A cardinal fact that one may miss in Huntington’s book is that the civilizational clash of Islam is not new; it is as old as Islam itself: fourteen centuries old. Islam was founded by Prophet Muhammad as a “totalitarian and globalist creed” in 7th-century Arabia at the cost of his non-Muslim neighbors: Pagans, Jews and Christians. The Prophet himself cleansed Arabia of the Pagans. On his deathbed (632), he had ordered his followers to cleanse Arabia of the remaining few Jews and Christians, whom he had allowed to live as ignominious dhimmi subjects in peripheral areas. The second caliph Omar (d. 644) put Muhammad’s last wish to action, denuding Arabia of non-Muslims. He expelled the Jews of Khaybar in 638, for example.
The clash of “Islam versus the rest of humanity”, initiated by Prophet Muhammad at its founding, was widened against all humanity and perpetuated by Muslims over the centuries. It could not be otherwise, because Islam was born in Arabia as Islamic God Allah’s master-plan, His politico-military tool, for creating a global Islamic state by making Muslims His “agent and inheritor of the earth” [Quran 6:165] and promising to make Islam victorious over all peoples and places [Quran 8:39].
Since then, Muslims, including its classical scholars, have divided humanity into two houses, two civilizations: Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (House of War). Islam’s central mission over the centuries has been to turn the non-Muslim Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam through Jihadi wars to realize Allah’s global imperial dream. Classical Islamic literature is very candid about this. And Islam’s history reflects exactly that.
Islam has achieved stunning success in this mission. Where is are the great pre-Islamic civilizations of Coptic-Paganic Egypt, Zoroastrian Persia, Eastern Christianity of West Asia, Paganic-Animist North Africa, where Islam reached quite early by the sword. They have all vanished. An estimated 120 million human lives were lost to Islamic swords in Africa and 80 million in India. Some 60 million Christians and millions of Buddhists also perished. Readers may consult my just-released book, Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism, and Slavery
, in order the grasp the whole picture of Islam’s historical and ongoing clash with the rest of humanity.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Arch Conservative
C'mon don't you think you're being a little unfair to Islam? I mean.....radical islamists are only killing the innocents that radical christians, jews, buddhists and hindus can't be bothered to murder.
2 - Doug Hunter
Somewhat fitting to mark the passage of Sharia law in Somalia. The curtain has fallen over one more state.
I don't think your article will receive much love here. Liberals, which now comprise a majority, have this worldview where christians and jews are the bad guys and muslims are just innocent victims.
3 - Arch Conservative
Well Doug that's because most liberals are useless fucking idiots.
Just look at who they've just chosen to be their new leader, Barry "hope and change" Obama, king of the useless fucking idiots.
4 - M. A. Khan
Yes Doug. Part of Pakistan is already in Allah's grip; the rest will follow suit in 10-15 years.
5 - Cindy
Khan,
Promoting this sort of opinion has serious implications. I'm glad you noted that Said opposed Huntington. Edward Said is a person whom I admired. So, I'll see what he has to say first.
I guess you weren't impressed with his criticism?
6 - roger nowosielski
Right, Cindy. E. Said is indispensable reading - kind of seeing both points of view. I'll look through what I have in order to comment further.
7 - Cindy
Roger I have a good video of Said's criticism of Huntington if you like. I'll get it.
8 - Cindy
Said's criticism of Huntington:
Edward Said Lecture - The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilzations':
1st 10 minutes of Said's lecture
Full 52 minute lecture
Article: The Clash of Ignorance
By Edward W. Said, in The Nation, October 4, 2001
9 - roger nowosielski
It's not a new theme, of course.
Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West,
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History
Vol I: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations
Vol II: The Geneses of Civilizations
Vol III: The Growths of Civilizations
Vol IV: The Breakdowns of Civilizations
Vol V and VI: The Disintegrations of Civilizations
Wikipedia.
10 - roger nowosielski
Great. Video part is disabled, but the reference to the article is great.
11 - roger nowosielski
Great article, Cindy. I'm afraid it'd require too much patience on the part of our ideologues to stumble through it, because they already know it all. As regards the quote,
"It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation."
