The Clash and the Alliance of Civilizations: too much ado for nothing!

By: Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
[

][Post to BookMarks @ AfroArticles.com]

[ Posted On: 2007-04-05 ]

'Clash of Civilizations': irrelevant and a-historical concept.

Never in the 6000-year long History of the Mankind did we encounter a 'clash' of civilizations. States, countries, monarchs, governments, peoples, tribes, hordes, and armies clash fighting for interests and ideals. Extending the conception of a historical event, we can say that philosophies, ideologies, and religions 'clash', if states and/or monarchs belonging to an opposite system than that adopted in another country enter into a war with that country. At an extreme limit, we could say that two gods are in clash, if two countries adoring two different gods are in war. But it is a figure of speech. However, clash or war of religions we had indeed many times in the History of the Mankind, whereas the elapsed 'Cold War' between the Soviet regimes and the Capitalist – Liberal West was truly a 'clash of philosophies' or a 'war of ideologies.'

What has happened several times in History is the clash between Civilization and Barbarism, and through this expression we describe the battle between a civilized state and people and an uncivilized horde of attackers. When the barbaric Sea Peoples attacked Egypt at the end of the 13th century BCE, Ramses III engaged the country of the Nile in three battles to save the world civilization, since other civilized countries, namely the Hittite Empire, Canaan and Ugarit had already collapsed. This was a 'clash' between civilization and barbarism, and Ramses III prevailed. World History is full of similar examples, with the Hittites engaged against the Kashka, the Akkadians struggling against the Guti, the Roman Empire opposing the Huns, the Eastern Roman Empire fighting against the Avars, and the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad emaciated by the Mongols.

What could be viewed and perceived as clash of civilizations? An overall confrontation in which the values of the one (state, monarch, people, system) would be rejected by the other? But this never surpassed the limits of a war between two religions. Of course, we do not imply that any time two countries with different religions were engaged in a war, this war was a 'clash' of religions. When the Assyrians invaded Egypt (671 by Assarhaddon, 669 and 666 BCE by Assurbanipal), when the Babylonians invaded Judah (587 BCE), when the Persians attacked Athens and Sparta (490 – 480 BCE), when Alexander invaded the collapsing Achaemenid Empire of Iran (333 – 330 BCE), we never had a 'clash' of religions. Contrarily to the aforementioned cases, Assurbanipal's ultimate annihilation of Elam (640 BCE) bears all typical characteristics of a 'war' of religions.

And certainly the expedition of Heraclius against Khusraw Parvez (Cosroes II) down to Ctesiphon aimed at recovering the stolen Cross of the Christian god was a typical 'clash' or religions. The Roman Empire and after the separation the Eastern Roman Empire had repeatedly fought with the Sassanid Empire of Iran, ever since its inception (224 CE), but earlier wars can barely be considered as 'war or clash of religions'. When Valerian was captured by Shapur I, and held and died as captive, the two empires were deep into a confrontation about the control of Syrian and Anatolian provinces of the Roman Empire that were vindicated by the Persians, but the two state religions did not differ tremendously since Rome's Jupiter had acquired Persian heliocentric attributes typical to the Sol Invictus Mithra. Even after the christianization of the Roman Empire, the Perso-Roman wars that became the topic of so many famous historians did not take the form of a 'clash' of religion, since political and economic interests were mostly at stake.

The rivalry of the peak monarchs, Justinian and Khusraw Anoshak Ravan (Anushirvan) (Cosroes I), was not a clash of religions. Much less a clash of civilizations! How could it be so? Who knows not that, when Justinian decreed the closing down of the last (non Christian) Philosophical school of Athens, the last seven Greek Philosophers left the Eastern Roman Empire and settled at Jond-e Shapur (not far from today's Dezful in Khuzestan, the SW Iranian province), where the world's greatest university was functioning as a vast Paradise of Knowledge and Science, gathering erudite scholars from allover the then known world?

