«Shows author's bias and borders on conspiracy theory»
This book was a bad read. It did show that the author probably has vast knowledge of world history and geography but at the same time showed his strong bias towards racial and religious nature of the world. The book makes some very simplistic judgments about the historical nature of conflict and added huge amount of weights towards some abstract "civilizational" construct of human life. Humans are way more complicated and driven a lot by nationalistic and regional concerns then this book realized. I found reading this book quite a waste of time.
[Sunday, November 23, 2008]
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«The Real War»
Islam presents no death dealing threat to the US or the West. There are real dangers facing the West, of course but these dangers emanate from within the West. George W. Bush has basically tanked the standing of the US in the world guided by neo-cons who redescribe Hegelianism as the Western tradition, see Francis Fukuyama. Progessives such as Richard Rorty advocate redscribing the West away too. The West vis-a-vis Rorty is just one damn thing after another. Whatever redescribes the West away is acceptable these days. The question isn't whether Islam is going to defeat the West it is whether the West is going to commit harakiri. To fail to acknowledge that the threats to the West come from progessives such as Richard Rorty and neo-cons such as Leo Strauss is to fail to see the real dangers that the West faces. Vis-a-vis the Middle East terrorism, of course, has to be contained but the real threats to the West are of the West rather vis-a-vis a clash of civilizations.
[Saturday, September 20, 2008]
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«Sloppy, Oversimplified and Deeply Flawed»
As an Arab-Canadian, I'm pretty much at the forefront of this so-called "clash of civilizations", and the way I see things as it stands, it seems as though there is indeed a 'clash' materializing. However, that is only a superficial gut feeling, the same feeling the respect Dr. Sam Huntington subscribed to when writing this book.
My interest in this issue started when I read John Esposito's book, Political Islam - truly a masterpiece - which picked stripped the religion of Islam bare, down to its origins, and described its evolution over time, spanning the Muhammedian era up till 9/11. He also dedicated chapters to specific issues such as the Jamaat-e-Islami group in Pakistan, the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt - all these were discussed in a political and religious context. In the afterword, he mentioned how there is almost no overlap between these movements, that these were truly independent movements spawned by the circumstantial political and socioeconomic currents in the region in question. From there, he concluded that the idea of a 'clash of civilizations' is preposterous. Indeed, it's a figment of Dr. Huntington's imagination.
There are almost 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet. The Islamic world stretches from West Africa all the way down to Southeast Asia. There is absolutely no common political denominator between the Muslims in, say, Morocco and the Muslims in China, because there is a massive cultural cleft within the Islamic world (and even within the Western bloc - something Tom Freidman also missed).
I won't go into the details, refuting every claim this book makes, but my impression of this book is that it's trash. I was even slightly offended by how much generalizing and statistical abuse this Harvard graduate has managed to cram in his book. The very fact that he didn't go through the trouble of trying to analyze the Muslim World in a greater depth left me uneasy going through the last couple of pages of the book.
In the end, this is just racist propaganda by a Xenophobe, not more. It shouldn't deserve that much attention, and indeed should be pulled of the shelves of all libraries for being more of a hate speech inciter than even the holy books!
[Tuesday, July 22, 2008]
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