Vardaman's Stamp of Approval, and a Sad Farewell to the Man

The Baylor Line

Some six or seven years ago, I sent the Vardamans a poem and an article. The poem was titled "Final Exam," and it was inspired by words of wisdom from Louis-Hector Berlioz that Vardaman loved to quote: "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils." My poem reads as follows:

Final Exam

If time be better teacher than the rest,
I need an explanation to explain
Precisely why that final taxing test
Should have to cause such overtaxing pain.

That final is a killer, so I'm told --
No student ever makes it out alive.
I'd rather take the test when I get old,
But don't know when my test-date will arrive.

Yet if I only knew the testing place,
I'd try to stay so very far away
So as to never ever show my face
For testing on that very fateful day.

And once that final test date were surpassed,
I'd live because that final test were passed.

So much for my poem, which now appears in my book of collected poems, Radiant Snow. As for the article, it was one I'd composed for the 2011 Global Forum on Civilization and Peace, a yearly forum for which about eleven other articles had likewise been written. All articles were published together under the title Resolution of Conflict in Korea, East Asia and Beyond: Humanistic Approach. My own paper was titled "Points Toward a Culture of Discussion."

Professor Vardaman read the article, and Betsy read the poem. Here is his response to my article - and note his dark allusion to the NoZe Brotherhood, Baylor's satirical social club (to which I might or might not have belonged):

Dear Jeff,

I sit here on a Thursday evening approaching 8 p.m. and hearken back over the years, remembering such warm and fine things about you.

I take pride in you though perhaps I have no right to do so. I'm sure that all of the things that impel you to greatness took place in Salem, Arkansas, long before you appeared on Baylor's campus and in my life.

I'll always recall your intelligence, your wry humor, your hard work, and your sensitivity - despite your allegiance to a dark organization [called the NoZe Brotherhood] which made its home in Elm Mott . . . .

I recall, incidentally, some of the very, very bright people who were your fellow members in that organization. It seems to me it is now in a bit of decline. I hope that is incorrect. Baylor always needed the sharp [intellectual] knife which your group [metaphorically] thrust into the belly of our beloved Baylor. It was always done with love, not malice - I think and hope.

It is hard to believe that you have indeed become a successful Gypsy [Scholar] with your keen mind still intact.

I thank you for your warm words [about my teaching and my character]. I hope I deserve some of them.

I read your article and found it deeply interesting, indeed, in places quite fascinating. It seems to me you have asked the good questions, and you certainly have picked a judicious topic!

And it goes without saying that I agree with your basic thesis. What educated person could disagree with your opinion!

I trust you will be convincing when you deliver your paper at your conference.

It's good that you related Sam Huntington's clash of civilizations - rarely do people talk about his view of culture in a positive way as you do.

I appreciate your allowing me to read your work. It is quite stimulating.

Let me quarrel with one word you use twice in your essay. The word "probing." I think you should look it up. "Probing" is often mistaken for something more than it is. Probing means to explore a bit, not to really come to grips with the issue. The term is often misused. I will expect that you will not misuse it again.

I was very happy to find at least one thing a bit fuzzy in your thinking.

You've done it well. You've paid the price. I know it has not been easy. There's the loneliness, sometimes the rejection, sometimes the longing for rich understanding from others that just won't appear when we need it most. It pleases Betsy and me that you have been selected to discourse at this global forum. Hopefully it is more than a stewpot. With you there, I think it will be.

We wish you were at Baylor. Since you are not, it is most rewarding to hear from you.

We care about you and what happens to you and your family always.

Sincerely,

Jim

And Betsy wrote:

Jim is very proud of you, and your sending him a copy of your paper meant a lot to him. When he put it down, the first thing he said was, "Impressive." I think that means you have taken all the final exams you need to take and have passed with flying colors.

As you see, Betsy has responded to my 'Final Exam' poem, wittily connecting its theme to the first word uttered by Professor Vardaman upon reaching the end of my paper: "Impressive."

I could ask no higher evaluation from such an elevated source, and I hope I deserved the praise. I know I'll never hear its like again, leastways not in his voice.

Now, he belongs to the ages . . .

Stephen Vincent Benét: On the End of a World

Valeria Victrix
Badge and Standard of Legion XX
Moulded Antefix Roof Tile
Holt, Clwyd, Wales

In Stephen Vincent Benét's short story "The Last of the Legions," the first-person narrator, a centurion of high intelligence, speaks with his Greek friend Agathocles, who keeps accounts for the legion, about the growing darkness as Rome begins to pull back from its borders, in the legion's case, from the northwest of Britain, and he asks why order ends:

"But tell me," I said, "why does it end?"

