The End of Civilization is Not So Bad
(1993 MESA Presidential Address)[1] John Obert Voll

THE SOUNDS and activities of an increasingly globalized human world often drown out the noises of the debates in scholarly journals and intellectual magazines about the coming wars among civilizations.[2] This globalized theater of life is paradoxical, conflict-ridden and often destructive of many human values, but it is fundamentally an increasingly one-world context. Its struggles and conflicts cannot be best understood by viewing them as if they were wars between essentially different and separated entities.

The music of the group called “Dissidenten” reflects the character of the globalized theater of contemporary human activity. The information about the group provided on the cover of their compact disc called “Sahara Electric” identifies them as having their base in Germany, beginning, before the Berlin Wall came down, in the complex multi-cultural entertainment scene of West Berlin. The Dissidenten or “the dissidents” are part of the World Beat movement in which musicians show the impact of what Marshall McLuhan called “the global village.” The CD jacket describes the World Beat movement in this way: “The beguiling melodies and rhythms of traditional music from around the world was [!] being combined with the visceral energy and contemporary sounds of Western pop as Western pop musicians discovered world pop as the last musical frontier.”[3] This type of music stands as a stark and dramatic counterpoint to the image of a world of separate and warring civilizations presented in some recent and widely-read articles, the best known being the one by Samuel P. Huntington.[4]

Both “Dissidenten” and Huntington call our attention to one of the major problems that we all face in our special fields of area studies. We must find means of communication which can go across the barriers of identities, cultures and languages. These barriers exist and are significant but they also can be overcome, as I was reminded many years ago when I first heard the statement: “Ana maskiin wa inta kwayyis,” or “I am wretched and you are nice.”

Street-hardened veterans of Cairo would fall into their carefully developed mode of non-attention if they heard that statement and felt a hand on their arm. However, I reacted with positive enthusiasm the first time that I had the experience of feeling a small hand on my arm and hearing the sentence. I had just arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, and was standing in the dock area of the port after getting off the boat which had brought me to the Middle East for the first time. I was filled with apprehension because I had already invested two years of my life in a masters degree program in Middle Eastern Studies but had never actually been to the region. I was concerned that I might not understand or like the region which was so important for my future professional plans. Then, I heard the voice and the sentence and I actually understood it. Sir Hamilton Gibb, Nicholas Heer, John Mikhail and Menahem Milson were all instantly forgiven for the discomforts of intensive elementary Arabic and I knew that I had been able to begin the process of crossing the barriers to understanding. (I might add that the surprised child got an Egyptian pound as a result.)

A very important part of our professional mission is to help people cross the various barriers to understanding that exist between peoples in the West and peoples in the Middle East. Events in the past year or two have reminded us of people who have made significant contributions to this part of our professional work. Sadly, sometimes the reminder comes with learning of the death of a colleague, teacher or old friend. The Middle East Studies Association is formally remembering one such scholar and colleague, Albert Hourani. Others who have died in the past year and who had special influence on me personally were Mohamed Omer Beshir, who has been the teacher and friend of virtually every scholar who deals with modern Sudanese history, and Syed Zayn al-Abdin, who helped us all become aware of the importance of Muslim minority communities around the world, and in addition, George Kirk and David Gordon, who taught many of us who now follow them as teachers. Recent publications also remind us of the works of people who were influential in the development of our understandings and scholarship. The recent reprinting of Richard Mitchells The Society of the Muslim Brothers reminds us of a pioneer in the understanding of Islamic activism, and the publication of a major collection of essays by Marshall Hodgson, edited by Edmund Burke, reminds us of the need for both broader visions and more precise terminology when we try to understand.[5] The recent publication of an account of the killing in 1972 of Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore, two American diplomats with training in Arabic and regional studies,[6] and the inevitable memories that are aroused for many of us when MESA presents the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Awards are reminders of the truly great sacrifices that some of our colleagues have made.

