Fouad Ajami: Samuel Huntington was correct

The Clash by Fouad Ajami

Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington’s thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. “The things and ways that the West took to ‘the rest,’” I wrote, “have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.” I had questioned Huntington’s suggestion that civilizations could be found “whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.” Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.

Huntington had written that the Turks — rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels — would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. “What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?” Huntington asked. “At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time.

(snip)

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

You think things are bad now?

Try the summer of 1939: The Nazis were on the verge of conquering almost all of Europe, and were working out how to divide it up with their soon-to-be ally Stalin. Franco was triumphing in Spain. The Japanese were gobbling up China and getting ready to move out into all of East Asia.

Of the remaining liberal democracies, the British were led by appeasers. The Americans had their head firmly in the sand. The French were a paper tiger.

It was "midnight in the Century". Any reasonable person would have given good odds that we were on the downward slope to something very nasty.

But it didn't out that way.

Now things are beginning to look bleak again. Everything is different, including the nature of the threats to civilization. And this time, we may really be on that slope. In fact, there are a hundred hidden factors at work of which we are not aware, some of which are favorable to us.

All we can do is to brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves in a way that will make our descendants proud of us.

Maybe the title of this thread is a little sweeping? I read this Ajami piece with interest when it first came out and seemed to remember it a little differently, as more qualified in its embrace of Huntington. So now I've gone back and reread it. He does indeed express a new appreciation. But also some important nuances. E.g., this was one of the "snips" from post #1:

"I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young."

This essay is best read in its entirety. Thanks for providing the link, Codyed.

The leitmotif of several works by several learned men:

"More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission."

Marcello Pera & Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Without Roots

Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech

Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong

George Weigel's Faith, Reason and the war against jihadism

Fouad Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift

I need to re-read Huntington - probably we all should, every couple of years.

You know what defeated Communism?

They couldn't make a decent pair of blue jeans.

All we have to do is to defend our societies, and those people will be destroyed from within, eventually. If you think we are going to be in trouble when the oil runs out, it will be as nothing to their problems. We will invent substitutes for oil, but they will not invent substitutes for dollars. The war is ours to lose.