He shook his head. "I do not know," he said. "Men build and they go on building. And then the dream is shaken - it is shaken to bits by the storm. Afterwards, there follow darkness and the howling peoples. I think that will be for a long time. I meant to be a historian, when I first joined the eagles. I meant to write of the later wars of Rome as Thucydides wrote of the Greek wars. But now my ink is dry and I have nothing to say."

"But," I said, "it is there - it is solid - it will last," for I thought of the country we had marched through, and the boy, unafraid, on his pony.

"Oh," said Agathocles, "it takes time for the night to fall - that is what people forget. Yes, even the master of your villa may die in peace. But there are still the two spirits in man - the spirit of building and the spirit of destruction. And when the second drives the faster horse, then the night comes on."

"You said you had a state and a law," I said. "Could you not have kept them?"

"Why, we could," said Agathocles, "but we did not. We had Pericles, but we shamed him. And now you and I - both Romans" - and he laughed and coughed - "we follow a hairy general to an unknown battle. And, beyond that, there is nothing."

And I wonder, as I look on the state of our world today, how dark is the future we face in the face of our storm.

Read the story.

Camille Paglia: Ever Bracing to Read!

Camille Paglia

Salon

In Tracy Clark-Flory's recent Salon interview of Camille Paglia, the ever-bracing Paglia -- who seems to be channeling Samuel Huntington, at least in part -- had this to say about global threats faced now and in the future:

The escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve -- and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win . . . . The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.

These two statements come in response to different questions, but they deserve to be tied together, for Islamism -- though Paglia wasn't focusing solely on specifically this -- poses the greatest threat to the successful secularism of the West and to the rights of women around the world.

And to be frank, Islam itself hasn't done much in the world recently for either secularism or women's rights . . .

Tony Blair on Violent Islamism

Tony Blair
Office of Tony Blair

In an article first published in the Mail on Sunday (June 2, 2013), but reprinted by the Office of Tony Blair, Britain's former prime minister, offends against political correctness to proclaim:

"The ideology behind Lee Rigby's murder is profound and dangerous. We must take on this extremism."

He first addresses the recent murder of Lee Rigby at the hands, knives, and cleavers of two violent Islamists:

There is only one view of the murder of Lee Rigby: horrific. But there are two views of its significance. One is that it is the act of crazy people, motivated in this case by a perverted idea about Islam, but of no broader significance. Crazy people do crazy things . . . . The other view is that this act was indeed horrible; and that the ideology which inspired it, is profound and dangerous. I am of this latter view . . . . [W]e are deluding ourselves if we believe that we can protect [ourselves] . . . simply by what we do here [in the West]. The ideology is out there [in the world]. It isn't diminishing.

Indeed, it seems to be growing. Blair appears to think so himself and points to violet Islamism's worldwide prevalence, in both Sunni and Shia variants, whose violent adherents hate each other as heretics, in addition to hating infidels:

The Syrian opposition is made up . . . increasingly [by] the [Sunni] Al Qaida affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra. They are winning support, and arms and money from outside the country . . . . [Shia] Iran pushes Hizbollah into the battle. Al Qaida is back trying to cause carnage [to Shias] in Iraq and Iran continues its gruesome meddling there. To the South in Egypt and across North Africa, Muslim Brotherhood [Sunni Islamist] parties are in power but . . . face growing instability and pressure from more extreme groups [of violent Islamists]. Then there is the Iranian regime, still intent on getting a nuclear weapon, still exporting terror and instability to the West and the East of it. In sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria is facing awful terror attacks [from Sunni Islamists]. In Mali France was fighting a pretty tough battle [with Sunni Islamists]. And we haven't mentioned Pakistan [-- Sunni and Shia Islamists there --] or Yemen [with its Sunni Islamists]. Go to the Far East and look at the Western border between Burma and Bangladesh [mostly Sunni]. Look at recent events in Bangladesh itself [with its largely Sunni Islamist parties] or the Mindanao dispute in the [mostly Sunni] Muslim region of the Philippines.

Blair could almost be Samuel Huntington mapping out Islam's "bloody borders" -- except that he doesn't borrow that expression -- but he does find a common thread in the violence:

I understand the desire to look at this world and explain it by reference to local grievances, economic alienation and of course "crazy people". But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all? . . . . [T]here is a problem within Islam -- from the adherents of an ideology which is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it . . . . I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open minded societies. At the extreme end of the spectrum are terrorists, but the world view goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit. So by and large we don't admit it.

But we have to speak up, says Blair:

First [because] those with that view [that Islam should dominate politics] think we are weak [in our silence] and that gives them strength. Second . . . [because the] Islamists who have this exclusivist and reactionary world view . . . . are a significant minority, loud and well organised [but still just a minority].

Blair goes on to advocate military engagement where necessary, security measures where possible, and education about modern religious understanding of religion and state everywhere. All well and good where well and good.