Many other names could be mentioned in this accounting but one last will provide a summation. In the past year one of the great pioneers in trying to understand the relationships, especially in terms of images, concepts and prejudic- es, between "Islam" and "the West," Norman Daniel, died. His book, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, was a classic in the field and, in his retirement, he completed a revised edition although, sadly, he died before its publication. The new edition exhibits the spirit of the original, working to provide a scholarly foundation for understanding so that peoples who disagree might at least be able to try to live together.[7]

The lives and works of all of these people are reminders of the challenges of interpreting and understanding human interrelationships on a global scale. We live in a world of great tensions and conflicts and the stakes are high. When Norman Daniel was the British Council representative in Sudan in the early 1960s, he brought Arnold Toynbee to Khartoum. Toynbee was on a grand lecture tour of Africa and the scheduled title for the talk was one chosen by the British ambassa- dor from a list that had been sent in advance. It was relatively innocuous: "Africas Place in World History."[8] However, that night in early 1964, Toynbee took the opportunity to remind the northern Sudanese of their special obligations in the emerging context of civil war between peoples in the northern and southern Sudan. In a time when, a few weeks later, students were shot in demonstrations against the military suppression of southern opposition to northern military rule, Toynbee told his audience that a "serious failure, on the Northern Sudanese peoples part, to solve the problem of its relations with the Southerners might have disastrous effects, not only for both parts of the Sudan, but for the whole of Africa."[9] Both northerners and southerners failed, and generations of Sudanese have paid the high price.

The Sudanese are not the only ones involved in great conflicts across critical human boundaries. Today, the debate over the "clash of civilizations" and many other issues reflects the reality of such conflicts. The results of failure in resolving such vast struggles sound apocalyptic when described in even the coldest scholarly terms.

It is essential that we work to understand the basic natures of such con- flicts. This means that the conceptual framework within which the conflicts are defined is crucial not just to "understanding" the conflicts, but also to finding ways of resolving them. My position can be stated quickly: Analyses and narratives based on the concept of separate, clearly identifiable civilizations are no longer adequate, if they ever were. In fact, the "civilizational narrative" may now be an integral part of the problem rather than a part of the explanation.

This is not a call to choose sides for a great battle of paradigms. I am not saying that we must now choose between Samuel Huntington or Fuad Ajami, Bernard Lewis or Edward Said, Daniel Pipes or John Esposito. We are all seriously engaged in the same task of finding ways to understand and resolve the great conflicts of our day. In this task, Samuel Huntingtons response to his critics is very important: "Can any other paradigm do better? If not civilizations, what?"[10] These issues are of special importance in trying to understand the relationships between Islam and the West.

A major difficulty with the civilizational explanatory narrative is that it assumes the existence of entities that do not exist as independent units. It might be useful for purposes of some types of analysis to think of "civilizations" as "ideal types," but most people who utilize civilizational narratives in the current debates do not treat "civilizations" in this way. In the premodern eras of world history, the relative spatial separation of large-scale, citied societies gives validity to talking about the great "civilizations." However, even in this context, there are difficulties with "civilization" as the basic unit of analysis. Arnold Toynbee presents perhaps the most comprehensive civilization-based narrative available. In writing his massive study of world history, he began by defining the most effective "intelligible unit of historical study" as being "neither a nation-state nor (at the other end of the scale) mankind as a whole but a certain grouping of humanity which we have called a society."[11] He then identified twenty-one such societies as "civilizations," and set out to present an immense comparative study of these civilizations. However, at the end of his long study, he expressed reservations about "civilizations" as intelligible fields of study, especially in terms of understanding human religions. He concluded that "we may venture to propound a 'law' to the effect that, for a study of the higher religions, the minimum intelligible field must be larger than the domain of any single civilization."[12]

In a similar way, Marshall Hodgson used the term "civilization" and spoke of Islam as a "world civilization."[13] Yet, when he undertook the task of defining civilizations, he clearly understood them to be units which interacted within a larger historically-meaningful whole. "If we arrange societies merely according to their stock of cultural notions, institutions, and techniques, then a great many dividing lines among pre-Modern civilized societies makes some sense, and no dividing line within the Eastern Hemisphere makes final sense," and one needs to perceive "the unity of the whole Afro-Eurasian citied zone."[14]

