To solve the region's intractable problems, Obama should turn the shared history between Arabs and Europeans for guidance and wisdom, writes Salah Salem* The relationship between the Arab-Islamic world and the Euro-American West is caught between two antithetical perspectives. The first is to regard the two worlds as sibling civilisations, based, to varying degrees, upon monotheistic legacy and Abrahamic prophetic tradition fused with elements of Hellenistic philosophy and sciences as well as elements of the ancient philosophical legacy of the Far East. Proponents of this perspective take inspiration from the lesson of history that true religions do not clash but rather complement one another and that vital civilisations do not clash but rather compete with one another. Instead, it is the priests of religion and custodians of society who stir tensions and provoke conflict, exploiting baser human instincts such as fear or greed in the interests of conquest or revenge. This is not religion speaking, but the political state; it is not civilisation at work, but the forces of destruction. The advocates of this approach go on to argue that the Prophet Mohamed's mission complemented the mission of Jesus by placing justice alongside love, just as Jesus complemented the mission of Moses by placing divine law in the framework of mercy. In a similar vein, they point out that Ibn Rushd (Averro�s) valued Aristotle above all other philosophers and that medieval Europe responded in kind by inviting the Arab Muslim philosopher to help trigger its renaissance. Then, just as the Arabs had introduced the European West to its Hellenic roots, the West introduced the Arabs to some of their roots. For it was such scholars as Champollion who unveiled to them the mystery of one of their ancient scripts, enabling the Arabs and the rest of the world to probe deeper into their past and into their identity. Moreover, as the Arab East embarked on its modern renaissance it mirrored the West's recognition of Arab Muslim philosophers and scientists in the Middle Ages and summoned the aid of pioneers in modern rationalism and humanitarianism, from Descartes to Habermas. Along the way, of course, it would have encountered the great Immanuel Kant who formulated the most promising rule for human coexistence. Kant had a vision of history as a civilisational structure driven toward advancement and progress. In his proposed programme for "Perpetual Peace" he stated that for human political society to attain such advancement it had to implement two systems of law simultaneously: one governing the internal affairs of nations on the basis of freedom and aspiring to democracy, and the other governing the relations between nations on the basis of justice and aspiring to world peace. He stressed that there could be no true freedom within nations until justice and peace was realised between nations. The antithetical perspective sees the two worlds in a state of perpetual conflict, taking turns at exercising hegemony over the world over most of the course of history, starting from the Axial Age through the classical and medieval eras to the expansion of the modern global order. The civilisations that rose to global prominence on one side of the divide were the Pharaonic, Babylonian, Carthaginian and Persian civilisations, followed by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and then by the Mongolian and Ottoman Empires. On the other side of the divide they were the Minoan, Athenian, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine and Holy Roman empires, through to modern European empires. The tug-of-war between the two sides is exemplified by the Arab domination of southwest Europe in the early medieval period and the subsequent Ottoman expansion into Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and by the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant in the middle ages, and subsequent European colonial conquests of most of the Islamic world. The proponents of this viewpoint tend to have various facile conceptions of the other. On the one side, we have Kipling's irreconcilable hypostatic East versus the perfectible West and Christopher Dawson's notion of a total bifurcation between the Hellenic cultural imagination, informed by philosophy, and the Islamic cultural imagination, informed by religion (Dawson held that the Prophet Mohamed was the radical reaction of the East to the challenge of Alexander the Great). There are also the many European Orientalists who forged condescending stereotypes of the "fatalistic," "mystic," "fantasising" Muslim East, as opposed to the "sophisticated," "rational" and "realistic" West. The late Samuel Huntington -- the virtual antithesis of Kant -- took such stereotypes to new heights in the process of formulating his theory of an immanent conflict between two civilisations whose essentially antithetical cultures place them on a collision course. Huntington departed from a long American academic tradition of treating the Arab-Islamic world as a subdivision of American strategic studies. But if he revived a certain independent cohesiveness in that world, the cement he used consisted of traits that he felt would inevitably propel it to conflict. On the opposite shore, we find equally facile perceptions of the other in the fundamentalist trend that rejects the heretical modernism of the West. From this trend stems a small but extremist branch that categorises the West as a "House of War", with its crosshairs relentlessly trained upon us in the "House of Peace", and perpetually conspiring against our unique authenticity. The exponents of this view, thus, see themselves as morally and existentially opposed to the West, which for them assumes the form of Satan who is eternally striving