Getting Beyond the "Clash of Civilizations"
By David Cannadine
Two recent horrifying events, taking place thousands of miles apart, are a vivid reminder of how easy it is to see the world in simplistic, polarized terms, while also demonstrating how dangerous and mistaken it is to do so. . . . But the temptation to suppose that there is just one religious community called Islam, which harbours deeply hostile attitudes to a no less solid Christian "West," and that this Manichean view of the world divided by conflicting creeds is an accurate guide to how things really are, remains very strong. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush initially called for the launching of a "crusade" against its Muslim perpetrators, and he was later genuinely surprised to learn later that Islam was itself divided between Sunni and Shi’ite, and that the concept of Jihad was more likely to be an exhortation to individual journeys of fulfillment in finding and following the demanding path of God, than an incitement to all Muslims everywhere to embrace a holy war against the wickedly infidel Americans.
Underlying these simple binaries was the work of the Harvard political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, who had popularized the concept of the "clash of civilizations" during the late 1990s, and whose thesis was enthusiastically embraced in the aftermath of 9/11 by the Bush administration in the United States, by the government of Tony Blair in Britain, and by many neo-conservatives, as providing an intellectual justification for their "war on terror," and for the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Huntington, the world was indeed divided into separate, discrete civilizations, usually on the basis of differing religious beliefs; and it was these hermetically sealed civilizations that provided the most significant unit of collective human identity, and also the most likely cause of conflict. . . .
Here, it seems, is significant historical validation for the view that the world is best understood in the Manichean terms of "us versus them," with civilizations clashing and conflicting, and usually on the basis of antagonistic religious affiliations. Yet while such a polarized perspective on the past and the present appeals to some politicians and religious leaders, to many journalists and pundits, and to some historians and political scientists, it is highly selective and irresponsibly misleading. To begin with, there has never been agreement as to how such civilizations should be defined, or how many of them there have been; and insofar as such collective identities do exist (which is doubtful), their relations have been characterized more by interaction, borrowing and conversation than by hostility, confrontation and conflict. . . .
On closer inspection, these allegedly monolithic identities of "Christianity" and "Islam" turn out to be nothing of the kind; their relations have been characterized as much by accommodation as by antagonism; and in any case, religion is only one of many different human identities. All too often, politicians and pundits exhort us to see the world in simple, binary, polarized terms. But it is one of our major tasks as historians to keep pointing out to them that reality is much more complex, and that is what I have tried to do in my new book, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences."
http://hnn.us/articles/getting-beyond-clash-civilizations