Brandishing the Spectre of “The War of Cultures”: Whose Interests Are Served?

Abstract

This article critically examines Huntington's thesis in The Clash of Civilizations. It explores why the thesis of the “war of cultures”, adopted by the New Right, has also been adopted by the Islamist groups like Al‐Qaida and their homologues. The principal foundation of the deep and sly complicity between the followers of xenophobic identitarian doctrines of all countries and all cultures is that they try to legitimize themselves by working, not on “culture,” but on “ignorance,” to use the perceptive phrase of Edward Said. The author identifies the complicity between the Occidental extreme Right and the most radical expressions of Islam. Through his researches among scholars in Arab universities in Jordan, in Egypt and in Morocco, the author observed that the thesis of S. Huntington is quite to the taste of the Islamo‐nationalists, allergic to all universalist discourse. Ironically, some Arab scholars agree with Huntington on the role he attributes to religion in the cultural identity of peoples, and on the role and the irreducible character of the antagonistic differences between great cultures. Like Huntington, they speak of the end of ideological conflicts without understanding—or refusing to recognize—that talk of “the clash of civilizations” is only an ideological delirium which tends?like all forms of ideological mystification—to pass off the particular interests of a group—or a country—as those of a larger unity, whether it be at the level of a society, of a geo‐political ensemble or of the “international community”.

Keywords:

• Clash of Civilizations
• Extreme Right
• Islamic Fundamentalism
• Xenophobia
• Mediterranean

Notes

[1] Huntingdon was author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, which was published in France by Odile Jacob under the title Le Choc des Civilizations (1994). His article, “The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests”, was published in Foreign Affairs (no. 3, 1993: 22–49). The nuances added by the book, and the replies to the criticism to which this thesis gave rise, change nothing in the content of its essential ideas. Quotations are from the article in its original version.

[2] Rufin 1992.

[3] Ibid., p. 222.

[4] Author of numerous works on Islam including Les Assassins (1982), Le Retour de l'Islam (1985), Le Language Politique de l'Islam (1877), and Islam‐Occident, que s'est‐il passé? (2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohamed‐Chérif Ferjani

Mohamed‐Chérif Ferjani is Professor of Political Science and Arab Civilization at the University of Lyon II.