Clash of Civilizations and the Democratic Discourse: The Islamic Challenge

Reflecting on the 1991 Gulf War in which the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was reversed and the Iraqi regional power curtailed, S.R. Gill observed: It partly reflects not simply the struggle between states, ... but also the struggles over the organizing principles of society - struggles which began at least as early as the Middle Ages and the era of the Crusades - between Western capitalist secular materialism and the metaphysics and social doctrine of Islam as well as more secular pan-Arabist forces in the shape of the Iraqi regime.1 In the same vein, Bernard Lewis has stated that: This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.2 Gill, Lewis, and Samuel Huntington all appear to contemplate conflict between civilizations as the "latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world."3 The lines are being sharply drawn between the West and its old nemesis, the World of Islam. Such demarcations reflect two distinct civilizational orders with their own specific and dynamic understandings of the nature of congruency between normative standards and social existence. Implicit in such a process are the fundamental considerations of epistemology and ontology and the very foundations upon which civilizations are to be built and consciousness shaped.

This article addresses some salient aspects of the anticipated civilizational conflict. Its basic contention is that the multi-dimensional conflict between the Muslim world and the secular West can only be resolved at the foundational levels of epistemology and consciousness. Only then could Muslims engage in the "politics of civilizations," not solely as the "objects of history as targets of Western colonialism," but "as movers and shapers of history."4 I will proceed by expounding some essential sources of conflict and by deconstructing liberal democracy as the political and ideological manifestation of the Western hegemonic system. I will further suggest the Iranian revolutionary experience as a budding nucleus of an Islamic transformation and propose criteria against which this phenomenon could be Islamically analyzed and understood in future and anticipated works.

• Introduction

• Liberal Democracy and Islam: The Deconstruction of a Discursive Formation 

• The Islamic Revolution of Iran: The End of a Discourse? 

• Conclusion 

• Endnotes

Dr. Amr Sabet is a professor of Political Science, Middle East Politics. He is affiliated with the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.He is currently a visiting fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies – Oxford/UK.

 

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