The Spirit of Huntington Still Prevails in Libya and Iraq
Al-Ittihad, UAE, September 2
Last week, Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League, gave the keynote address at the Rimini Forum, a gathering of European youth attended by more than one million people. At the core of his speech, Dr. Al-Issa criticized Samuel Huntington’s theory of the inevitable clash of civilizations, warning that “knowledge without values has created extremist theories.” Al-Issa made it clear in his lecture that the “alliance of civilizations,” based on our common humanity, is what human relations should revolve around. Integration between different cultures is the shortest and easiest – indeed, the only – way to further the prosperity and development in the world. In 1993, Huntington shared his theory of the “Clash of Civilizations” in a short article in an American magazine. The article instantly became viral, leading to Huntington’s writing of a book in 1996 under the same title. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the article and the book were published during the era in which Democrats sat in the White House. The Soviet Union collapsed, marking the end of the nationalist and communist era. The question that arises here is, did Huntington come up with this theory as a purely subjective philosophical product, or was he a soldier in an army of theorists and thinkers who were entrusted with the task of crafting America’s foreign policy for the next 100 years. Following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, America became the world’s dominant power. It became a single force in the face of political and military void. However, history teaches us that whenever a great power is left uncontended, without an adversary or challenger, it comes close to collapse within a few decades. Today, America must find and identify an enemy in order to prevent its downfall. America wants to survive and thrive for the next 100 years. Recovery and prosperity depend on the presence of an enemy that can rally the American people around the flag. Therefore, a new concept must be introduced, promoted, adopted and applied; and the theory of the Clash of Civilizations has been subsequently resurrected. The trend of “Islamophobia” began in the ‘90s as one of the byproducts of Huntington’s book, followed by the effort to antagonize Islam. The chaos in countries like Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Lebanon has since been cited as a practical expression of this famous theory. But why did the application of the theory begin with the Islamic civilization and not with the Orthodox or Confucian civilizations, which are two other civilizations cited in Huntington’s book? The answer is simple: Putting the focus on the Islamic world allows the US to cut any and all cooperation between Islamic civilization and other civilizations. – Abdullah Nasser Al-Otaibi (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
