Ejaz Akram

This paper begins with a cautionary reference relating to the “clash of civilizations” thesis by Huntington. Huntington, in his ever-popular but very erroneous thesis of a clash of civilizations, is at least half right. He is quite on the mark in indicating that there is a clash, however, our inquiry shows that it is not between civilizations, but rather between civilizations and that entity which is against the ethos of civilization. There are many different ideas, across several disciplines, of what constitutes civilization. Often civilization is thought of as a world which reflects certain achievements relating to development of culture, language and literature, arts and architecture, technology and systems of administration, etc. These, in our opinion, are the manifestations or the forms of civilization whose essences lie hidden beneath the forms. Instead of defining civilization in positive terms, we find it useful to proceed with the discussion of civilization by knowing it via negativa, i.e., to know what civilization is not. We begin with the assumption that what Huntington means by civilization is not civilization.

Huntington defines civilizations as “cultures writ large.”1 Even though he talks about civilizations, he asserts that the central theme of his work is “culture and cultural identities,”2 whose meaning he casts upon his concept of civilization. It is rather exigent that one unlearn his concept of civilization to find out what civilization really is, and secondly, if there is a clash, to ask what it is exactly that is destined to clash. Furthermore, the most surprising fact about Huntington’s work is that he talks about the role of religion and its integrative function in the life of a civilization, yet at the same time he reduces religion to the level of culture and custom!

It is our conclusion that the core of every civilization is not culture but its primordial tradition.3 The life of that entity which we can call civilization is tied to its worldview, which emerges from those answers that its religion gives to the existential predicament of humanity. Cultures are the realms of shared meanings and shared understanding through the use of mutually comprehensible language and symbols. However, they evolve and gravitate around the primordial tradition. Whereas the former is subject to change, the latter is a repository of those principles and has a timeless value. Therefore, several systems of culture can be well integrated into a larger civilizational whole to which they belong, and the cohesive element that unites them together in spirit also allows the plurality of their outer forms to exist. It is that element which is universal and the one that can serve as a platform for reconciliation at the local as well as the universal level.

Before civilizations can embark upon the task of an inter-civilizational dialogue, different systems of cultures within them must have an intracivilizational dialogue that allows them to recognize each other’s differences within a civilization, and expresses the willingness to live with each other. Only after the acceptance of diversity within a civilization can the people of that civilization be open to talking to the people of other civilizations. Because such an internal dialogue is not resolved in the West, a dialogue with others seems intricate. Only when the European civilization comes to terms with its own religious tradition can it understand and come to respect other religious traditions.

It must also be known that the basis for intra- or inter-civilizational talk must be unity and not uniformity. In any civilization, although diverse cultures coexist with each other, they are unified in one whole via a religious weltanschauung. Modernity,4 on the other hand, can be identified with that process which seeks uniformity as a way to resolve conflict among people. This phenomenon is as visible as daylight if one observes how the process of state-making took place in Europe and how the nation-state is, by its very nature, the enemy of diversity, and therefore, of universality.

Even the process that aims to roll back the nation-state in Europe has a uniformist political agenda and not a unitarian one. Any force that unites people in isolation from their primordial beliefs, which sustain humanity’s spirit, must be hegemonic. Yet the only way to unite people is to unite them in spirit. True believers can respect other religious forms only because they, too, are created by the single Creator and their mutilation amounts to an insult to God. This necessitates taking into consideration the transcendental unity of all primordial beliefs.

Unity as a principle resides in its perfection with the Divine Grace but serves as the ideal for God’s vicegerent on Earth. The principle of unity can bind people within an area because of the humanity they have in common.

This principle allows people from outside of their acumen to understand and respect each other. But what must one do if a certain entity is interested in knowing the others after jettisoning those principles that constituted the core of their primordial tradition? Since such an entity in our view does not qualify to be called a civilization, there cannot be a dialogue.

It is important to see how the modern world deviated from its traditional way of life, and how modernity cannot be adequately classified as a civilization. Civilizations can be identified by race or ethnicities (e.g., Chinese and Indian), by religion (e.g., Islamic), or by geography (e.g., African or European).5 All such categories of identifying a civilization are linked to a certain worldview that is imparted to the people of that civilization by its religious moorings.

The recent history of modern Europe is an exception to that rule, for:

There is no phenomenon of modernity in the orbit of any other civilization,
in the specific sense in which we understand it, that is, a scientific, secularized (“disenchanted or “desacralized”) and, consequently, materialistic culture, centered around the dominant idea of the individual.6

Given this break from what we consider to be civilization, it becomes even more difficult to ponder upon possibilities of a dialogue because:

if modernity as a civilizational form is applied to the entire world arena, it is precisely because of the contemporary phenomenon of a new type of hegemony, the results of which are crystallized through globalization.7

As a matter of fact, most civilizations before the advent of modernity can be called civilizations because their civilizational trajectory was centripetal in relation to religion; whereas what we call modern civilization, or technically un-civilization, is hopelessly centrifugal in relation to its primordial center. The contemporary western culture/or the former Christian civilization of the West is the only one which, according to its own celebrated principles of humanism and secularism, has consciously moved away from its center. Thus the spread of un-civilization around the world and its attendant military and intellectual assault on the traditional civilizations is a movement which can be quite accurately called anti-civilization.

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