When one looks at the vast networks of interactions in the Eastern Hemisphere even in premodern times, it is difficult to maintain that the "civilizations" are free-standing, clearly independent units. The interactions, for example, in religious terms between India and China or the Middle East and the West are profound and shape the very foundations of the cultural orders. By the time of the twelfth century, it would be difficult to extract Buddhism (a worldview originating in India) from even the most xenophobic definition of "Chinese Civilization," or Middle Eastern traditions of ethical monotheism from the fundamental definitions of medieval Western civilization. In modern times, the profound interconnections among "civilizations" is even more striking. In this context, it is possible that neither "Islam" nor "The West" are civilizations in the contemporary globalized world, if they ever were. In the sense that the term "civilization" is used by contemporary scholars across a broad spectrum of scholarly positions, it is difficult to maintain that Islam is a "civilization." In the broader patterns of world history, William H. McNeill speaks in terms of a four- civilizational pattern of interaction in the ecumene of the eastern hemisphere, identifying the four as Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern and European/Western.[15] Huntington identifies "seven or eight major civilizations:" Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American "and possibly African" civilization.[16] He goes on to state that “differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.”[17]

Islam cannot be called a civilization, even within these relatively standard definitions. It is a multi-civilizational unit that has significant elements and participation in more than one civilization. In premodern times, Islam was an important part of societies which could not be identified as “civilized” as well as citied societies. In both modern and premodern times, there were people who were legitimately “Chinese Muslims,” “Malay Muslims,” “Fulani Muslims,” “Bengali Muslims” and many other such combinations of societal identities with Islam. In modern times, one must also mention “American Muslims.” All of these people show that it is possible to be both authentically Muslim and authentically local. It would take a significant redefinition of categories to state that Malcolm X was not authentically American and also, by the time of his death, authentically Muslim. If it is possible to be legitimately Western and Islamic, then at least one of those terms cannot refer to an exclusive civilizational identification.

Civilizational explanatory narratives simply are not useful in discussing the dynamics of the lives of Muslims in many societies of which Muslims are a part. If “Islam” refers to an identity or a unit, that unit is not a civilization by any of the widely-used definitions of that term. In premodern world history, the Islamic world is a unit that is multi-civilizational and includes both citied and non- citied societies. In the modern global village, Muslims are legitimate parts of many of the different units that have been identified by some scholars as civilizations.

"The West" also has difficulty fitting into the standard definitions of civilization. It does not have the clear and distinctive cultural unity that seems to be implied by the definitions in presentations like Huntingtons. The definition and map included in Huntingtons presentation would lead to the conclusion that Greece is not a part of Western Civilization since orthodox Christianity and long- term historic control by the Ottoman Empire must mean that the Greeks "were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe."[18] Because of the major contributions to the West by Jews and the significant differences between Protestants and Catholics, the religious diversity of the West should also raise questions about whether or not the West fits within Huntingtons definition of a civilization. The medieval West tends to fit the standard definitions of civilization so it may be that the first "traditional" civilization to be destroyed by the processes of modernization was Western Civilization. What we now call "Western Civilization" is identified with modernity and this is something strikingly different from the society and life style of the Europe of the medieval papacy, the great Gothic cathedrals, the Crusades, the Magna Carta and other pillars of traditional Western Civilization.

Modernity is the result of one of the three great transformations of human life styles. The emergence of modernity is well-recognized as involving changes that are of the order of magnitude of the Agricultural Revolution and the Urban Revolution, each of which brought whole new life styles. The agricultural revolution was not simply gathering-and-hunting peoples adopting the distinctive gathering styles of neighboring groups, and the Urban Revolution was not simply people in some Neolithic villages adopting the farming methods of other Neolithic agriculturalists. Instead, these transformations involved the emergence of whole new life styles. When we talk about the urban revolution in ancient Mesopotamia we do not insist that Ur and Lagash are simply bigger and more complex villages; we call them by a new term, “cities.” Similarly, it might be helpful not to insist that the dramatically new structures of human life created by the processes of modernity be called by the same term as the premodern structures.

