Summary
The author of “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Foreign Affairs, summer 1993), answered in the forty-sixth and final essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, “The Clash of Definitions” — the book’s only previously unpublished essay (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.523, 543).
Details
- His essay announced in its first sentence that “world politics is entering a new phase”: conflicts would be between clashing civilizations, principally the West against the Islamic and Confucian civilizations, with far more attention paid to Islam than to any other civilization, including the West (PDF p.523).
- Said reads the essay as a recycled Cold War thesis addressed to Washington-based opinion and policy-makers: conflicts remain ideological rather than economic or social, with the West’s ideology as the still point around which all others turn (PDF p.523-524).
- His conclusion, quoted at his p.49, prescribes that the West “exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states” and strengthen institutions reflecting Western interests (quoted PDF p.524) — a prescription Said reads as a manual for maintaining a wartime status in Americans’ minds, from the standpoint of Pentagon planners and defense industry executives (PDF p.524).
- His authorities are tendentious publicists, scholars and journalists — Charles Krauthammer, Sergei Stankevich and Bernard Lewis — picked because they emphasize latent bellicosity; his title phrase itself is Lewis’s, from “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (PDF p.525).
- Like Lewis, he treats civilizations as monolithic and “homogenous” (as printed, PDF p.526) and assumes an unchanging us-and-them duality; he is in Said’s account a polemicist and partisan, a crisis manager who wants to manage civilizational conflict, not resolve it (PDF p.526).
- His “civilization identity” is “a stable and undisturbed thing, like a roomful of furniture in the back of your house” (PDF p.533); his use of “culture” and “civilization” treats them as fixed, reified objects, and his clash is produced by his prose’s managerial poetics — “the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia, has bloody borders” (Huntington, quoted PDF p.534).
- He overlooks the internal contest over the definition of every civilization, and quite astonishingly overlooks the globalization of capital described by Willy Brandt and Arif Dirlik (PDF p.533, 539).
- He posits six civilizations at the beginning of his essay (PDF p.536) and speaks of the “common objective elements” supposedly existing in every culture (quoted PDF p.538).
- The book that followed his essay came in 1995, as Said gives it (PDF p.523).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis, Arif Dirlik, Martin Bernal, Edward Said