Abstract

Problem of using the categories of culture and civilization in much of the social science literature is so obvious that it necessitates a philosophical definition. This paper argues that the core of every civilization is its Religious Tradition which makes all civilizations universal, and allows them to form the ‘human civilization’. Cultures on the other hand are specific and distinct, and several systems of cultures co-exist within a single civilization. This co-existence is the function of a worldview that binds these specific cultures. At the heart of this worldview are its religious beliefs. The life of every civilization is tied to the well-being and operativeness of those religious beliefs that it upholds sacred. While cultures are formed, they can evolve or become run over by other cultures and thus perish, civilizations are not destroyed from the outside, they only commit suicide. When the religion of a certain civilization dies, the civilization itself also dies.  This paper points to the errant ‘clash of civilization’ thesis and argues that the seat of a universalist consensus cannot be modernity (the post Christian secular West, which is particular), but religious traditions that are universal.

This paper begins with a cautionary reference relating to the clash of civilization thesis by Samuel Huntington. Mr. Huntington in his ever popular but very erroneous thesis of ‘clash of civilizations’ is at least half right. He is quite on the mark in indicating that there is a clash, although our inquiry shows that it is not between civilizations. The clash is between civilizations and that culturally specific entity which is against the ethos of civilization.

There are many different ideas of what civilization is across several disciplines. Often civilization is thought of as a world which reflects certain achievements relating to development of culture, language & literature, arts & 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 an assumption that what Samuel 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 unlearns his concept of civilization to find out what civilization really is, and secondly, if there is a clash, what is it exactly that is destined to clash? Further, most surprising fact is, that he talks about the role of religion and its integrative function in the life of a civilization, yet he reduces the entity in question 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 that issues from those answers, which its religion gives to the existential predicament of humans. 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 which is of 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 at the universal level.

Before civilizations can embark upon the task of an inter-civilizational dialogue, different  systems of cultures within them must have an intra-civilizational dialogue that allows them to recognize each other’s differences within a civilization and 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 internal dialogue is not resolved in the West, a dialogue with others seems intricate. Unless the European civilization comes to term with its own religious tradition, only then can it understand and come to respect the other religious traditions.

It must also be known that the basis for intra or inter-civlizational talk must be unity and not uniformity; In any civilization diverse cultures co-exist with each other yet they are unified in a single whole through a religious Weltanschauung.  Modernity[4] on the other hand can be identified with that process which seeks uniformity as a solution to the resolution of tension between people. This phenomenon is visible as daylight if one observes how the process of state-making took place in European societies and how the nation-state is, by its very nature, the enemy of diversity and therefore 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 the humanity’s spirit, must be a hegemonic force and the only way to unite people is to unite them in spirit. True believers can only respect other religious forms 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 the people within an area because of the humanity they have in common, and it is the same principle that would allow people from outside of their ecumene to understand and respect each other. But what must one do if a certain entity which 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 (such as the Chinese and the Indian), by religion (such as the Islamic or by geography (such as the African or the European)[5]. All such categories of identifying a civilization is linked to a certain worldview that is imparted to the people of that civilization by its religious moorings. However, the recent history of the modern European world is an exception to that rule. “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 “de-sacralized) and, consequently, materialistic culture, centered around the dominant idea of the individual”[6]. Given this break from what we consider as 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 the ‘modern civilization’ or technically un-civilization, is hopelessly centrifugal in relation to its Primordial Center. Only the contemporary Western culture/ or the former Christian civilization of the West is the 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.

The Role of Religion in the Life of a Civilization

The role of religion in the life of a civilization can be understood quite well from Wittgenstein’s famous quote that “the sense of the world must lie outside of the world” and “the solution to the riddle of life in space and time lies outside of space and time”[8]. All cultures except the modern Western culture are centered around a religious or transcendental/metaphysical core[9]. Religion alone, besides language and culture, provides an ontological and cosmic framework that helps weave those cultures in a single civilization. Most striking features of the Western European civilization is its discontinuities from the ways of the past rather than the continuity of Primordial Tradition as in the other civilizations[10].

Even at the earliest times in recorded history, we know how civilization of Greece died when the Orphic religion was replaced by the Olympic religion. When the primordial religious tradition died, the civilization died. The present situation in the former Christian West is somewhat similar. No entity has been militarily so strong in the history of humanity, still it always talks of deterioration of security. They cannot realize that the threat is from within itself and not outside. The threat of having lost the primordial center which is the life of a civilization and what provides security.

One of the crucial functions of religion is to secure the moral guidance of believers in this life. The transcendent core of culture gave sense to the vicissitudes of life; it explained gave meaning and assigned a role and a permanent value to all occurrences in the physical world, in society, and in individual lives[11]. Because religion is concerned with the real, its cosmology and ontology includes all that is physical as well as spiritual. It addresses the things we can see and it also addresses the things we can’t see. Due to this cosmology, man is situated in the universe as a higher being (instead of an accident of evolutionism) and is appropriately a part of nature and therefore integrated into the global whole.

