Contesting the Present Through History

Radwan Al-Sayyid

In his article “The Clash of Civilizations” (1993), which later became a book in 1996, Samuel P. Huntington argued that every civilization possesses an unchanging constitutive essence, namely a particular religion. In his view, the remaining living civilizations—between seven and nine in number—would eventually fall under the umbrella of Judeo-Christian civilization, with the exception of Islamic civilization. The latter, he claimed, has “bloody borders,” meaning that it confronts the victorious civilization with violence and refuses to join the triumphant civilizational order after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

From a different, though equally absolutist perspective that glorifies Arab and Islamic civilization, radical decolonial thinkers who detest Huntington have reached similar conclusions: Islam is a great religion and a complete civilization, while the West—with its Enlightenment and modernity—is the source of every evil with which Islam cannot reconcile. Anyone who imagines the possibility of such reconciliation, they argue, risks drifting outside the boundaries of Islam itself.

Thus, the Western right considers Islam to be outside civilization because of its supposed violence. The decolonial left, meanwhile, insists that one must rebel against the West, which it sees as conspiring against and seeking to destroy it.

In reality, both currents—the right and the left—misunderstand and misjudge Arabs and Muslims. The secular right had already begun this tendency in the mid-nineteenth century when Ernest Renan, the French thinker and philologist, rediscovered Ibn Rushd and the Latin Averroist tradition that helped free Europe from religious obscurantism. Yet at the same time, Renan associated Islam and Judaism with a rigid “Semitic mentality” supposedly incapable of creativity.

Since then, “Orientalists” have struggled to classify Islam: whether as a product of a Semitic mindset, as a fierce rival to Christianity and its humanistic doctrines, or as a civilization that once flourished when Muslims benefited from Greek heritage but later declined when they turned away from it. This decline—and its intellectual stagnation—was analyzed by Bernard Lewis, as well as by Huntington and others.

Beginning with Edward W. Said and extending further left into what became known as the subaltern current, a fierce campaign emerged against the allegedly sinful West that works to destroy the world—and itself. This critique has roots in the colonial period and spans various intellectual and social fields. In Said’s work—particularly in his book Covering Islam—Islam was portrayed as a victim within Western scholarship, media, and culture. Later, this tendency intensified and radicalized, extending into intellectual, legal, and philosophical history. Islam came to be depicted as a complete historical system destined to confront the West, which is portrayed as conspiring against both Islam and the wider world. Just as Islamists benefited from Said’s critical stance toward the West, they benefited even more from the decolonial thinkers spreading across India, Latin America, and Western universities. Today, anger toward the West has intensified further because of the war of extermination in Gaza.

Naturally, these two tendencies—“Islam against civilization” and “Islam as the banner of civilization”—both feed on either fascination with the West or hatred of it. Yet Islam cannot be marginalized or confined to the mold of Orientalist interpretation; it has been at the heart of world history since the seventh century. From its milieu and surroundings emerged the Abrahamic religions, and Islamic civilization led the world for eight centuries. Even in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese began mounting cannons on their trading ships, it was the Chinese and Muslims who dominated global trade and carried its cultural networks. And even during the colonial dominance of the nineteenth century, figures such as Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi sought to convince both Westerners and their own societies that they were partners. The same aspiration appeared in the work of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in Al-Urwa al-Wuthqa: “We must free ourselves from European colonialism because we are partners in religion, culture, history, and ethics—there is neither master nor slave among us.”

We cannot align ourselves with the subaltern current in its protest, because our relationship with Europe is not as fragile or dependent as it assumes. Nor can we accept the claim of a Judeo-Christian civilization, for no such singular civilization exists. Indeed, scholars such as Richard W. Bulliet have written about a shared Christian–Islamic civilization.

Decolonial intellectuals in India and Latin America believe that the West stripped their societies of their humanity. Attempts were made to do the same to us, but they failed—because we are, in fact, part of the same historical world, whether they accept it or not. The proof lies in the persistence of cultural and military conflict despite vast disparities in power and despite the ordeal represented by Israel.

To the advocates of decolonialism and the proponents of the subaltern perspective: renouncing Western values—despite the many crimes committed in their name—means renouncing half of what we live by and believe in. How unfortunate is the statement made by Rudyard Kipling: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

In reality, we are destined to meet despite our differences. To reject the West entirely is to reject the historicity of the self—and the shared nature of civilization.