The most interesting aspect of Blair's remarks is his willingness to state that the problem of Islamist violence cannot be explained by local circumstances, but is rather a worldwide, ideologically inspired phenomenon. That's been quite clear for some time to many of us, but Blair's willingness to break with a narrowly restrictive political correctness is refreshing.

We may eventually hear prominent voices going further . . .

Adam Garfinkle on Mali . . . and what we fail to learn

Adam Garfinkle

FPRI

In "Mali: Understanding the Chessboard" (E-Notes, January 2013), Adam Garfinkle has some kind words about a prior American counterterrorism policy in Mali formulated by policymakers oblivious to its ethnic complexity and the implications of inadvertently favoring one ethnic group above the others:

Speaking of full-frontal ignorance, . . . the U.S. counterterrorism training mission in Mali made the stupefying mistake of choosing three of four northern unit commanders to train who were ethnic Tuareg . . . [W]hen the Tuareg rebellion in Mali gained steam after the denouement of the Libya caper, greatly stimulated by the return of heavily armed Tuareg brethren from that fight, these three Tuareg commanders defected to the rebels, bringing soldiers, vehicles, ammunition and more to the anti-government side. Anyone who was surprised by this is at the very least a terminal ignoramus. And anyone in the U.S. military who failed to understand the ethnic composition of the country's politico-military cleavages, such that he let U.S. Special Forces training be lavished on Tuareg commanders, was clearly insufficiently trained to do his job. And believe me, that's about as nice a way to put that as I can summon.

See? I told you he was being kind. He put his criticism as nicely as he could manage. He also has some kind words about the American assumption of Enlightenment universalism:

How do things like this (still) happen, after what we should have learned from years of dealing with Iraqis and Afghans and others on their home turf? I happen to know someone who teaches in the U.S. military education system, and this person happens to be a field-experienced Harvard Ph.D. in anthropology. This person tries very hard to clear away the thick fog created by the innocent Enlightenment universalism that pervades the American mind -- the toxic fog that tries to convince us that all people, everywhere, are basically the same, have the same value hierarchies, the same habits of moral and tactical judgment, and mean the same things by roughly comparable translated words.

I think I know the anthropologist he's referring to. Garfinkle's right that our military is still naive, but as he also points out, this merely reflects a larger American ignorance of something that Samuel Huntington tried to drum into our heads, namely, that the world is not as Francis Fukuyama expected at the 'end' of history, a triumph of bourgeois democratic values. Instead, there will be blood -- over clashes of values. But there's hope that we Americans might still learn, for the unnamed anthropologist keeps trying:

Sometimes this person senses success, because the Special Forces officers in class who are still climbing the promotion tree tend to "get it." They "get it" because they have collected personal experience -- whether in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or the Philippines, or even in Mali -- so that what they are learning in class corresponds to the realities they know. I have been to this person's classes on several occasions to guest-teach, and I agree: A lot of the guys (and the few women in the spec ops field) who have been on the ground do "get it." But it seems that a lot of their senior officers don't yet get much of anything at all. It is almost inconceivable that we could screw-up so badly, since understanding basic Malian circumstances isn't rocket science, as they say. So why did this get so thoroughly botched? I'm trying to find out; patience, please.

One thinks that 9/11 should have taught us that some groups don't even come close to sharing out values, but too many people still don't "get it." I'm all for Enlightenment universalism, bourgeois democratic values, and basic human rights, but I'm not naive. I know that a lot of cultural, religious, civilizational groups out there in the world are not for these things.

Some of these groups, such as those represented by the likes of Al-Qaeda, are even violently opposed to anyone anywhere holding to Enlightenment universalism, bourgeois democratic values, and basic human rights.

Our Globalized, Systemic Conflict

Egypt Protests
Photo by Asmaa Waguih/Reuters
Christian Science Monitor

Nathan Gardels, writing "In violence over anti-Muslim video, a new world disorder" for the Christian Science Monitor (September 14, 2012), says some things that fill in what I alluded to in a recent comment, as we see in the following quotes from his article:

Welcome to our new world, where no one is in control -- neither the West of its social media nor Arab rulers of their liberated subjects. This is a combustible mix that goes beyond the recent anti-Muslim video to the overall message of Western-shaped globalization.

Gardels reminds us that the scholar Akbar S. Ahmed, already in the decade before 9/11, foresaw the stakes in the increasing conflict between the West and Islam and realized this conflict's existential character:

Years before Osama bin Laden conceived of the assault on the Twin Towers in New York, Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar and former ambassador to Great Britain, grasped the mentality of siege gripping the Islamic world. After an extended trip through the remote villages of the Afghan-Pakistan border where the Taliban got its start, he reported that pious Muslims sense "there is no escape now, no retreat, no hiding place, from the demon" of the Western media, which he called "storm troopers" of the West. They feel, he wrote, "the more traditional a religious culture in our age of the media, the greater the pressure on it to yield" to the faithlessness and secularism of global civilization emanating from the West.