Yet another deeper factor that prevents a dialogue between religious and non-religious worlds are the philosophical assumptions upon which the modern thought rests and its ramifications for those who choose to live life according to their religious tenets. Modernity gives us a picture of the origin of man through evolution coupled with a belief in the linear progress which is a utopia. If today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today, one gets caught up in a Utopian trap which is at once teleological, futuristic but imprisoned to the immanence of this world. Moment of perfection resides in future and not the origin. Religious eschatology on the other hand addresses the phenomenon of afterlife and death and its moment of telos is not in this world but in the transcendental world. “[Modern science is] limited to efforts aimed at understanding the physical world in which we live. It cannot be teleological but only teleonomic”[12].

Every civilization has its own trajectory of development which reflects the aptitude and tendency of its people. Consequently, this also accounts for their difference, however, this difference does not imply opposition. Such is the case with all those civilizations that can be considered normal, or traditional[13]. All such civilizations are based upon certain principles and the difference between them is to the extent how they vary from those transcendent principles. Such divergences are mostly superficial and external and the unity of these civilizations remain intact because of their adherence to those principles. The common denominator between such civilizations is the affirmation of these principles. However, only the modern Western world is the one which is based upon the negation of all those principles. This is one of the chief factors that prohibits it to have an understanding with those civilizations that have religious origin; “…if such understanding is to go at all deep and operate efficaciously it must first be established at the top, that is to say through those very principles which this abnormal and aberrant [civilization] lacks. In the present state of the world, therefore, we have, on the one hand, all those civilizations that have remained faithful to the traditional standpoint, namely those of the non-West, and, on the other hand, a specifically anti-traditional civilization, that of the modern West[14].

Besides wars and usual political tensions in the history of mankind, no tension existed between the traditional civilizations, the new opposition of ‘West against the rest’ only took significance upon the emergence of the Modern West, because the medieval Western civilization was comparable to the other traditional civilization in those days as the traditional civilizations of today are comparable to each other. In such an atmosphere, a dialogue, trialogue or conference of civilizations would indeed have been a possibility. But it is not a possibility in the contemporary mentality, which is hostile to the idea of civilization.

Dialogue of Civilizations in the age of Globalism

All world systems, cultures and civilizations except the modern culture, are imbued in and reflect certain principles whose source is ultimately transcendant. It is only the ideology of modernism that stands apart from the rest. Modern cultures, whether Western/liberal or Eastern/socialist are particularistic because they lack a connection to their primordial center, and it precisely because of this break from the past which characterizes them as overly rational, anti-religious and anti-universal. Ironically, it is only this section of the contemporary humanity that so often speaks about the need for dialogue, inter-faith understanding and reconciliation.

In the era of ‘globalization’ with its associated ideology of globalism, the modern world is no longer a geographical entity restricted to the West. It has permeated through the vestiges of traditional societies and with its seductive and misleading luciferan impulse, it now threatens their existence to the core. The process of modernity has in the past destroyed the equilibrium of the traditional societies and continues to threaten the very existence of the world, lest this force is recognized as harmful, which in our opinion is only possible from within a world that has some idea of what is universal.

On one hand it holds the material progress of West as normatively superior to the rest of the world, which is a result of particular constellation of historical events (thus modernity as process from inside out is no longer available to others), and on the other hand it champions to be the model for the ‘backward societies’ to emulate. Its like telling those ‘third-wolders’ that you can never become like us, however, we would still like you to try and see if you can! Therefore it is ever eager to export its technology and ideological appeal to the non-West. It has historically exported imperialism and later nationalism, communism and capitalism; and to combat the consequences of such divisiveness and ‘particularisms’, it also exported arms and ammunition (along with the antibiotics) to disrupt the balance of the non-West. Lately it is busy exporting all of the above (because of ‘national interest’) in form of globalism and democracy, as unalloyed goods and achievements of modernity. All the things the ascendant power within West is championing, can only become universal “…if and only if, humankind is Westernized as a whole… by replacing all other cultural traditions and worldviews, through a mental revolution in the orbits of every civilization until its final conquest of the whole world”[15].  The ideology of globalism that the West talks about is no more than a dogma and it is only superficially understood as ‘universalism’. It is actually the antithesis of true universality because true universality can only result from a genuine desire to understand the other as the other understands himself. Finally, “globalization is one aspect of the extension of control over the world—world culture, world economy, world organizations, etc. – of any of the actual aspirant political and economic powerholders”[16].

Islam & Modernity: Clash or Dialogue ?