The wars between the risen Islam and ailing Christianity during the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries were a typical 'clash' of religions, although for the first two hundred years of the History of Caliphates the majority of the populations of the Islamic states was Christian. But they were never a 'clash' of two civilizations! Certainly not! The academic and scientific exchanges between Baghdad and Constantinople prove that the ruling Muslim and Christian found no major difference between themselves, no cultural divergence, and no other variance than the religious one.

The Crusades, promoted by the mostly uneducated and poorly cultured Western European countries around the Vatican, disclosed a great dose of hatred, violence, criminality, and inhumanity. All this was not addressed against the Muslims of the Middle East only; it was also express ed against the Jewish, the Christian and all the non-Muslim populations of the Caliphate. In addition, it was directed against the Eastern Roman Empire itself, since the Fourth bogus-Crusade was diverted against Constantinople that was looted by the inhuman French, German and British 'crusaders', who had not seen such riches in the plague of NW Europe.

Despite the European barbarism expressed typically in the Crusades, the event itself proves that it was barely a 'war' of religions, but certainly not a 'clash' of civilizations. The Templars and other knights entered in contact with the Ismailiyeh Hashashin (Assassins) in esoteric exchanges and interactions related to the Graal and other issues, proving therefore intellectual similitude, cultural resemblance and civilizational commonality. The Crusaders were not a 'Clash' of Civilizations….

What has to be stressed for the 9th and 13th centuries, it has to be also declared the 15th century, when the risen Ottoman Caliphate and the Safevid Persian Empire were the scientific, academic, cultural, political and economic superpowers of the world. The confrontation against the Austrians in Central Europe, the Spaniards in the Western Mediterranean, and the Portuguese in the Horn of the Africa area was neither a 'war' of religions nor a 'clash' of civilizations. Manuscripts of the leading Turkish astronomer Ulugh Beg of Samarqand were translated and studied by Galileo and Copernicus, and there was no thought of a division between 'Christian West' and 'Islamic East'.

The Divide 'East vs. West' is an Orientalist, Colonial Aberration

Since the World History offers no 'clash' of civilization until the 16th century, what happened ever since to permit the use of such a term? We have to clarify that Modern History does not offer either an example or a model of 'clash' of civilizations. Then, the question may arise about what made such an expression possible.

The reason one could speak of the eventuality of a 'clash of civilizations' and not be immediately rejected and laughed at is that a viewpoint had been introduced over the past 200 years throughout the European and the American educational systems, according to which the World 'is' divided into 'West' and 'East'. Additional qualifications have been introduced and made of the aberrational division and divide a totally Manicheist rift and clash, an unprecedented and primordial polarization between:

• Christian, progressive, enlightened West

and

• Islamic, backward, tenebrous East.

The Greco-Romano-centrism of the West was fabricated to idiotically 'demonstrate' that the Europeans' past was older and greater than that of the other peoples and nations. It was a further investment into the same theoretical construction. One further step towards the falsehood!

After numerous and ridiculous French academic and theoretical denunciations of Manicheism, and of any Manicheist approach, the bogus-academia of Colonial France embarked on the most Manicheist division that occurred in the History of the Mankind. They divided the world into two parts, Colonial and 'Superior' Europe and its appendices on one side, and all the rest of the world, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Pre-Colombian America, Oceania on the other side.

Because the colonial powers gradually expanded and ultimately controlled one way or another the non-Western world, they diffused the idiotic and schizophrenic bogus-historical model of division and divide through the local systems of education that puppet elites introduced there in a suicidal way. So, now the falsehood had to be believed by Eastern masses. Acting in a way that no other theoretical systematic approach be possible to emanate from another cultural milieu (Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian), the Colonial powers guaranteed that no other people be able to see the World through binoculars other than those of the colonial instructors of falsehood.

The reality was hidden, and yet it is very simple: there is no division of the world, and there cannot be any! The supremacy of Colonial Europe and the decadence of other centers of political, economic, scientific and intellectual power (Ottoman Empire, Safevid Iran, Mogul India, China, Japan, etc) was just a matter of occurrence, not an unavoidable happenance. The divide has existed from the moment it was successfully propagated that it exists, and engulfed all the other peoples in the wrong belief. One could consider it as an effort to eternalize the political – academic supremacy of a moment.