Mr. Akbar imagined that "it must have been something like this in 1258 when the Mongols were gathering outside Baghdad to shatter forever the greatest Arab empire in history. But, this time, the decision will be final. If Islam is conquered, there will be no coming back."

That may go quite a ways toward explaining the rigidity of the battle lines that have been drawn. Gardels himself -- perhaps channeling Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory -- considers the conflicts cultural and acted out on a global stage:

The conflicts of the future are thus going to be as much about the abundant cultural flows of the global information economy as about the scarcity of resources or the breach of territory. This is because contending values have been crowded into a common public square created by freer trade, the spread of technology, and the planetary reach of the media.

Only in such a world could a provocative Danish cartoon or a truly lame YouTube video on Muhammad inflame the pious and mobilize the militant across the vast and distant stretches of the Islamic world.

This is precisely what was on my mind in my recent comment noted above in my opening line. Gardels expects these cultural conflicts to be unavoidable because fundamental:

No military retaliation, or further violent attacks on diplomatic outposts, can erase the reality that what is sacred for America (freedom of expression, including sacrilege) and what is sacred for the Muslim world (their faith) are clashing values now contending on the same virtual terrain.

Not just America, of course, but the West more generally, which in its most secular heart believes sacrilege sacred -- an irony perhaps worthy of being reflected upon. Still, Gardels hopes for the best . . . sort of:

Managing some semblance of stability in this new, out-of-control world is going to take some deft statesmanship. The West is not about to give up its defense of freedom of expression -- whether Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" or the "Innocence of Muslims" YouTube video. Muslims, militant or mainstream, are not about to give up the defense of their faith and its messenger.

That's the best he can hope for, "deft statesmanship," and it isn't much hope, for he sees our reality clearly:

Along with the advent of democracy in the Arab world, this is a new reality we will all have to live with. Let's not pretend that this conflict isn't real.

I've been living almost entirely without that pretense since 9/11, and I had a strong inkling of it ten years before that attack when I was living in Germany and saw up close the increasing piety of Muslims studying and living in Europe.

Sheikh Ahmad Abu Quddum: "There is indeed a clash of civilizations . . ."

Sheikh Ahmad Abu Quddum

MEMRI

From MEMRI comes a report that "Sheikh Ahmad Abu Quddum of Jordan's Tahrir Party Discusses Jihad," Middle East Research Institute (Special Dispatch No. 4354, December 12, 2011):

"[Jihad] is in order to remove obstacles . . . . When we declare Jihad against . . . [a] state, for refusing to allow Islam to spread to the people . . . . [w]e give them a choice: Either to convert to Islam, or to pay the jizya and submit to the laws of Islam. The jizya is the . . . tax paid by non-Muslims . . . . We should fight the states and the armies . . . . [I]f a certain state insists on preventing the spread of Islam on its soil, we will fight that state . . . . [Samuel Huntington was right.] There is indeed a clash of civilizations . . . . If not for Jihad, Islam would not have reached us and all the other places. Within a quarter of a century, Islam reached most of the ancient world by means of Jihad . . . . [T]his is Islam's way of spreading . . . . [R]uling positions . . . are exclusively for Muslims. Anyone who is part of the rule –- the head of state, who is the Caliph, the empowered official, the executive official, the wali, or the governor –- must be a Muslim. Moreover, he must be a man . . . . The future belongs to Islam. The Islamic caliphate is bound to come, as was foretold by our Prophet Muhammad . . . . [T]here will be a caliphate following the path of the Prophet Muhammad."

When queried about the West's advantages by a political activist, Omar Abu Rassa, the sheikh retorted, "European countries live in prehistoric, pre-human times." When the activist pressed a bit further and asked about the West's "scientific accomplishments" and "freedom of thought," the sheikh asked, "What scientific accomplishments?! We [Muslims] brought them there." The report does not say if the sheikh also insists that Muslims brought freedom of thought to the West, but I assume that the sheikh's Tahrir Party is the same as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, a Sunni pan-Islamic organization that has spread around the world, doubtless to bring true liberation of thought, i.e., submission to Islamic law.

I therefore infer that the good sheikh would also insist that Muslims bring authentic freedom of thought, the freedom to think whatever one wants to think so long as that thought remains a thought.

No freedom of speech, however . . .

Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in Microcosm?

Ethiopian Evangelicals

(Image from Christianity Today)

I see from Wikipedia that Ethiopia is about 33.9 percent Muslim and about 62.8 percent Christian, the latter divided into 43.5 percent Orthodox and 19.3 percent other denominations, mostly Protestant, I suppose. The place is thus one in which to take a glance through a Huntingtonian lens, though of no statistical validity admittedly. Huntington argues that Western Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam form the basis of different civilizations and that the clashes among civilizations reflect the clashes among religions. He might have therefore expected three-way clashes in Ethiopia, perhaps similar to those in Bosnia.