The clash of civilizations is most visible between the former European civilization and Islamic civilization. Until the rise of Marxism, Islam has been the only world-movement of which the West has been afraid[17]. Now that Marxism is dead, the West is focused on Islam once again. Politically, the Muslims are ever afraid of the West who can pound as much iron on them whenever it wants, but despite the colonial and post-colonial European domination of Muslim lands, Islam continues to be the only religious movement that is a serious challenger to Christianity, as it continues to grow even within the West. This phenomenon makes it even more exigent from the Muslim point of view that conflict resolution must take place so that Muslims themselves can feel secure, whether they live in politically and military dominated within their own lands or vilified by the Western media within the West.

The challenge to inter-civilizational rapprochement again is not religion but the kind of secular liberalism that is fashion of the day, which sees religion as a fallacy of the past separated from most of the culture and especially divorced from politics, economics and law[18]. In the Muslim world the spheres of politics, society, law and economy have been morally informed by the divine injunctions as revealed in the Quran and Sunnah. The Western liberals on the other hand, are proud of their secularism and deny that they are caught up in any religious debates and pose to be religion-neutral, however their heritage of animosity with Islam still colors their perceptions unwittingly[19].  The reason why most traditionalists, especially Muslims will not engage with liberals seeking a pseudo-dialogue is because they question what is there to learn from those whose vanity is embedded in material progress, scientism, technicalism and nationalism, which has resulted in pollution of the earth, deadly arms race, and the stark possibility of a nuclear winter[20].

The degeneration of the unity of Western civilization into an anti-civilizational world power was imminent from the very beginning of the modern history and it was precisely this anti-unitarian aspect of the West that put it on the collision course with the Islamic civilization. Wilfred Cantwell Smith says that “Western civilization is dual, one part of its inheritance coming from Greece and Rome, the other from Palestine. The two have proceeded sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony, sometimes juxtaposed, but never fused…[whereas] the Islamic civilization is unitary, not dual”[21]. The principle of unity, which is most essential in realizing universalism, is without exception embedded somewhere or the other in all the Primordial Traditions. Especially, tauheed or oneness is pivotal in case of Islam, which informs the Muslim societies’ worldview, education and arts. There is no dialogue between Islam and the secular modern West, however, there is a possibility of dialogue between Islamic and Christian traditions. The role of the West is crucial in defeating the particularistic anti-civilization in order to resuscitate the primordial civilization of the West and to restore the environment, which can be conducive to ethos of Universalism so that life of other civilizations can be sustained.

Muslims are still Muslims in a sense that the Christians are not Christians anymore. This seriously hampers the possibility of serious understanding, because of the relegation of Christianity from the center to the periphery in the secular West. It is a particularly difficult situation because so many different sects of Christianity that were truly Christian in the recent past have given in to the forces of modernism. The disunity and fragmentation within Church into what it does not ordain (gay & lesbian churches, separate churches for the blacks and white, or rich or poor) is something that goes against the ethos of Christian universalism. The Unitarian church for example, even allows atheists to become church members and be a part of their congregation! Giving non-believers a chance to listen to God’s message is one thing, but accepting their money (and therefore democratic accommodation of their opinion) is totally another.

Just as there are impediments to dialogue in the West, there are the Uncle Toms of the contemporary East, i.e., the modernists who value having a selective dialogue with the almighty West. Most of them also happen to be the darlings of the secular Western establishments. The position of these easterners (often the ruling elite from the formerly colonized nations) is perhaps the most pathetic. They are in awe of the West and often see themselves through the eyes of the West’s progress, and based on that negative self-image and inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West, they make suggestions of eclecticism and selection. They want to mimic the West and dream to become like it, so they will support those reforms that claim to put them on the path of ‘progress’ (or shall we say ‘destruction’?) They cannot fathom the impossibility of this task because all those little things we superficially consider good in the modern world are attached to a pattern, and piece by piece they bring in all the other necessary pre-requisites for that which at first seemed good until the point where escaping the whole structure becomes next to impossible[22]. The traditional Islamic world and is an organic whole, a gestalt, which is interconnected and just grafting the shoot to the root will not make a difference.

The technicalism and scientism which has replaced the primordial and the religious and its hostility to the sacred, makes reconciliation difficult between the modernity and tradition. The technical and scientific mind has become an arbiter of all other forms of human mind, all other forms of human existence but a progressivist one, and of all other dimensions of human being’s essence and the human being’s world in general[23]. Outside of this new sacred domain of technalism, everything else is considered normatively inferior and unacceptable. Such are the a priori preconditions in the minds of those who are so eager to talk to the worlds other than their own.

