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CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

Chủ đề trong 'Anh (English Club)' bởi despi, 09/10/2001.

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    CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
    Globalization brings the West and Islam closer, but the familiarity sometimes breeds contempt
    BY SARAH LUBMAN

    Whether he's visiting a mosque or speaking directly to the nation, President Bush has taken pains to stress that Islam isn't the enemy. In his recent speech to a joint session of Congress, Bush called the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks ``traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.''

    But for all the caution and the pleas for tolerance, polarizing sentiments keep seeping to the surface. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi set off a furor by pronouncing Western civilization superior to Islam. Bush himself initially referred to the U.S. anti-terrorism offensive as a ``crusade,'' a historically loaded term that the White House hasn't used again.

    Such are the conflicting impulses at work. One begs for mutual understanding, while the other paints current events as a fateful clash between cultures. The reality is more complex and harder to accept: Familiarity with another culture can breed contempt, not love -- but Islam has no monopoly on the clash that can result.

    The cosmopolitan backgrounds of several of the attackers illustrate how immersion in a foreign culture can intensify rage against it.

    Although the identities of some of the 19 hijackers are unclear, all appear to be of Middle Eastern origin. Some of them spent years in the West, attending colleges in Germany and living in the United States before learning how to fly commercial jets in Florida and California. Some had foreign friends; a few days before their suicide missions, three of them drank and played video games in a Hollywood, Fla., sports bar called Shuckums. They had years to acclimate to their surroundings.

    They didn't. On the contrary, the terrorists' commitment to a militant version of Islam only seemed to harden on foreign soil. Their dedication highlights the awkward, flip side of globalization: More contact and more exposure to other cultures doesn't always lead to more tolerance, and in some cases can create more estrangement, not less.

    Anyone who has lived overseas can relate to the double-edged nature of expatriate existence. Familiarity with another culture and another language can lead to knowledge and a complicated kind of affection. It also leads, paradoxically, to a heightened sense of strangeness, an ever-deepening awareness of vast cultural gaps.

    Yet acute consciousness of mutual differences isn't limited to Islam, or any other religion.

    Globalization enables extremists to cross borders with the flip of a cre*** card or a wad of cash even as it pushes American culture into parts of the world that don't want it. But as one leading expert on South Asia points out, the clashes that result have been going on long before Osama bin Laden or even Muhammad, the founder of Islam, entered the picture.

    ``When Cortez invaded Latin America, that was globalization,'' said Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution. ``It's just a new term for what's been going on since tribes started wandering off their reservations 4,000 years ago and hitting other people over the head with clubs. There's nothing that can be done about it. It's the eternal human problem of different cultures meeting each other.''

    Perhaps that makes it easier to understand why, for example, a picture of modestly clad women in one of the hijackers' Florida motel rooms had been covered with a towel. The terrorists may have been living in the West, but they weren't of it and didn't want to be.

    Cultural rejection goes the other way, too.

    ``Let's say Americans are living in a difficult foreign country,'' said Ira Lapidus, a University of California-Berkeley professor emeritus who wrote a book on the history of Islamic societies. ``They have a small enclave, their contacts with people are superficial. They come back and say they didn't like it, the plumbing was no good. It happens to people who spend long times abroad for business or diplomatic reasons.''


    `Clash of civilizations'

    Some thinkers have painted cultural frictions in darker, apocalyptic terms. In the early 1990s, Samuel Huntington, a Harvard University political scientist, predicted that a ``clash of civilizations'' would replace the ideologically driven Cold War. Fault lines between civilizations, not nations or ideologies, would drive future conflicts, Huntington argued in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs and a subsequent book.

    High on Huntington's list of potentially violent future clashes was one between ``Islam'' and the Judeo-Christian ``West.'' In his book, Huntington listed five factors that have increased Islamic-Western conflict. The first four are Muslim population growth; a resurgence of Islam; the West's attempt to ``universalize'' its values while intervening in conflicts in the Muslim world; and the collapse of communism as a common enemy.


    The globalization factor

    The fifth factor is, in effect, globalization. ``The increasing contact between and intermingling of Muslims and Westerners stimulate in each a new sense of their own identity and how it differs from that of the other,'' Huntington wrote.

    Huntington's hypothesis remains as controversial today as it was eight years ago. His critics accuse him of vast oversimplification and inflammatory rhetoric. Others say Huntington, who declined a request for an interview, ignored the diversity of Islam, not to mention clashes between and within Muslim nations.

    ``It's really quite misleading,'' said James Noyes of the Hoover Institution, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Near Eastern, African and South Asian affairs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. ``It implies that the basis of Islam is hatred of the West, and that there's something about our civilization that can't get along with Islam. It's ridiculous.''

    But Huntington has his backers, such as Thomas P.M. Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who studied under him at Harvard. Although Barnett says his former professor is guilty of generalization and was wrong to identify Chinese civilization as a potential threat, he agrees with him about Islam.

    ``Islam grows in strength as external threats grow,'' Barnett said, adding that globalization is one of those threats. ``There's a sense of forced Americanization that creates a certain desperate feeling for certain cultures who are seeing centuries of tra***ion eliminated.''


    Where dissenters agree

    Even some of Huntington's critics find grains of truth in his point about the effects of globalization.

    Stephen Cimbala, a terrorism expert at Pennsylvania State University, noted that the Muslim world is more diverse than it is cohesive, with splits along ethnic as well as religious lines. But he also acknowledged that ``globalization is certainly a negative symbol for many tra***ional elites seeking to hold onto power throughout the Islamic and Arab worlds.''

    Those elites, along with popular demagogues, manipulate anxiety over globalization for their own political purposes. In Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Cohen notes, government propaganda has distorted U.S. policy in the Middle East, even recirculating old Nazi stereotypes about Jews. Pakistanis widely believe that Israel was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    Bin Laden, who is revered on the streets in Pakistan, took such antipathy to an extreme in a 1998 order to Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. In a decree published in an Arabic newspaper in London, bin Laden described the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia during and after the gulf war as ``the calamitous Crusader occupation'' -- a world view fed by Bush's ``crusade'' reference. The term evokes the medieval battles between Muslim and Christian armies that are a mere history lesson to Americans, but a potent emotional symbol in the Arab world.

    Italy's Berlusconi suggested a modern battle of values when he praised the West over Islam. ``We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion,'' he said. ``This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries.''

    Such language understandably feeds Muslim resentment, but it doesn't excuse extremist violence.

    There is no easy remedy for the kind of hatred that is unmoved and even inflamed by more contact with the West. But there is a way to deal with it: Understand its origins better -- for counterintelligence purposes, if no other.

    Back in 1998, Bernard Lewis, one of the nation's leading authorities on the Middle East, published a short article in Foreign Affairs about bin Laden's chilling decree.

    Lewis, a Princeton University professor, said bin Laden's declaration was a ``travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad.'' But he also noted that a minority of Muslims were ready to approve and even apply it, and that the West needed to understand the forces driving terrorists. Huntington's much-maligned article made a similar point.

    Their message is the same: We need to understand the motivations of our enemies, but not because we want them to know us and like us.

    ``Intelligence and counterintelligence are only as good as cultural and social understanding are accurate,'' Cimbala said. ``If you think of your adversaries as aliens, you are unlikely to discover their political motivations or military-strategic priorities before they have eaten your lunch.''





    Despair is not Hopeless!​

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