Fight to the Finish
Has a 'clash of civilizations' threatened 'the end of history'?

BY JAY TOLSON

Americans now have at least an idea of who the enemy is: a network of terrorists who may or may not have the support of one or more nations. But there is another question, with potentially greater implications for U.S. foreign policy: What are we fighting?

Terrorism alone is a complicated challenge, of course. Defeating it, experts say, will require the same sustained commitment needed for fighting a conventional war, along with a shrewd appreciation of how it differs from a classic military operation. Without drawing these subtle distinctions, says Martha Crenshaw, a professor of government at Wesleyan University and a terrorism specialist, "you are likely to create expectations . . . that might be impossible to meet: What is victory? And when does it arrive?" To balance the desire for revenge and justice with the need for lasting security, two objectives should be utmost, Crenshaw says: "In the short run, we have to crack down on the networks; in the long run, we have to drain the swamps that spawned them."

And to drain those swamps, Washington has to know what it is fighting–a question that goes to the heart of the two most provocative theories on global politics after the Cold War, published in articles by Francis Fukuyama ("The End of History?") and Samuel Huntington ("The Clash of Civilizations?").

Writing in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama, then a State Department official, argued that the end of the Cold War signaled the approaching end of "mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." In other words, the West had won. There would be blips on the screen, he allowed, and temporary setbacks in different parts of the world, but the path to an essentially harmonious global political economy was set.

Not too long after Fukuyama outlined his scenario, Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard, issued a far more ominous forecast. The passing of the Cold War had brought an end to serious competition among nation-states, but it had also launched an era of growing competition among the world's major civilizations. Where once ideologies had been the points of conflict, now religion, ethnicity, and cultural values were. "Most important," he wrote, "the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance, and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations." The stage for epic struggles–the West versus the rest–had been set. And none loomed more menacingly than the one between the West and the Islamic world.

So, then, in the still-smoky aftermath of the horrors, has Huntington been vindicated and Fukuyama disproved? Huntington has so far declined to comment, but Fukuyama remains guardedly hopeful. "In general, the Muslim world has had the most problems with modernizing," he says, "but even there the modernizing trends are strong." At the same time, Fukuyama cautions, "A lot depends on how the administration responds."

To many Islamic specialists, even suggesting that the current conflict is a clash between civilizations is handing victory to the terrorists. To Osama bin Laden, who in 1998 declared that his struggle was a continuation of the struggle against infidel Crusaders of the Middle Ages, nothing sounds sweeter than President Bush using the word "crusade" to describe America's intentions. It confirms, in his own eyes and those of his followers, bin Laden's sense of himself as a modern-day Saladin–the sultan of Egypt and Syria who captured Jerusalem and defended it during the Third Crusade.

Islam versus Islam. Some scholars say the battle lines are different: "It's not Islam versus the West as much as it is Islam versus Islam," says Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistani ambassador to the United Kingdom and professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C. Ahmed calls for what he terms a more Islamic response to the radical fringe. Many Islamic extremists (like many American commentators) equate globalism with Americanism and Westernization, for example, ignoring the Koran's own words: "There is neither East nor West for God." They also fail to acknowledge, Ahmed says, the long history of Muslim interaction with disparate religious cultures. Other scholars go even further, saying that extremism denies the spiritual richness and diversity within Islam, ignoring the Prophet's own call for tolerance.

While there are many variants of extreme Islam, most share qualities with a movement launched by an 18th-century scholar, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who lived in central Arabia and found a receptive ear in the Saud family, which in 1932 became the ruling dynasty of the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Claiming to return to original Islam, Wahhabism rejected all innovations, stressed literal belief in the Koran and hadith (the traditions of Mohammed), and called for the creation of a state run strictly according to Islamic law. Most threateningly, says Sheik Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the fundamentalists "considered traditional Muslims apostates," a judgment that the Prophet had said no mortal should make. The Prophet had foreseen that there would be many divergent practices within Islam, Kabbani notes, but said only God could judge which version is true.

Islamic civilization continued to spread and diversify. But the European nations' surrender of their colonies during the first half of the 20th century left the newly independent Islamic nations throughout North Africa and the Middle East with great challenges. Without democratic traditions, all acquired autocratic regimes of one kind or another. Their intellectuals and elites, meanwhile, tended to embrace the secularism of their former colonizers in their quest for modernity and progress. Religious practice and scholarship were neglected, and the rulers increasingly cracked down on their critics. Into this era of ferment came the Jewish state of Israel, which arose in the center of the Levant. One of its primary supporters, the United States, became a major player in the region, more than once having its way by supporting or installing unsavory regimes.

Social justice. Thus the region became ripe for movements (particularly fundamentalist ones) promising social justice and ethnic solidarity. And all the better if they painted Uncle Sam as the Great Satan, the wicked meddler in local affairs. But the notion that the United States is the decisive factor behind the rise of fanatical Islam–or of the terror it inspires–is absurd, as Richard Cohen noted in the Washington Post. Even as Washington attempted to broker a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, bin Laden's associates carried out their attacks on U.S. embassies and the USS Cole.

If there is a failing within Ameri- ca's foreign-policy establishment, says Charles Fairbanks, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, it is that it needs to figure religion more seriously into the geopolitical equation: "It's in the interest of the United States and other countries to try to encourage the recovery of traditional Islamic religious learning." Sheik Kabbani concurs, adding that it's the fanatics who "now have the mike." But to be helpful, Americans need a rudimentary knowledge of Islamic traditions and teaching so that they will know who should get aid, and who should not. At present, says Kabbani, some extremists "are getting support even from the regimes they are trying to destroy." If the United States and other nations do not help the traditionalist Muslims win the theological struggle within Islamic civilization, then the West may face what the extremists want: a real and possibly cataclysmic clash between civilizations.