and/or religionin the Islamic way of thinking. Like the clash of
civilizations theory, de-contextualization strategy has been part of a well-orchestrated

effort to divert attention from the root causes of terrorism and attribute it to pathological
problems of the Muslim mind.4
Neoconservative militarists in and around the Bush administration, and
beneficiaries of war dividends in general, have foundindeed, also promotedthis
sinister strategy of obfuscation quite useful for the purposes of justifying their military
adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. As discussed in the
previous chapter, ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall beneficiaries of war and
militarism have been searching for substitutes for the communist threat of the Cold
War era in order to maintain and justify their lions share of national resources, or tax
dollars. The view that Western civilization is threatened by militant Islam has provided
these beneficiaries with a perfect substitute for the communist threat of the Cold War
era. The view has gained additional strength as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
President Bushs explanation that those atrocious attacks were prompted by a hatred of
our way of life can be better understood in this context.
Although short sightedly self-serving, this explanation of terrorism and the
concomitant justification of war and militarism harbor an element of dangerously
misleading plausibility: once the public is convinced that the hostile and irredeemable
Islam or Islamists are out in force to drown our civilization, preemptive war would be
hailed as the logical response. The danger is further compounded because this
explanation of terrorism possesses the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, the power to
make what is theorized appear real.
Not only do such explanations tend to sow the seeds of hatred and ignorance, and
are bound to poison international relations, but they also fail the test of history. The

history of the relationship between the modern Western world and the Muslim world
shows that, contrary to popular perceptions in the West, from the time of their initial
contacts with the capitalist West more than two centuries ago until almost the final third
of the twentieth century, the Muslim people were quite receptive to the economic and
political models of the modern world. Many people in the Muslim world, including the
majority of their political leaders, were eager to transform and restructure the
socioeconomic and political structures of their societies after the model of the capitalist
West. The majority of political leaders, as well as a significant number of Islamic experts
and intellectuals, viewed the rise of the modern West and its spread into their lands as
inevitable historical developments that challenged them to chart their own programs of
reform and development.
In light of this background, this question arises: what changed all of that earlier
receptive and respectful attitude toward the West to the current attitude of disrespect and
hatred?
I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that the answer to this question rests more
with the policies of the Western powers in the region than the alleged rigidity of Islam, or
the clash of civilizations. I hope to show that it was only after more than a century and
a half of imperialistic pursuits and a series of humiliating policies in the region that the
popular masses of the Muslim world turned to religion and the conservative religious
leaders as sources of defiance, mobilization, and self-respect. In other words, for many
Muslims the recent turn to religion often represents not so much a rejection of Western
values and achievements as it is a way to resist or defy the oppressive policies and
alliances of Western powers in the Muslim world.

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:

Touchstone Books, 1997); Bernard, Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern
Response (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Pipes, There are no Moderates:
Dealing with Fundamentalist Islam, The National Interest (fall 1995):
<http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=pub&mod=Publications%3A%3AArt
icles&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=3&aid=3628086DA65A4EB6BFA5F7D25799
F6A0&dtxt=>; Charles Krauthammer, Americas Great Success Story (interview), Middle East
Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1994): <http://www.meforum.org/article/197>; Norman Podhoretz, World War IV:
How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, Commentary (September 2004):
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm>.
2

Samuel Huntington, The clash of civilizations, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22.

Ibid., 47.

Gwynne Dyer, De-Contextualizing Chechnya,

<http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Russia%20and%20Chechnya.
txt >.