Markha Valenta: The Clash of Clichés
[Markha Valenta holds appointments in the departments of history at the University of Amsterdam and of culture studies at the University of Tilburg. Her current work concerns the politics of religious diversity in relation to global urbanism, multiculturalism and secular democracy. Her openDemocracy column is Inter Alia.]
At the beginning of the year, John Vinocur published a fascinating little article in the New York Times. John Vinocur is senior correspondent at the International Herald Tribune (the New York Times’ global edition, based in Paris). Not only has he had a long career in journalism, but some twenty-five years ago he was awarded the George Polk Award, a prestigious honour. It is striking then that he should now write an article that so distorts and misrepresents its subject, as if its author has forgotten how to do good journalism. I am ambivalent about putting this so bluntly because I met Vinocur some years ago on a panel, and found him both friendly and generous in his comments. But still: he goes too far.
Inspired by recent remarks made by the former leader of the Dutch Liberal Party, Frits Bolkestein, Vinocur argues that while Europe addresses its other major problems, it is virtually ignoring the problem of integrating its Muslims. Vinocur understands this problem as a clash of civilizations.
At the receiving end
That is his first mistake. The shortcomings with this trope – that in Europe today we find two distinct civilizations – are well-established. The peoples and cultures of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia have been cross-fertilizing, competing with and engaging each other for centuries. To assert that they constitute distinct “civilizations” that until now have evolved as islands of culture afloat in the world is not only to be wilfully obtuse and ahistorical, but to make a political statement. It is only by asserting that they are distinct that conflict between them can be naturalized, while their on-going collaboration and fusion are de-naturalized and made invisible.
So, for example, it has by now been quite persuasively established that the Jesuits did much to invent the Confucius we know. This troublesome historical fact does not fit easily with any idea of a Chinese civilization whose primary claim to distinction from western civilization is its basis in Confucian tradition. More well-known is how the Muslim world preserved and studied Aristotle for centuries and then re-introduced him to the Christian world, long after that world had mostly lost track of him. While Europe is rightfully proud of its Renaissance, where would that Renaissance have been without Aristotle? That is to say, where would western modernity be without the influence of the Muslim world and its deep thinking about rationality, the order of the world, and its legal, scientific and philosophical engagement with that world through institutions of learning that helped to shape our own?
Europe, as we know, repaid its debt some centuries later by going to Muslim areas of the world and deeply transforming the politics, cultures, and religions to be found there. This was no simple one-way process, as foreign imposition and strategic local response intertwined. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of Catholic (and dissenting Protestant and Jewish) identity politics in England’s Atlantic territories mirrored by the rise of Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist identity politics in England’s territories outside Europe. This was no clash of civilizations, but the opposite – the creation of one modern political domain in which everyone increasingly deployed shared repertoires and strategies, including that of organizing on the basis of shared identities and traditions in the interest of political gain. Religion, much like culture, gender and class, has been central rather than marginal to this eminently democratic process, in which authenticity, numbers, dedication and discipline are strategically deployed in order prove the worthiness of one’s cause and the right to the formal recognition of one’s community and its interests in the field of politics (to roughly paraphrase Charles Tilly)....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
At the beginning of the year, John Vinocur published a fascinating little article in the New York Times. John Vinocur is senior correspondent at the International Herald Tribune (the New York Times’ global edition, based in Paris). Not only has he had a long career in journalism, but some twenty-five years ago he was awarded the George Polk Award, a prestigious honour. It is striking then that he should now write an article that so distorts and misrepresents its subject, as if its author has forgotten how to do good journalism. I am ambivalent about putting this so bluntly because I met Vinocur some years ago on a panel, and found him both friendly and generous in his comments. But still: he goes too far.
Inspired by recent remarks made by the former leader of the Dutch Liberal Party, Frits Bolkestein, Vinocur argues that while Europe addresses its other major problems, it is virtually ignoring the problem of integrating its Muslims. Vinocur understands this problem as a clash of civilizations.
At the receiving end
That is his first mistake. The shortcomings with this trope – that in Europe today we find two distinct civilizations – are well-established. The peoples and cultures of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia have been cross-fertilizing, competing with and engaging each other for centuries. To assert that they constitute distinct “civilizations” that until now have evolved as islands of culture afloat in the world is not only to be wilfully obtuse and ahistorical, but to make a political statement. It is only by asserting that they are distinct that conflict between them can be naturalized, while their on-going collaboration and fusion are de-naturalized and made invisible.
So, for example, it has by now been quite persuasively established that the Jesuits did much to invent the Confucius we know. This troublesome historical fact does not fit easily with any idea of a Chinese civilization whose primary claim to distinction from western civilization is its basis in Confucian tradition. More well-known is how the Muslim world preserved and studied Aristotle for centuries and then re-introduced him to the Christian world, long after that world had mostly lost track of him. While Europe is rightfully proud of its Renaissance, where would that Renaissance have been without Aristotle? That is to say, where would western modernity be without the influence of the Muslim world and its deep thinking about rationality, the order of the world, and its legal, scientific and philosophical engagement with that world through institutions of learning that helped to shape our own?
Europe, as we know, repaid its debt some centuries later by going to Muslim areas of the world and deeply transforming the politics, cultures, and religions to be found there. This was no simple one-way process, as foreign imposition and strategic local response intertwined. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of Catholic (and dissenting Protestant and Jewish) identity politics in England’s Atlantic territories mirrored by the rise of Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist identity politics in England’s territories outside Europe. This was no clash of civilizations, but the opposite – the creation of one modern political domain in which everyone increasingly deployed shared repertoires and strategies, including that of organizing on the basis of shared identities and traditions in the interest of political gain. Religion, much like culture, gender and class, has been central rather than marginal to this eminently democratic process, in which authenticity, numbers, dedication and discipline are strategically deployed in order prove the worthiness of one’s cause and the right to the formal recognition of one’s community and its interests in the field of politics (to roughly paraphrase Charles Tilly)....