Let's look at what Matthew D. LaPlante says of the three religious groups in his article "Growing in the Word" for Christianity Today (September 16, 2011):

In 2002, a mob of Orthodox priests and adherents carrying axes and machetes attacked Protestants in the town of Merawi, injuring many and killing Pastor Damtew Demelash of the Full Gospel Believers Church. Just a few years earlier . . . a stone-throwing mob of Orthodox Christians attacked Protestants attending a conference, wounding 51.

But at St. Gabriel's Orthodox Church, priest Aba Mezmur Hawaz tells his parishioners not to quarrel with fellow Christians. If someone is better able to see God through a Protestant lens, he said, so be it. "The whole world of Christians -- we are all going to go up one way together."

He gave a different assessment of the Muslims in his community. "They will go a different way," he said. "And if they want to fight with us, we will fight with them."

This is not a matter of simple religious prejudice. In recent years, both Orthodox and Protestant Christians have been the victims of attacks by Islamic extremists, which killed several people and destroyed scores of Christian homes and churches. Although they are still relatively rare, such attacks have brought Christian leaders together for support, protection, and prayer.

This Ethiopian microcosm of the clash among these three religious groups might appear to illustrate Huntington's views, but not quite to the letter, for attacks by Islamic extremists would seem to be motivating the Orthodox and the Protestants toward religious unity. On a civilizational scale -- if I might be allowed to speculate in a statistically meaningless way -- this could imply that the rise of Islamism in the Muslim world and corresponding attacks upon Christians of all denominations would also give rise to increasing unity between Western Civilization and Orthodox Civilization.

But this, of course, is mere speculation that depends upon Huntington being both right and wrong . . .

Crimean War and Religious Conflict . . .

Image from Website of Orlando Figes

I had no idea the Crimean War was so interesting, but the New York Times review by Gary Bass, "Why the Crimean War Matters" (July 8, 2011), of The Crimean War: A History, by Orlando Figes, makes that war sound fascinating and even important, if overshadowed by the two great world wars of the twentieth century.

This is history with an argument. Figes maintains that the conflict was essentially a religious war, and he is frustrated that most writers have neglected that theme: "If the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the rise of militant Islam have taught us anything, it is surely that religion plays a vital role in fueling wars." Figes writes of Russians and Turks clashing over "religious battlegrounds, the fault line between Orthodoxy and Islam," and explains that "every nation, none more so than Russia, went to war in the belief that God was on its side." The Crimean War "opened up the Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire to Western armies," and "sparked an Islamic reaction against the West which continues to this day." The title of the British edition of the book is "Crimea: The Last Crusade."

The 'last crusade'? Sounds as though it might also well be subtitled the 'modern jihad.' But neither Figes nor Bass think in terms of a perennial religious conflict:

As Figes himself emphasizes, ideologues, whether Islamist or Christianist, who seek historical evidence of a permanent war between Islam and Christianity will have to look elsewhere. Britain and France fought for the Ottoman Empire. And Western and Eastern Christians despised each other, sometimes more than they loathed Muslims.

I might here note that this is precisely what Samuel Huntington would have expected, for he distinguishes between Western and Orthodox civilizations, and Figes himself -- as quoted by Bass -- uses language that sounds remarkably like Huntington's: "the fault line between Orthodoxy and Islam." The review, however, does not mention Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis, nor does the book itself, if one can trust an Amazon "Search Inside This Book," for a search of "Huntington" comes up as "0 results for Huntington"!

As my exclamation point indicates, I find this rather astonishing. Has Huntington's language of "fault lines" so pervaded intellectual discourse that even scholars themselves are unaware of their debt? That seems rather incredible.

That point aside, however, the review is well-written. I read it together with my fourteen-year-old daughter, and she said that it made the book come alive. It certainly made me want to read this book, which rather surprised me since I only with reluctance undertook to read the review.

Cultural Diversity and European Integration

Ewha Womans University

(Image from Wikipedia)

The photo above shows pretty much what I see nearly every morning after exiting the subway station and heading for the entrance to Ewha campus, and I'll be seeing this scene later on this early Sunday morning, albeit with fewer students milling about, as I head for my duty as judge in a nationwide speech contest sponsored, if I recall correctly, by the JoongAng Daily.