One might want to add The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, to see how flimsy a veneer the civilization is when the upper-class English schoolboys educated at Eton are left to their own devices on a desert island.
The reference to Henri Pirenne is also great, since his one-sided thesis helped shaped the thinking of the West:
"Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno."
12 - Dave Nalle
Yes Doug. Part of Pakistan is already in Allah's grip; the rest will follow suit in 10-15 years.
I admire your optimism. With the ongoing brain drain of Pakistan's intellectual and middle class going to the UK and the US I give the country no more than 5 years before it falls to a radical Islamic regime.
When radicalized Islam controls everything from the border of India to the middle of Africa then we just have to sit and wait for Turkey to fall. Then it's France and Germany. Just a matter of time as things are going now.
Dave
13 - roger nowosielski
You're subscribing to the thesis, then, that ignorance shall prevail - which would signal an entry into another "Dark Ages." But from strictly historical standpoint, aren't such episodes rather short-lived and unstable?
14 - Dave Nalle
How predictable that Edward Said should be brought up in the context of this article. Whenever someone writes about the threat of Islam Said, who was not a historian or a political analyst and whose views are remarkably naive and tainted by his early experiences in Palestine, is always the authority of last resort.
The problem with Said is that he never really got the difference between Islam and the Arab people. He was self-admittedly conflicted about his upbringing as an Arab mostly isolated from Islamic society, and his criticisms of historians like Lewis and Huntington, is that he mistakenly leaps to the defense of Islam as a whole when what he really wants to do is defend the Arab people and differentiate them from the rest of Islam.
His argument that Islam is more diverse than westerners believe is only valid up to the point where Islam as an international movement takes over from Islam as a local religion. The hard truth which Said was never able to accept, is that the common ground between all muslims regardless of cultural and ethnic background is the Q'ran, and the Q'ran includes in it a fundamental intolerance and demand for the subjugation of other cultures. It's an inescapable fact, and no matter how congenial, educated or cosmopolitan Arabs or other muslims are on an individual basis, the religion still has these problems when you look at it as a whole.
Dave
15 - Cindy
Roger,
I noticed that you have said more than once that you can't get video--yet the video was/is available.
If you would like help with finding out why you can't and how you might get video, let me know.
The longer said lecture is excellent. I wouldn't want to have missed it.
16 - roger nowosielski
Someone like Said's voice has got to brought to the conversation, or we just have to go along with a one-sided view, such as one by Huntington or his exponent, Khan. You may not agree with Said's analysis, but the alternative is even worse. Should we just become captive to an idea without discussing it?
17 - Dave Nalle
You're subscribing to the thesis, then, that ignorance shall prevail - which would signal an entry into another "Dark Ages." But from strictly historical standpoint, aren't such episodes rather short-lived and unstable?
Short-lived from a historical viewpoint is still longer than you or I are likely to live, Roger. The patterns are obvious. The intellectuals and the wealthy and the skilled move to where their talents are in the most demand, leaving behind the ignorant and the easily swayed. As a religion Islam has no use for intellectuals or even the middle class. It's openly hostile to them. Conditions in the Islamic world and the increasingly radical direction Islam is going, guarantee that those who could stop the spread of darkness move to the west.
Look at Edward Said who we brought up earlier. He was a great advocate for moderate Islam and Palestinian rights. Did he move back to Palestine or even Egypt so he could have a positive influence? Hell no. He stayed nice and safe here in the US. Hypocritical, perhaps, but a sign of good sense, and an example which thousands of others have followed.
The population becomes more ignorant, Islam becomes more intolerant, the remaining intellectuals and minorities leave and take their skills with them until all you have left is a repressive system of religious radicals, hereditary elitists, ignorant peasants and slaves. That's the future of Islam, and even if Said wouldn't admit it, that's why he and others got the hell out.
Dave
18 - Dave Nalle
Should we just become captive to an idea without discussing it?
We can continue to discuss it, but we're just rehashing Said's argument with Bernard Lewis where Said ended up resorting to ad hominems because he couldn't defend Islam effectively on a historical basis or on the basis of current events, and it's just gotten worse since Said died.
