Arshin Adib-Moghaddam book review in Strategic Analysis
Strategic Analysis, 36:2, 337-338
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, A Metahistory of the Clash of
Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism, Hurst and Company, London, 2011,
$45, 338 pp., ISBN 978-184904-097-6
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Reader in Comparative
Politics and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London. Born to Iranian parents in Istanbul, he grew up
in Hamburg. He later obtained his doctorate from Cambridge University. His
personal and academic background are recounted here to show that he has a deep
knowledge of the two civilisations that are supposedly in ‘clash’. The book
takes off from perhaps the most cited article by Huntington (‘The Clash
ofCivilisations’,ForeignAffairs,72(3),1993,pp.22–49),whichwaslaterpublishedas
The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon and
Schuster, London, 1997). Dr Adib-Moghaddam’s book is not just another book that
supports or contradicts Huntington. Instead, it is a tour de force demolition
of the Huntington thesis. The thesis has acquired notoriety because it was put
into practice in the Bush years by the neo-cons committed to it, against
equally committed adherents to the thesis, the Al Qaeda. The author eminently
succeeds in exposing that the ‘clash’ has been created by the ‘engineers of the
clash regime’ who are engaged in ‘creation and legitimisation of war and
conflict’ (p. xvi). His contention is that several influential scholars and
politicians have dominated the discourse to condition people into accepting the
‘normality of conflict between us and them’. He begins by soundly critiquing the
concept of a clash. He discusses the signification of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in
Christian and Islamic invention. His second chapter delves into the
exclusionary dictums and grammatical structure of the clash regime. Chapter 3
would undoubtedly be of interest to most readers since it brings the book up to
contemporary times in which the agenda set after 9/11 shows little sign of
exhaustion a decade down the line. The last chapter is the most significant as
it signposts a counter-regime that suggests alternative ways of thinking about
the ‘other’. This does not mean that he favours instead a ‘dialogue of
civilisations’, since to him this too is ‘dependent on the myth of undisturbed
civilisational entities’ (p. 25). The author traces the origin of the idea of a
clash to the discord between the Greeks and Xerxes, Cyrus and Darius, legendary
monarchs of pre-Islamic Persia. To him it was this imperial rivalry that
created the historical archive of the clash regime. This contention was
reinforced in the age of the Crusades. History got ‘increasingly framed in
terms of an inevitable and continuous struggle between Christianity and Islam,
good versus evil’ (p. 44). The author’s attempt at dissecting the discourse is
one of the highlights of this book. He relies on his multi-cultural background
and familiarity with Persian and Arabic to recount the theological and
intellectual debates between the two Semitic religions. That Islam considered
Jesus a prophet did not help, since in the same breath it tended to devalue
Christianity which had arrived at the doctrine of Trinity on
institutionalisation of the Church. The presence of Islam at both ends of
Europe in the middle ages followed by the colonising of the Middle East in
modern times has reinforced the conceptions of the Islamic ‘other’ in Western
imagination. FollowingEdwardSaid,theauthorisparticularlysevereontheOrientalistsforcreating
a hegemonic discourse based on the distinction
between the racially superior Occident and the ‘eloquent, cunning, excitable,
and cowardly (Mark Sykes)’ Orient. Adib-Moghaddam puts his knowledge of Persian
and Arabic to good use in giving the readers a sense of the thinking of
classical philosophers on Islam, such as Farabi and Ibn Sina. The
Farabian/Avicennian discourse did not lend itself to ‘the making of a coherent
“Islam” and an equally coherent evil “other”’ (p. 76), even as Islam expanded
into becoming a world empire in their times. The advent of literalist Islam was
marked by the writings of ibn Taymiya, in the wake of the sacking of Baghdad by
the Mongols. The distinction between the two traditions is attributed to the
timing, the former born in stable times and the latter when Islam was
undergoing an existential crisis. He highlights the manner in which revivalists
such as Maududi, Qutb, al Banna and Khomeini have attempted later to
appropriate Islam for their anti-colonial political purposes. Political Islam
or Islamism thus emerged, firstly, to ward off the internal pressure over the
meaning of Islam, and secondly, to deflect the pressures of Western
modernityfromapositionofweakness.SinceIslamismisakeycontemporaryresearch area,
the discussion on the thought and work of the likes of Wahhab, Afghani and
Abduh is illuminating.
Theauthorchallengestheotherpopularthesisbasedonthe‘endofhistory’(Francis
Fukuyama). He notes that since nation-states are the carriers of the myth of
the clash in respective nationalisms, inter-group conflicts can only persist.
The inter-state arena has been taken as being anarchical in International
Relations theory ever since its institutionalisation early in the last century.
The foundational distinction is between the internal and external, ‘us’ and
‘them’. This can only perpetuate the clash thesis, particularly since a
critical discourse has not emerged on the ‘likes’, such as ‘Ibn Khaldun, Sun
Tsu or Simon Bolivar’ and others more readily recognisable to readers of this
publication, Kabir and Nanak. It is no wonder, then, that the just war
tradition is mobilised in legal terms to make the ‘war on terror’ a legal one.
The author aims a compelling broadside at Western scholars who take war making
to be legitimate state
policy,intendedtocivilisethe‘other’.TheconceptofAmericanexceptionalismisbuilt
up in such a manner as to further an America-centric world order and violence
against ‘terror’. It bears recall that Operation Enduring Freedom, which
endures at the time of writing, was initially termed Operation Infinite Justice.
Of equal if not more interest to readers would be the author’s analysis of the
debate between the Avicennian tradition and the Qutbian Islamists. He notes
that Islamists have adopted a revolutionary reading of Islam. They are engaged
in a resistance instigated by the neo-colonial domination of their homelands by
theUS through their client regimes. Their argument mirrors that of their
antagonists. The author’s treatment of their argument makes rewarding reading
since the literature on Islamism available to Indian readers is somewhat
monocular and lacks depth, primarily because it is mediated by the West and
packaged by politically motivated commentators contriving to place India on the
side of the West. While Adib-Moghaddam is enlightening in what he sets out to
do, his unintended impact is to provoke a debate on how the ‘us’ versus ‘them’
concept is formed and articulated. The process can be discerned in any conflict
setting, including the India– Pakistan one. Therefore, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam’s
book is valuable in more ways than the obvious. His next book will hopefully
build a counter-narrative as a necessary antidote to the hegemonic discourse he
has so spectacularly succeeded in busting.