As any falsehood, the European scheme could not achieve eternal acceptance, let alone survival. It generated a severely problematic development that could not have been anticipated! The deep feeling of inferiority and humiliation among those, who reject the West but cannot reconstitute an authentically Islamic viewpoint, Weltanschauung, and system of perception and analysis similar to Western Cartesian Science, generates a total and hysterical reaction.

The Islamic extremists are not able to understand that they are the product of a factory set up by the Colonial West, that their words are the result of others having machinated that they are so, that their acts are managed and maneuvered without their choosing. The Islamic extremists cannot understand that they fabricated in a way to (un-islamically of course) reject Civilization rather than the West itself only.

Impossibility of Clash of Civilizations in Our Era

Western scholars envisaging the possibility of a clash of civilizations fail to answer the very simple following criticism: how the demarcation lines that they draw to highlight their system, instead of delineating the different historical and cultural backgrounds (Eastern European Orthodox, Islamic, African – Kushitic, Indian – Hindu, Chinese –Confucianist, South-Eastern Asiatic – Buddhist), they simply separate the Colonial West from all the rest?

A line that sets Western Europe and Northern America apart from all the rest, and brings on the other side Greeks, Palestinians, Oromos, Persians, Tamils, Hindus, Cambodians and Mongols, is just a bogus-line and a real nonsense. It is the result of thoughtless acceptance of the Divide 'East' vs. 'West' for the refutation of which there has already been available an abundant bibliography.

By delineating two areas and two 'civilizations', Huntington did not only prove himself as a scholar in academic disarray and historical confusion; he also offered tremendous support to Ossama Bin Laden and all the terrorist sheikhs of our times. He left to them a vast space, plus the right to 'represent' another 'Civilization'. Better letter of Indulgentia, and more solemn remission of the punishment could never have been expected by them! Without realizing it, Huntington promulgated the most horrendous realm of 'Barbarism' to the level of (the opposite) 'civilization'. What Huntington mistakenly conceived should rather be gone in oblivion ….

There can never be an 'Alliance of Civilizations'!

When professors deviate like this, why should one expect ignorant and superfluous prime ministers perform better? The recent suggestion of the Spanish minister to avoid a confrontation with Islam through an 'Alliance of Civilizations' is a pathetic and ludicrous approach to the most serious problem of our days.

Historically, in the same way they cannot be (and there was never) a 'clash of civilizations', there cannot be an 'alliance of civilizations'. Alliances can happen among states, countries, governments, peoples, but certainly not among religions or cultures, since a faith and a philosophy, an ideology and a behavioral system do not exist in order to be accepted or tolerated by an opposite system; they exist 'per se' as genuine expressions of peoples, philosophers, priests, colleges of religious leaders, etc.

And what would be an 'alliance of civilizations'? Who would say who represents a 'civilization'? Or the historically irrelevant Spanish Prime Minister wants just to say that his coincidentally elected government does not want a 'clash' but an 'alliance' with Ossama Bin Laden?

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis - is Orientalist, Assyriologist, Egyptologist, Iranologist, Islamologist, Historian and Political Scientist. Dr. Megalommatis, 49, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages.

| View Profile & All Articles By: Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis |

		Post Comment
		Blog This Article!
		Discuss Article in Forum(s)
		Publication \| Reprint Terms

Please Rate this Article

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Ideology Articles Via RSS!

| Category Feeds | All-in-one Feed | Other Feed & Syndication Options |

Additional Articles From - Home | Politics | Ideology

	Print This Article
	Post Comment
	Add To Favorites
	Email To Friends
	Ezine Ready \| Syndication
	Post To del.icio.us
	Post To Furl
	Add To Google Bookmarks
	Submit To Netscape

	Add To Yahoo! My Web
	Add Main Feed To Outlook
	Post to BookMarks @ AfroArticles.com

	Post To BookMarkAfrica.com

Site Home

Article Categories

More Search Options

Site Map

Submit Articles

Top Authors

Most Recent Articles