ISIS and crISIS: Time for West to introspect on clash of civilisations

The rise of a new West Asian terror group – bunched under the banner of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – has sent shivers down western spines. India can’t be too unconcerned, with 40 Indians said to have been taken hostage by ISIS terrorists in Mosul, Iraq’s second city that was captured last week. While the short-term priorities for India and the world are similar – rescue the hostages, and try and cap the bloodshed between Shia and Sunni forces in Iraq – once the crisis is past, the west needs to introspect and ask itself how much of the current west Asian (and world turmoil) is due to its own selfish and incompetent interventions in the past. In particular, it must rethink and rewrite its own hubris-laden version of its role in the history of modern civilisation and ultra-modern barbarism. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “ The white man’s burden”, in which the racist poet asked America to shoulder the burden of empire at the turn of the 19th century, can now be stood on its head: it is the rest of the world that has to shoulder the messy burdens created by the white man’s unholy colonial and post-colonial interventions. This story has been unfolding for some time now, starting with the end of colonialism around the mid-20th century, and the division of entire peoples on the basis of ethnicity, religion, race, language, etc, accompanied by a wholesale redrawing of world maps. The west created nation-states where none existed, and cleaved tolerant national diversities into intolerant nation-states (India-Pakistan, Palestine, whole countries in Africa). [caption id=“attachment_1574715” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Young Iraqi boy holds a weapon to join fight against militants. AFP image[/caption] It is not my purpose to rant against what happened in the last century, but to point out that a lot of the current world turmoil is the result of many western ideas that we have all internalised and believe to be self-evidently true. Among these: the idea of western universalism (low tolerance of difference), the idea of the nation-state (a utopian belief that an entire people can have common beliefs, and who stay in the same geography), the belief in binaries (good versus evil, black versus white, “I-am-right-you-are-wrong”), the belief in rigid secularism (church vs state) as opposed to a more benign pluralism (be what you want to be, never mind if your beliefs are different from mine), et al. The only modern idea emanating from the west – or at least articulated extensively in the west – is the idea of the individual as the crucial unit of civilisation, with her own inalienable rights. The rest of it is open to question. At the root of all western belief systems and assertion of western superiority is one implicit truth: might is right. This is the reality of western influence, and not all the bright ideas of freedom and enlightenment that Anglophones rave about. No one got this better than Samuel Huntington, the late author of The Clash of Civilisations. He observed quite pithily: “The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-westerners never do.” The US, South America and Australia were settled through a process of violent extermination and subjugation. Europe separated itself into narrow ethnicities settled into small geographies after years of bloody warfare among themselves. The modern European nation-state is thus the result of long-term ethnic cleansing – hardly the ideal for today. What the Europeans did to themselves, they inflicted on their colonial territories in America, Africa and Asia, too. They brought new ideas of power and universalism in order to extract wealth from their colonies, but in the process they damaged the innate diversities of native peoples. (For a critique of western universalism, read Rajiv Malhotra’s book Being Different_)_ This is not to suggest that the pre-colonial eras were times of peaceful coexistence between people. Not quite. Tribes, regions, races, and religious groups fought one another often, but no strife was permanent. It needed the European concept of binaries – good versus evil, my god versus your god – that allowed for no grey areas and made conflicts endemic and intractable. It demanded an artificial universalism where only one thing could be right, and only one idea can prevail. This is why we are now seeing implacable foes of the west and Christianity surfacing in West Asia. Remember, the idea of religious war was invented by the church. This is the idea that led to the crusades, and what we are witnessing in West Asia is a renewal of this primeval conflict between Islam and Christianity. The post-World War domination of West Asia by America has only added new zest to this enmity. In the last 25 years, the Americans have been trying to rework the map of the Arab world by separating them into good Muslims and bad. It will now learn that this is one more binary that has gone bad. Western scholars will be raising the usual question after Mosul: What is it about Islam that it regularly throws up violent ideologies? They will find some answers by looking into their own past - and into the mirror. Religion as a cause for war was an invention of the European church. Today’s Islamists are only returning the fire with their own version of the crusades. While America has always been home to radical born-again Christian fundamentalism, Europe has also seen a rapid rise in right-wing groups - with recent European parliament elections giving them unexpected gains. In a sense, the continent that launched the crusades against Islam is getting back to the crusade mindset at its fringes. Mainstream Europe is meanwhile embracing another fundamantalism - a secular fundamentalism where head scarves will be banned even while European courts will protect crosses in schools on grounds of tradition. Nor is this reversal to old cultural identities only a western preoccupation. In Russia, Orthodox Christianity is back. In Japan, the old feeling of being wronged, by the imposition of victors’ justice after defeat in the Second World War, is surfacing again. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe now regularly pays obeisance to the war-dead by visiting the Yasukuni shrine – despite huge Chinese anger. In Turkey, Kemalist secularism is in retreat, and the country (under Tecip Erdogan) now sees itself as a leader of the Islamic world. Turkey does not think twice about taking anti-Israel positions. Radical and/or tribal groups are ruling the roost - legitimately or illegitimately - in much of Africa outside South Africa. In south east Asia and south Asia, religious identity is making a comeback - in India, in Sri Lanka, in Myanmar, in Thailand, not to speak of the Muslim majority nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. Even tiny Maldives was not free from religious iconoclasm and bigotry, with Buddhist images being smashed in the coup that dethroned an elected president in 2012. There is, of course, a danger is trying to link separate events and developments to a single or similar set of causes. But the trend is so widespread that it is impossible to deny a connecting thread between these developments. The connecting threads are the following. Worldwide, as modernisation, globalisation and technology threaten jobs and livelihoods everywhere, including in that bastion of capitalism, America, people are harking back to an era that they believe was simpler - a golden age. Religious fundamentalists and traditionalists are selling dreams of an ideal past that never was - and people are desperate enough to buy. In all cases, the outsider is seen or shown to be standing in the way of achieving this ideal past. If the Arab world sees America as the great devil out to subvert pristine Islam, Americans are equally willing to erect Islamism and the related terrorism as the greatest threat to world peace. The pace of change - political, economic and social - is now very threatening to large sections of people in every part of the world. The resulting sense of helplessness, the inability to control this pace of change, makes people vulnerable to simple solutions. People are rebelling against complexity and lack of control over their lives by opting for simplistic solutions like “Islam is the answer”. Anger and impotence have been harnessed by radical forces by creating imaginary external enemies and jihadist propaganda. While the harking back to simple ideologies is a worldwide phenomenon, it has been instrumental in reawakening the old Abrahamic fault-lines between Christianity and Islam. While the west sees Islam itself as a threat, the Islamists see western modernity and its offshoots - consumerism, globalisation, and secularism - as the threat. Huntington again got it right when he said: “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilisational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.” The Clash of Civilisations is something all fundamentalists believe in - both in the west and the Arab world. The latest version is currently playing out in Iraq with ISIS as lead actor. The best the west can do is act humble, and stay out of the conflict unless both parties invite it over. It’s interventions have only worsened matters everywhere in the past.