If modern societies are really significantly different from premodern societies, it might be analytically better to recognize that they are not generically the same kind of units. If premodern, large-scale, complex societies were “civilizations,” then it might be better not to use that same term for modern complex societies since definitions of distinguishing characteristics will inevitably lead to anomalies like the exclusion of Greece from “The West.” We may need to recognize that “civilizations” and “civilizational forms” are a phase of world history which we have now gone past.[19] It is possible that the attempt to understand the interactions between Islam and the West as interaction between two civilizations will be profoundly misleading because neither are “civilizations” in terms of the definitions of the discussions. Huntington’s question of “if not civilizations, what?” takes on a whole new meaning in the context of an analysis where the definition of civilization used in the “civilization paradigm” does not fit either Islam or the West. The civilization paradigm, as defined by Huntington, does not, for most practical analytical purposes provide a way for talking about the interactions between two immense and complex human units which are not civilizations.

The civilizational explanatory narrative can be, in this context, a source of conflict and may exacerbate already difficult situations. The civilizational narrative defines dividing lines between peoples that may not exist or may give a more cosmic frame of reference to existing differences. The perception of a great separation may have the effect of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and increase existing but possibly minor gaps between peoples. A major source of conflict in the current post-cold war world is the growing conflict resulting from ever-smaller units demanding separate recognition. Mininationalisms provide the basis for dangerous confrontations. However, clashes between smaller and smaller groups do not represent, by themselves, conflicts between civilizations. Protes- tant-Catholic fighting in Ireland, Basque separatism, intrablack tensions in South Africa, and other such situations present the potential for conflict, but by them- selves are not clashes between civilizations. Nationalisms produced by fragmenta- tion of larger units are potential danger points in contemporary world affairs but none threaten global war.

Conflict on a global scale would be the product of what was called "hyper- nationalism" in an imaginative discussion which appeared in The Economist as the chapter on the 21st century from a future world history text. Hypernationalism appeared when "nationalism," the "desire to create a sense of identity by marking oneself off from others -- by separating us from them -- had spread from single countries to whole regions."[20] Those who attempt to see civilizations in conflict where civilizations do not exist may be assisting in the process of creating hypernationalist attitudes and perceptions. Considerations of this type provide the urgency behind the debate over "the Islamic threat." The perception by people in the West of Islam as a categoric threat to "Western civilization" may create the conditions for self-fulfilling prophecies of conflict between the United States and various Muslim groups and movements.[21]

There are many conflicts in the contemporary world. There are many tensions and dangers. However, in the modern world with its high levels of interaction and dissolution of old boundaries, such conflicts are not between "civilizations." The civilizational narrative, in this context, increases tensions rather than explaining them.

The perceptual problems of the civilizational approach to general education noted by Michael Geyer apply more broadly to the whole issue of utilizing a civilizational narrative to analyze the contemporary world.[22] Geyer notes that the civilizational approach "focuses, if not on empire, at least on regionally bounded, territorially integrated settlements." It "pits settlement against unsettlement, the city against nomads, the Volk against migrants." It "cherishes the idea of culture as an autonomous and indigenous process of unfolding norms and values, grounded in the unity of language, society, and territory ... and is at a loss in explaining a syncretistic world. It is unable to explain an international configuration that is anchored in many local worlds with their own and discrete processes of socialization that are nonetheless tightly connected. It is unable even to depict the multiplication of radically different worlds, forged from a mélange of elements from all parts of the world." In terms of where we began, it is unable to explain the "global village" and the Dissidenten.

