Clashing Civilization - Free Essay Example

Hannah Duggan September 17, 2010 â€Å"Clashing Civilizations? † by Edward Said In Edward Said’s essay â€Å"Clashing Civilizations? †, he analyses in detail the arguments of Samuel Huntington in his paper on â€Å"Clash of Civilizations†. Edward Said incisively analyzes Huntington’s notion that differences in culture between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ will lead to conflicts between the two civilizations. Arguing against large understanding of cultures, Said makes a powerful case for multiculturalism. As he argues in this essay, â€Å"A unilateral decision made to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz’s nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn’t make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examin e, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, ‘ours’ as well as ‘theirs’. † Said argues that collapsing complex, diverse and contradictory groups of people into vast, simplistic groups has disastrous consequences. In Huntington’s original piece, he believes that the Muslim culture is more involved in wars and conflict than any other culture. He also believes that the clash of distinct cultures and civilizations is the potential root cause of the reinvigorated conflicts between nations differing in religious beliefs. Said, on the other hand, feels as though Huntington is using labels, generalizations, and culture assertions as reasoning to his thesis. He states, â€Å"Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization; or for considering that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or int erpretation of each culture; or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. † Said feels, as though Huntington is basing his hypothesis strictly on assumptions and stereotypes, he has no factual backup. The next point Said makes is how articles like the one Samuel Huntington published, give readers and the public a confusing message. Since Huntington uses generalizations and undetermined labels such as â€Å"Islam† and â€Å"the West†, it is up for the reader to determine what people and places he is specifically talking about, therefore giving many people mixed conclusions. He states, â€Å"This is the problem with unedifying labels such as Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that wont be pigeonholed. For Edward Said, the West as an ideological concept is crucial to the mis interpretation of other civilizations, especially Islamic civilizations, as potentially hostile and compulsive. However, words like West are exploited heavily by western media as an easy and pragmatic mean to convey the imaginary ideological differences between West and Islamic. This form of mislabeling, according to Edward Said, leads to confusion, and ultimately results in the misinterpretation of other civilizations as potentially hostile to the West. Edward Said proposes that instead of see differences, we should look for parallels, and instead of battling each other ideologically, we should reconcile with other ideologies. He also describes our history as a universally shared history; therefore, it is our duty to reconcile with each other, and try to understand each other on firm objective bases instead of assuming imaginary ideological boundaries. Once this happens, we will be one step closer to a peaceful world.