Because of this early morning responsibility, I have little time for a substantive blog entry today, but I can at least note that Ewha's Division of International Studies has asked me to teach its course on European History this coming spring semester since the regular instructor will be on sabbatical. I intend to rework a course that I designed for Yonsei University's Underwood International College. Some of this will sound familiar to long-time readers of Gypsy Scholar:

In the book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, Robert Kagan proposes that Europeans are "turning away from power . . . [and] moving . . . into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation . . . . a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant's 'perpetual peace'" (page 3). But is this European perception of its role realistic or deluded? European integration has drawn together a collection of distinct nations, each characterized by its own particular culture, forming the EU a truly multicultural organization. These nations, nevertheless, share much the same civilizational identity, as Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations) would have agreed and Rémi Brague (Eccentric Civilization) would still attempt to set forth. But as Christopher Caldwell shows in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, the ongoing, extensive immigration from the world to Europe may be introducing a more radical version of multiculturalism, as groups adhering to other than Western identities begin to dominate and to practice, if not explicitly demand, cultural autonomy. Do such groups pose a political threat to the European paradise of peace? Were the Paris riots, for example, a harbinger of cultural -- perhaps even civilizational -- conflict to come? And with the current economic problems reflected in the Euro currency's woes exacerbate these cultural differences and bring the entire process of European integration to a halt, even a collapse? This course will focus upon such questions, broadly conceived.

This is a preliminary draft of the course description, and I intend to rework and reword it as soon as I get beyond finals grading and other editing jobs that have piled up recently.

Meanwhile, wish me energy for today's judging duty. I foresee three grueling hours . . .

William Pfaff 'Recalls' Huntington's Civilizational Theory of Conflict

Samuel P. Huntington

"When Cultures Conflict"

World Economic Forum 2004

Davos, Switzerland

(Image from Wikipedia)

I happened to read in a paper -- never mind which -- a recent column by William Pfaff in which he 'remembers' Samuel Huntington's thesis on the "Clash of Civilizations," which he refers to as:

. . . the colossal error of the late Samuel Huntington in asserting that the "next world war" would be a war of civilizations -- actually, his grandiose extrapolation of the war between Israel and the Arabs. The Israelis were invested with the honor of embodying western civilization while Arabs, who make up only a fifth of the world's Moslems, were conflated with all the world's Moslems, most of them actually Asians and Africans.

I've read Huntington on this theory, and I don't recall him specifying that the "next world war" would be civilizational. I think that rather than specifically predicting such an overwhelming global conflict, he instead warned of civilizational conflicts on the horizen after the Cold War's end and offered some means of avoiding such conflict through civilizational dialogue and understanding, a point often neglected in polemical allusions to his theory. And he certainly didn't invest the Israelis with bearing the standard of the West, for he saw Judaism as the basis for a civilization separate from the West, namely, Jewish civilization. Nor did he imagine that all Muslims were Arab.

I'm surprised the Pfaff would mischaracterize Huntington's ideas in such a distorted manner, but I must say that I often have a similar impression in reading Pfaff's columns, that his mind is a sort of Procrustian bed into which issues must be forced to fit by trimming or stretching -- though not quite so radically Procrustian as Chomsky's mind, of course, which can stretch one death from a US bombing in Sudan to an atrocity worse than the nearly 3000 deaths from Al-Qaeda's attack on America.

No, Pfaff is no Chomsky, for he's sometimes right on the money, as with his warning about accepting Georgia into Nato, i.e., that such an agreement "has war built into it," but he's more often too ex-centric in his views for me to accept his analyses unsalted.

Reading Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Christopher Caldwell

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

Immigration, Islam, and the West

(Image from Zócalo Public Square)

Among other things keeping me busy, I'm also reading Christopher Caldwell's recently published book, Reflections on the Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. Some readers may recall that I mentioned this book in a blog entry of May 22 this year.

It's a pretty blunt book, as he forewarns his readers:

The reader should be warned that, without a certain amount of shorthand and bluntness, nothing serious can be said. (page 25)

In other words, expect Caldwell to step on some toes, which does rather often -- as he has probably done with these words:

The late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington devoted much of his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations to Islam's "bloody borders." This may be a controversial observation, but it is an observation -- it is not something Huntington dreamed up. As of this writing, Muslim countries or groups are either at war or in a hostile truce with every civilization that Islam abuts, from Nigeria to Xinjiang. (pages 162-163)

Five pages later, he picks up on this point:

If we return to Huntington's observation about the frictions between Islam and every single culture with which it is in contact, or if we consider the penury, servitude, violence, and mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide . . . how do we explain it? Either there is a problem with Islam that must be addressed by Muslims themselves, or a wide variety of non-Muslim cultures has, by incredible coincidence, developed exactly the same unfair malevolence toward Islam. (pages 168-169)

As I noted, rather blunt words, and a lot of people won't like them, but I've also read similar words elsewhere -- sometimes in blogs, sometimes in newspapers, sometimes in books -- so this opinion appears to be growing rather widespread.

If Caldwell is right, then Europe will see itself split by what Huntington called "civilizational fault lines," and we will find out within our own lifetimes if Caldwell is right.