This leads the Muslims to believe that the anti-civilizational forces that colonized the Muslims are still at work with the only difference that the Western masses are now more brainwashed by the state propaganda than ever. Injustice has been around for a very long time. However, the new thing is, how black is turned into white overnight in front of people’s eyes who become gullible to an extent that they believe everything that is told to them by the media. 

Dialogue can be between Christianity and Islam and not between Islam and the West, because Islam itself has been a part of Western heritage and continues to grow within the West. Those Muslims who continue having a dialogue with the liberal West by the virtue of living there is also an inconclusive experiment that began after the Jewish holocaust. Since then Muslims have seen what can happen to them in instances like Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosova and Chechnya. Western Europe’s silence and embargo upon Muslims’ plight as they were broken down by gang rapes, infant rape and mass extermination is a living proof that the modern world is still haunted by the forces of anti-civlization.

Conclusion

The logic of Enlightenment holds the European way of life superior to rest of the ‘barbaric and backward’ world because of its belief in progress as opposed to static non-western world. The enlightenment mood is primarily responsible for social and political policies around the world that consider development normatively superior to under-development (even though it is primarily over-development that has brought humanity to the brink of ecological disaster), economic growth is privileged over subsistence economies (even though the fetish of economic growth is the enemy of sustainability and balance), and procedural democracy is privileged over benevolent kingships (even if it contributes to degradation of moral values and brings about the tyranny of masses). Because of modernism’s diametrical opposition to the traditional worldview, a dialogue is not possible. There is an exploitative push in the civilized world by the forces of anti-civilization, which must stop in order to promote an environment that is conducive to mutual respect and understanding

It must be asked that how is a dialogue possible between entities who are not at parity with each other in terms of power. On one hand, it is that entity which can be rightly called a civilization and on the other hand you have a force antagonistic to civilization and it is the latter which is ruling strong but the one which also insist upon a dialogue, Given the fact that the traditional civilizations have already suffered enormous torture at the hands of un-civilization, how can that gesture of dialogue be even taken with credibility? The modern West in the very recent past has attempted to destroy the unity of traditional civilizations around the world; how does it even have the nerve to propose a dialogue with the world which is often portrayed as the enemy in their societies, from the works of policy-making hawks to the world of Hollywood?

Huntingtons, Fukuyamas, Brzezenskis and other policy hawks of the modern West offer little guide to to understanding what is beneath the ‘clash of civilization’, but more so, they are preparing and orchestrating their world for a ‘clash of civilizations’. It is ironic that these people who are writing in the defense of the modern West as if it was an endangered entity from outside. It is the modern world that threatens to overrun of what remains of the traditional world and not vice-versa. Conversely, it is the traditional civilizations and the traditional cultures that are in fact endangered entities of today akin to many species from the plant and animal kingdom that are becoming extinct from the encroachment of the modern way of life onto the world of balance and subsistence.

Finally, a word must said about the idea of toleration as it has become a buzz-word and a truism which is taken as something intrinsically good in the jingoism that surrounds the discussions of dialogues and reconciliation. Toleration or tolerance, in and of itself, is not necessarily good. We so often speak of tolerating this and tolerating that and that the gospel leads one to believe that tolerating is a virtue in iteself. It must be understood that one tolerates only that which is essentially undesirable, but no so much that one reacts against it. What is important is really important is acceptance and not toleration. One tolerates ones enemies but accepts the friends. Since acceptance can only come from understanding, acceptance of the other’s religion and civilization can only come about from the understanding of other’s religion and civilization. Only if one accepts the other’s religion to be valid (which can only result if you understand it), can one further the idea of reconciliation among religion and therefore civilizations. If one does not make an attempt to understand religion, nor does one make any attempt to accept it, but one merely talk of tolerating the “unwanted”, it is most probable that the toleration will reach its limits sooner or later and a clash based on misunderstanding and unacceptance will result.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1997 Touchstone, NY.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred,  Suny, NY 1989

Victor Segesvary, From Illusion to Delusion: Globalization and the Contradictions of Late Modernity, International Scholars Publication, Bethesda, MD. 1998

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge, London 1974

Edmund Burke III, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, by Marshall Hodgson, Cambridge 1993

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective, SUNY, NY 1997

Rene Guenon, Crisis of the Modern World, Tr. By Marco Pallis & Richard Nicholson 1999, Suhail Academy, Lahore.

Gai Eton, Islam and the Destiny of Man,  Suhail Academy, Lahore,

Enes Karic, Essays on Behalf of Bosnia, El-Kalem, Bosnia Herzegovina, 1999

James Heft et al, A Catholic Modernity? Oxford University Press, 1999

Wilfred Cantell Smith, Modern Culture From a Comparative Perspective SUNY, NY, 1997

Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History Cambridge University Press, 1993

Raymond Tallis, A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism: Irrationalism, Anti-humanism and the Counter-Enlightenment St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1997