'THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS': ISLAM AND THE WEST

April 6, April 18, May 16, June 6, 2002

Over the last several months, there have been a number of attempts to understand the catastrophe of 11 September. Most conspicuously, journalists, policy-makers, and the general public have sought to understand the crime by applying Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" thesis. According to Huntington, the world is divided into a number of "civilizations," each of which has its own unique characteristics and values which are incompatible with those held by other "civilizations." Thus, according to Huntington, the "West" will never reach an accommodation with "Islamic civilization" and should recognize fundamental differences that separate one from the other—differences that inevitably lead to conflict. The purpose of this three-day seminar is to examine this thesis, to determine whether or not it accurately represents the international situation, and, if not, to pose alternatives.

The seminar is divided into three parts. In the first, participants will read and discuss the thesis itself as it is presented in Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The second discussion will look at the most devastating critique of the thesis, presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism, a book ironically published two decades before Huntington’s. Said not only dismisses the idea of incommensurable civilizations, he traces the evolution of the idea of distinct "civilizations" from its roots in ancient Greece through the present day. In the final discussion, we shall look at various short works (by Andrew Sullivan, Muhammad Khatami, Sayyid Qutb, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, James L. Gelvin) that have been written in answer to the crime of 11 September in an effort to ascertain the usefulness of the "clash of civilizations" thesis for understanding recent events and the world in which we live.