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Civil Society > Global Village Versus Faith Tensions

Confucious avoids the clash;
so how angry are Muslims?

The Rt. Hon Chris Patten, EU Commissioner for External Relations, delivered a speech at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on May 24th, 2004. In these excerpts, he questions Samuel Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations theory and presents a picture of the Muslim world based on survey data that is less at odds with the West than many accounts portray

A great communicator? Chris Patten.

Hot on the heels of liberalism’s triumph—the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the fall of Europe’s last empire, the opening of markets by technology and international agreement—[Samuel] Huntington warned against the easy assumption that we could now relax, a cold war won without the use of any of those engines of death stockpiled in silos from Utah to the Ukraine. Conflict was not after all a subject for the history books. “The most important conflicts of the future,” he wrote, “will occur along the cultural fault lines separating... civilisations from each other.”

The differences between civilisations were more fundamental than those between political ideologies, and the more the world was shrunk by technology, the more we became aware of them. Globalisation weakened local and national identities, and the gap was filled by religion with non-western civilisations returning to their roots, re-Islamising for instance the Middle East. Moreover, cultural, or as he largely argues it, religious characteristics are less likely to change than those that are political or economic. “Conflict,” he notes, “along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilisations has been going on for 1300 years” and “on both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilisations.” Popular in academic circles in the West, his theories are also extensively quoted on jihadist websites in the Arab world.

There were other civilisational clashes as well to which Huntington drew attention. But his arguments never convinced me. I spent a good deal of time during my years in Hong Kong pointing out that there was not some cultural divide between the so-called Confucian world (“so-called” usually by those who have never read Confucius and tend to confuse him with Lee Kuan Yew) and the West which strips Asians of civil liberties and denies them democracy. Sun Yat Sen had apparently never existed. Many of us argued that human rights were universally valid, and that democracy under the rule of law was the best system of government everywhere. And with the Asian financial crash and the discrediting of the Asian model of crony capitalism and authoritarian politics, the controversy seemed done and dusted. The clash of civilisations was the stuff of provocative academic seminars. Then the ‘planes slammed in to the Twin Towers, and the world changed.

Well, of course, it was not quite that simple. The pretexts, the causes, the narrative of atrocity began much earlier than 2001. And we had scholarly guides to point us down the right exploratory tracks. Oh, to have been the publisher of Professor Bernard Lewis, sage of Princeton. I admit to a personal debt to his scholarship. I have enjoyed, and I hope, learned from a number of his books.

But I have started to worry as I read on from [Lewis’s] “What Went Wrong?” to “The Crisis of Islam” that I am being carefully pointed in a particular direction, lined up before the fingerprints, the cosh, the swag bag and the rest of the evidence. “Most Muslims,” he tells us in The Crisis of Islam, “are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.”

Well, yes—and it’s a sentence that resonates in parts of the policy-making community in Washington. But what if I had tried a similar formulation on some of these same policy makers just after the IRA bombed Harrods in London: “Most Catholics are not extremist Irish republicans, and most extreme republicans are not terrorists, but most terrorists in Britain today are Catholic and proudly identify themselves as such.” I suspect that it is not a sentence that would have increased my circle of admirers in America, not because it is wrong but because it is so loaded with an agenda. Anyway, what we have been taught is that there is a rage in the Islamic world—in part the result of history and humiliation—which fuels hostility to America and to Europe too, home of past crusaders and present infidel feudatories of the Great Satan. Clash go the civilisations.

* * *

What of this Islamic world which allegedly confronts our own civilisation? It is sometimes forgotten that three quarters of its 1.2 billion citizens live beyond the countries of the Arab League, in for example the democracies of Malaysia, Indonesia and India. Asian Muslim societies have their share of problems, not least dealing with pockets of extremism, but it is ludicrous to generalise about an Islamic anger engulfing countries from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific shores.

If we focus on a narrower range of Arab countries—the Magreb, the Mashreq, the Gulf, the countries in the cock-pit of current struggle and dissent—what do we find? In 2002, the Arab Thought Foundation commissioned a survey by Zogby International of attitudes in eight countries—Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. They questioned 3,800 people and their results confirmed other similar if not identical surveys, for example by the Pew Research Centre. What is pretty clear is that, like Americans or Europeans, Arabs are most concerned about matters of personal security, fulfilment and satisfaction.

Perhaps it is a surprise that they do not appear to hate our Western values, and their cultural emanations—democracy, freedom, education, movies, television. Sad to say their favourite TV programme is “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Other survey evidence underlines this point about the most significant values. The Second Arab Human Development Report published in 2003…quotes from the World Values Survey which shows that Arabs top the world in believing that democracy is the best form of government. They are way ahead of Europeans and Americans, and three times as likely to hold this view as East Asians.

There is not much sign of a clash of values here. The problem seems to be rather simpler. The Arab world does not mind American and European values, but it cannot stand American policies and by extension the same policies when embraced or tolerated by Europeans. So the Arab world holds very negative opinions of the United States and the United Kingdom (even while holding, according to the same survey, positive views about American freedom and democracy).

Why is the UK in this pit of unpopularity? Partly I suppose because of what we are seen to do, and partly because of what we are silent about. I don’t know how widely St Thomas More is read in Arab lands but “qui tacet consentire videtur” is true everywhere. Perhaps it cheers us to discover that France comes best out of these surveys, scoring very positive ratings, as do Japan, Germany and Canada.

What sort of policies turn Arabs off? Today Iraq would certainly feature high on the list. But in 2002 the issue that stands out from the Zogby survey is, hardly surprisingly, the absence of peace in the Middle East. Let me quote what the survey’s authors say; “after more than three generations of conflicts, and the betrayal and denial of Palestinian rights, this issue appears to have become a defining one of general Arab concern. It is not a foreign policy issue...rather...the situation of the Palestinians appears to have become a personal matter.” As the recent work of, for example, Richard Perle and David Frum has shown, this apparently incontestable point is, for a particular school of American thought, a deliberate and alarming blind spot.

The treatment of the Palestinians is one of four areas of policy where the approach we pursue in America and Europe could abate or exacerbate Arab hostility, and build rather than burn bridges between the West and the whole of the Islamic world. The other three that I want to examine are how we engage in the debate on reform in the Arab word; where we go from here in the dreadful situation in Iraq; and how we handle Turkey’s aspirations for EU membership.

The full text of Commissioner Patten’s speech is online at
http://europa.eu.int/comm/commissioners/patten/speeches/