By all accounts Said was a really nice guy and his literary criticism is interesting, but he was a fool when it came to politics.
Dave
19 - Cindy
Dave,
It is even more "predictable" given that the author's article cites Said as a critic.
lol Dave, Said's views are "tainted". If you agree with them, my guess is the adjective you used, would have been "informed".
Well, Dave Huntington might be a bit on the "tainted" side himself.
Let's see you defend his positions based on some of his other attitudes, which speak pretty loudly about what he really is.
Hispanic Panic
Samuel P. Huntington and the return of the Know-Nothings.
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is a bigot, convinced that immigrant hordes are poisoning our Anglo-Protestant America. This in itself is not surprising; there have always been plenty of his kind on the American scene. Nor is it surprising that this bigot is a professor at Harvard. Nativism, in its 19th-century surge, was very much the darling cause of the New England elites.
What is surprising is that now, a century and a half after the Know-Nothings vanished in disgrace, Huntington feels free to promote his nativist hatred in print, and can be celebrated for doing so. Post-9/11 America, as John le Carre has said, has lost its mind. Huntington's screeching is a worthy contribution to the bedlam.
Huntington disguises a disingenuous question as a scholarly inquiry in his sleazy new book, Who Are We? The Challenge to America's National Identity (Simon & Schuster, $27). The question is disingenuous because Huntington already has an answer, the same one that has been peddled by American bigots for hundreds of years: America is and must remain an Anglo-Protestant culture.
Huntington's plan for America's salvation requires "a recommitment to America as a deeply religious and primarily Christian country…adhering to Anglo-Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage, and committed to the principles of the [American] Creed..."
Our Anglo-Protestant culture is under threat, according to Huntington, from the Latin hordes sneaking across our southern borders. Huntington violently hates Hispanics, especially Mexicans. The point of this book is to infect the reader with the same fear and hatred. In the process, this eminent academic is more than willing to dirty his hands with the sort of hatemongering anecdote Pat Buchanan would refuse to touch. His favorite, so special that he tells it at the beginning of the book and again at the end, is...
(continued at the link)
20 - Cindy
Sorry for the long quote. I think it's important that no one reading this article has to actually apply any effort to go elsewhere and see what Huntington is.
21 - roger nowosielski
Dave,
It won't advance your cause one bit by calling people names, like "a fool" here - unless of course your intent is to prejudice those who are not going to get through Said for a variety of reasons. So let's just forget that and get down to cases. In a sense, it's a blessing here because this discussion can be delimited to few participants.
We're not discussing here Said's view of politics but his view of civilizations and cultures. Whereas the contrary view, the one you're opposing, takes no consideration of Said's argument - and that view (as well as Said's, indirectly at least) affects and informs the political view(s) that are being espoused. So let's get clear on that before we can even begin, shall we?
Roger
22 - roger nowosielski
Cindy, you're only inviting hotheads into the discussion. It's precisely what I want to avoid, because resorting to name-calling, like "bigot," is going to degenerate this thread to the point neither you nor I would want to have anything to do with it. It's Dave's trick, and we want to cure him of that, don't we? especially when there's likely to be not much of an audience.
Roger
23 - roger nowosielski
PS: I don't mean to be disagreeable here, only a suggestion.
24 - Cindy
Roger,
I disagree for a few reasons:
1) I don't want to cure Dave (or anyone else) of anything. It's information, they can do whatever they want with it.
2) I don't think Dave realized what kind of mentality he was defending, and
3) The critique I offered, makes the point very loud and clear, and therefore,
4) It offers a better counter to the Huntington and his ideas than I could do myself with 42 pages of argument, and
5) I really don't care for arguing for argument's sake alone. So, if something quickly illustrates my point, that is what I will use.
25 - roger nowosielski
I just want the discussion to deteriorate to name-calling, which it very well may. It's not the argument that's at stake here but the inherent ideas. So I want him to discuss that rather than trying to dodge.
Yes, David does - if it wasn't for Huntington, it would be somebody else. He's committed to his view of things, remember, because of whatever's his perspective. Ultimately, it's those ideas that are the proper object of discussion and the battleground.