Bin Laden's foes are other Muslims
Sun, Oct 14, 2001
Gwynne Dyer "The nations of infidels have all united against the Muslims. ...This is
a new battle, a great battle, similar to the great battles of Islam like the
conquest of Jerusalem. ...(The Americans) come out to fight Islam in the name of
fighting terrorism. These events have split the world into two camps: the camp
of belief and the camp of disbelief...." -- Osama bin Laden Huntington's book was especially popular among the Washington-based
professionals who had built lucrative careers on fighting the Soviet threat, and
by the early '90s were desperately in need of a new threat to replace it. Just
substitute bearded fanatics for godless commissars, and carry on making money.
In Islamic fundamentalist circles, on the other hand, they had no need of
Huntington. They already believed that contemporary history is a morality play
in which the oppressed and despised peoples of the Muslim world are destined to
unite, wage a final battle against Western civilization, and overthrow its
domination throughout the world. This is the world view that bin Laden pushes relentlessly every time he finds
a camera to address, and there are plenty of Muslims, especially in the Arab
world, who already believe it. The current crisis will give this definition of
the world a big boost in both of the civilizations in question, but it remains,
nevertheless, pure parochial nonsense. There is no clash of civilizations, only
a clash between traditionalists and modernizers within each culture, religion
and civilization. All of bin Laden's real enemies are Muslims. The battle between reformers and conservatives has been under way in the West
for over 500 years, long before it began in other parts of the planet. This lets
the defenders of the old ways everywhere else portray their opponents within
their own society as mere pawns of Western influence -- and some of the
defenders are pretty extreme in their rejection of the modern. As a pro-Taliban
youth in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan put it recently, staking his claim
to the moral high ground: "The Americans love Coca-Cola, but we love death."
It's a striking statement, but the point is that there's nothing particularly
Islamic about it. A Japanese kamikaze pilot in 1945 could have said it with
equal sincerity. Every major culture on the planet is at some stage or other of
working its way through the same series of changes, and occasionally some
country or even some entire civilization may spin out for a while and go
slightly mad. This is not happening to the Muslims as a whole, some 1.2 billion people of
wildly diverse languages, histories and traditions who live in around 50
different countries in three continents. It is not even happening to the Arabs,
who account for only one-fifth of the world's Muslims. It is conceivable (though
not likely) that a couple of Arab states might face revolutionary takeovers by
Islamic fundamentalists if the current crisis lasts too long or involves too
many innocent Muslims' deaths, but you still don't get a clash of civilizations
out of that. There are large and genuine global trends at work today: democratization,
globalization of the economy, equality for women. The global village that
Marshall McLuhan predicted to much puzzlement 40 years ago is a reality, thanks
to the new media technologies, and we can and do see everybody all the time.
But these trends, while they cause much puzzlement and frustration, do not
show any signs of leading towards a titanic clash of civilizations. Instead, we
are all muddling through the mess, far too busy coping with the deluge of change
in our own lives to fall into the grand historical patterns foreseen for us by
men like Huntington and bin Laden.
NSP Lista isprobava demokratiju u praksi
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