Robert D. Kaplan: "Revenge of Geography"

Geopolitics

Illustration by Aaron Goodman

(Image from Foreign Policy)

Robert Kaplan has an excellent (though disputed) article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy (May/June 2009): "The Revenge of Geography." Although his article is global in scope, emphasizing the role played by geography in conflicts along what he calls "shatter zones" (reminiscent of Huntington's "fault lines" between civilizations, except geographic rather than religious), it has some especially significant observations about the specific case of Pakistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups -- Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns -- for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.

The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces -- and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.

Geography, ethnicity, and religion -- a witches' brew that makes up the dysfunctional state that we know as Pakistan. We're rather far from Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, which saw human history as a struggle between ideologies that had reached its Hegelian goal of liberal democracy. But we're also not precisely in those civilizations where Samuel P. Huntington placed us, either, for the Islamic civilization that ought to glue Pakistan together is a rather weak binding agent, given the corrosive acid of ethnicity. The good news in what Kaplan shows is that the Taliban, being an expression of Pashtun nationalism, will encounter resistance from the Punjabis who rule Pakistan and wouldn't want their nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a different ethnic group. We can therefore expect the Pakistan army to show more resistance than it previously did, for the stakes have been raised by the Taliban's push beyond the Swat Valley.

Or can we? Another scholar, Thomas Barfield, raises some doubts, noting the rise of Islamic radicalism within Pakistan's heavily Pashtun Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its previously secular army:

A lot of people in the ISI are Pashtuns because they had the language skills. During the Soviet War period, [Mohammad] Zia ul-Haq began Islamizing the army. Before, the army was fairly resolutely secular, but since the '80s you saw a greater and greater influence of Islamists in the army as well as the ISI. By the time they were helping the Taliban, some [army officials] were highly sympathetic to this idea of a Wahhabi-style Islamic state. Pakistan was formed as a state for Muslims separated off from India -- its name means "land of the religiously pure" -- and it's always been like, "Well, are we Muslim enough?" (Michael Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve Altogether? (Interview with Thomas Barfield)" Mother Jones, May/June 2009)

Barfield worries not just about a Pashtun attempt to take over Pakistan but also about even a failed Pastun attempt to grab the entire country if Pakistan's army holds steady and manages to keep the Punjab region for itself in the ensuing chaos:

The army has always stood to prevent that [sort of takeover], so presumably if they would hold on to the army, the army would hold on to Punjab and prevent things from getting out of hand. But then the question would be, if it starts to fall apart like that, would India feel the need to make a preemptive strike to go after the nukes? (Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve")

This is where things get really scary . . . and even scarier is the recognition that the world is full of 'Pakistans'! Perhaps not nuclear-armed ones, but increasingly militarized "shatter zones" destabilized by the tyranny of geography.

I have seen the future, and it is murder.

UPDATE: Commentor John B. (below) links to a strong and informed rebuttal of Kaplan at the Registan blog.

More from a former Islamist...

Ed Husain, Reluctant Islamist

(Image from Penguin Books)

Ed Husain -- the British former Islamist whose parents immigrated to England from the Indian subcontinent -- gives us all reason for some hopefulness in the clash with Islamism, or so implies an article by John-Paul Flintoff, "Rediscovering a kinder, gentler Islam," from the Sunday Times Online (April 21, 2007):

[W]hen a Christian youth was murdered by a Muslim, Husain realised it was a direct result of the hateful atmosphere he had helped to create. "I had advocated the ideas of Muslim domination, confrontation and jihad." That murder marked the start of Husain's withdrawal from Islamism. He was helped by Faye, a fellow student who later became his wife.

His doubts about radical Islam were reinforced by two years living in the Middle East.

He also regained a spiritual, non-political faith much like that of his Grandpa. "Sufi teachers taught me not to look down on non-Muslims," he says, "because you never know who is revered in God's eyes."

No longer believing in a clash of civilisations, he points out that it was Muslim scholars who kept alive Greek philosophy and science and reintroduced them to Europe. "We form part of western tradition. It's our tradition!"

That someone as deeply involved in the Islamist movement in Britain as Husain was could grow out of it gives us reason to hope. While not all Sufis are peaceful, nor do all reject the jihad of battle, the Sufi tradition in Islam does seem more open to other faiths. Sometimes, perhaps, this openness has served merely to Islamize a conquered culture by gradual inculcation of Muslim values among non-Muslims, but other times, it may have allowed for greater pluralism -- both within a society of Muslims and within societies in which Muslims and non-Muslims live. Someone with greater knowledge than my own could perhaps instruct us.