The world in which we now live is particularist and universalist. This is a paradox and difficult to cope with but it is a reality. Insisting that the world is either particularist or universalist misses the point of the profound complexity of the contemporary human situation. Civilizational narrators like Huntington can assert that the “one world” paradigm is an “unreal alternative,”[23] and they are correct if the “one-world” approach is a Pollyanna-like presentation of a “universal civilization” which somehow brings peace to all humans. However, if this means that somehow we must assert that Malcolm X was either not a Muslim or not a part of Western civilization, if we must see the World Beat music as not reflecting a significant reality, if we must ignore the globalization of popular culture as well as of the financial world, then it is the civilizational narrative that is “the unreal alternative”.

The syncretistic, paradoxical, self-contradictory, sometimes human value- destroying, conflict-ridden one-world of World Beat, McDonalds, the information superhighway and a host of other things, this one-world truly exists. Its sounds sometimes drown out the debates in scholarly journals and intellectual assemblies. In many ways in our contemporary world we really are at the end of civilization. We need to accept that and stop trying to explain our global and regional conflicts by defining and emphasizing divisions that no longer exist.

The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy wrote a poem called “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which the people of a great city prepare for the arrival of the barbarians, who ultimately never come because they no longer exist. In the end, the people say: “Now what’s going to happen to us without them? The barbarians were a kind of solution.”[24] The civilizational narrative relies on conceiving of the world as divided into large warring units which are culturally and religiously defined. Like the “barbarians,” “civilizations” are a kind of solution to problems of social identity, but one which may intensify or even create conflict. We may be living at “the end of civilization as we know it.” If we recognize this situation and try honestly to cope with its paradoxes and conflicts, we may discover that the end of civilization is not so bad.

Notes
[1] This text is based on the MESA presidential address given at the annual meeting in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina on November 12, 1993. The address was conceived of as a presentation to a particular gathering and was not intended simply to be the reading of a generic paper which could be read at any gathering of scholars. The particular and “occasional” characteristics of the address have been preserved in this text because it is addressed to the same community: the members of the Middle East Studies Association.

[2] The presidential address began with the loud playing of the song “Inshallah” from the CD “Sahara Electric” by the group called the Dissidenten, while, at the same time, the speaker read short selections from an article in Foreign Affairs. It is difficult to reproduce that part of the text in print media.

[3] The CD is produced by Shanachie Records Corp., and is identified as Shanachie 64005.

[4] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs72, No. 3 (Summer 1993).

[5] Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; reprinted 1993), and Marshall G.S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History, Edmund Burke, III, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[6] David A. Korn, Assassination in Khartoum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

[7] Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, revised ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 1993). See, for example, his concluding comments, pp. 336-337.

[8] I am grateful to Helen Langley of the Department of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for providing me with this information from the Toynbee Papers.

[9] These exact words do not come from a text of the talk but from Toynbees later account of the African trip as a whole, which appeared in Arnold J. Toynbee, Between Niger and Nile (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 37. However, I attended the lecture and I remember that his observations in the book reflect at least the tone of his lecture.

[10] Samuel P. Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 5 (November/December 1993): 191.

[11] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement by D.C. Somervell. 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, 1957), 1:11. [12] Ibid., 2:145-146.

[13] Note, for example, the subtitle of his major work: Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

[14] Hodgson/Burke, p. 81.

[15] See, for example, the organization of his world history text, William H. McNeill, A History of the Human Community (4th edition; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).

[16] Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” p. 25.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” p. 30.

[19] See, for example, the suggestive analysis in Robert Erwin, “Civilization as a Phase of World History,” American Historical Review 81, No. 4 (July 1966): 1181-1198.

[20] “Looking Back From 2992,” The Economist (December 26, 1992 January 3, 1993).

[21] See, for example, the analysis in John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially chapter 6.

[22] All of the following quotes come from Michael Geyer, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of General Education,” Critical Inquiry 19, No. 3 (Spring 1993): 529.

23] Huntington, “If Not Civilization, What?,” p. 191.

[24] C.P. Cavafy, Selected Poems, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 7.