Incidentally, Husain's point about Greek philosophy and science being kept alive by Muslim scholar, while not false, requires some qualifications. Christian scholars hadn't lost everything, and there were renaissances (e.g., the Carolingian) before the Renaissance of the 12th Century that was, indeed, partly inspired by Christian contact with Muslims in Spain. Moreover, Greek knowledge was also kept alive in the Christian Byzantine Empire itself, which provided a conduit of philosophy and science to Western Christendom, especially as Muslim attacks on Byzantium, leading to its fall is 1453, drove Orthodox Christian refugees to the Western, Catholic realm and engendered the greatest rebirth of the Classical tradition in The Renaissance.

Therefore, I wouldn't strongly imply that the Western tradition belongs to the Islamic tradition. I'd note, rather, that Islamic civilization and Western civilization have both borrowed from each other. Most of the borrowing, or so it appears to me, has been on the Muslim side. Certainly that's the case in the past 500 years. But since Muslim scholars were 'preserving' Greek knowledge (albeit not preserving the original Greek sources, as noted by Rémi Brague in Eccentric Culture), then Islamic civilization was already borrowing from early on in its rise to political, military, and intellectual greatness.

Even the clash-of-civilizations theorist himself, Samuel P. Huntington, acknowledges that civilizations don't only clash with each other, for they also borrow from each other -- often as they are also busy clashing.

So even if Ed Husain has withdrawn from his own clash-of-civilizations jihad, his personal example might not provide as much hope as one would wish:

What happened to him, and others, is the result of misplaced policies. "In the name of multiculturalism we have created ghettos," he says.

"In east London you can go to a nursery and then a school and then get a job and almost everyone in your life will be a Muslim. There is a Muslim underworld here, and that is the only frame of reference for young Muslims. We are sitting on a time bomb."

It would seem that Husain believes that there is a civilizational clash, after all, a hidden time bomb just waiting to explode...

Huntingtonian Conflict in "The Rise of Asia and Its Future"?

Huntington's Flashy Clash

Civilizations or Religions?

(Image from Wikipedia)

This coming Thursday and Friday, I'll be attending an international conference on "The Rise of Asia and Its Future: Global, Regional and National Implications," sponsored by the Korean Political Science Association (KPSA).

My friend Kim Myongsob and I will be talking about "When Asia Matters: What Asia, Why and How?"

That's the title of our paper, at any rate. We won't be reading it directly but will be riffing off of it a bit. Myongsob will be speaking in Korean, with simultaneous interpretation for the benefit of the international audience. I'll be speaking in English, of course, with the interpretation going the other way.

I had considered talking about the Western image of Asia since "Asia" is a Western concept, and I could show that the concept "Asian," albeit a Western concept, has not always and everywhere been a Eurocentric one. As evidence, I could show the T/O Maps discussed in an earlier blog entry.

Myongsob, however, has suggested that I talk about the 'clash of civilizations' in Asia. Perhaps he's right, for the focus of Huntington's perspective -- namely, violence between civilizations -- has more significance for the current rise of Asia today than would the long-surpassed, Ancient and Medieval images of Asia in the West.

Huntington, in his Foreign Affairs article for the Summer 1993 issue, "The Clash of Civilizations?", certainly provides matter for serious consideration on conflict in Asia:

The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim minority.

I could add to this the conflict in the Philippines between the Catholic majority and the Muslim minority. But this raises a question. Has Huntington correctly identified the major civilizations? Huntington identifies seven or eight:

Civilizational identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization.

Huntington then adds his crucial point that "The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another." But what do these fault lines separate? Don't they separate not so much civilizations as religions? Sometimes, Huntington talks as if they do:

[T]he processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social factors of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.

Religion, then, seems to be basic to a civilization. Huntington elsewhere appears to think so:

Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao.

The expression "from Bosnia to Mindanao" implies an conflict between Islam and Christianity, which we do see in the southeastern European region around Bosnia and in the southern Philippine region of Mindanao. This returns us to my question about "the conflict in the Philippines between the Catholic majority and the Muslim minority." Since Huntington alludes to it, he would seem to be including this conflict as a fault-line conflict between civilizations. But which civilizations? The Islamic one, to be sure, due to the presence of a Muslim minority in the southern Philippines. But the Catholic majority -- is it part of Western Civilization? It's certainly not part of the other six or seven civilizations, but would Catholic Filipinos see themselves as Western? Wouldn't their larger identity be Christian?

And this returns me to my question: "Has Huntington correctly identified the major civilizations?" If Islam, despite its own 'inner' fault-line distinction between Sunni and Shi'ite, can be conceived as one single civilization, then shouldn't Christianity also have this privilege? Why split Christian 'civilization' -- if I may use the expression -- into two civilizations, Western and Orthodox? Conversely, if Huntington is right to split Christian 'civilization' into two, then why not split Islamic civilization into a Sunni 'civilization' and a Shi'ite 'civilization'? And for that matter, why stop at two Christian civilizations? Why not three: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant?

Sometimes, I think that Huntington is talking not about civilizational conflict but simply about religious conflict.