to seduce mankind and lure him into evil. For them this contextualisation of two antithetical worlds in the framework of the primordial and timeless duality of good and evil runs so deeply that 11 September marks only a moment in the everlasting struggle between the two. The inherent contradiction between the two perspectives on the East-West relationship -- the one that perceives a religious kinship and a civilisational partnership, and the other that perceives an endless cycle of feuds and geographical tugs-of-war -- is self-explanatory. Paradoxically, the latter attitude stems not from the sharpness of the contrast between the two worlds, but rather from the force of the resemblance between them and, hence, from deep cultural jealousies, as opposed to feelings of difference. After all, jealousy in the cultural sense is born of a fundamental resemblance that fanatics transform into an imagined rivalry over the determination of destiny, all the more so when the resemblance extends beyond the mere contemporaneous presence in a single geographical or historical sphere to the realm of humanitarian callings. This is precisely the primary locus of resemblance between the Christian and Islamic civilisations, each of whose founding monotheistic religions, regardless of their differences on the degree of divine transcendence, claimed global horizon for the proselytisation of their respective spiritual and humanitarian visions. In addition, both these civilisations took part in leading the Mediterranean world, which was almost synonymous with human civilisation until the threshold of the modern era when the "New World" was transformed into a chronological extension of the "Old", and added a transatlantic dimension to Mediterranean space. The real problem, then, resides in blindness to commonalities and bonds of kinship, and an inclination on the part of extremists on both sides, whether conspiracy theorists here or the racist civilisational clash pundits there, to exaggerate differences and to distort and fan the flames of historical conflicts. It is a problem that requires us all to engage in a historical and "structural" reinterpretation of it. We might start, for example, by asking whether it is possible to state that those conflicts were alien to the long course of conventional history, constantly shaped by the force of the sword and the fray of battle. Can they be fundamentally distinguished from those waves of invasions that occurred within each civilisational sphere, such as the Norman invasion of Saxon Britain, the Gothic invasion of Celtic Spain, the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire, and the religious wars of the 17th century, on the one hand, and the Mongol and then Turkic invasions of the Levant and the Ottoman- Safavid rivalry over this region until the modern period, on the other? The bulk of history tells the story of immeasurable bloodshed and of countless victims of tyrannical rulers or royal dynasties protecting their own noble blood or their divine right to rule, which is to say to reduce others to subjugation. It was not until the 20th century that mankind saw the birth of a new collective intelligence that criminalised offensive warfare in accordance with international conventions and treaties, and that established international organisations such as the League of Nations and then the UN in order to safeguard international peace and stability and to uphold the sanctity of international borders and national sovereignty. At this historical juncture, the "right of conquest" that had inspired the march of armies among all civilisations was officially abrogated and a new and unprecedented balance was struck between civilisation and military might. As a result, it is now possible for a country to attain a very advanced status without necessarily having a commensurately powerful military force to protect it. Perhaps the only price it would have to pay for this would be to forego a regional or international "role," whereas in the past it would have had to sacrifice no less than its independence if not its identity, even if it continued to contribute its civilisational input uninterruptedly, albeit from within the framework of different geopolitical constructions. Obviously war has not been eliminated from history, whether in the context of the relationship between the East and West, and specifically the dynamics of Western colonialism in Third World societies, or within the respective realms of the Western world (to which testify two world wars) and the Islamic world themselves. However, now war has become the exception whereas previously it had been the rule and the greatest determinator of the course of history. Yet, although human civilisation has matured to an extent sufficient to enable the Muslim East and the Christian West jointly to overcome their moments of weakness and lapses in wisdom, their remains a formidable challenge to their collective wisdom. I refer, here, to Israel which, empowered by nuclear arms and driven by Old Testament myths, threatens the heart of the Arab world and Islamic civilisation. I believe that the prospect of peaceful coexistence between the Eastern and Western worlds is contingent upon the answer to a crucial question: Can Israel be made to assimilate into the region so that it can live safely and in harmony with others, in accordance with the new historical wisdom, or will it persist in its attempts to bend the entire region to its own will, in application of the logic of the right of might? Operating on the principles of the logic of might, European leaders made the establishment of Israel possible. Most probably they were motivated in so doing by the burden of guilt they bore for "Catholic" Europe's legacy of the ghetto and for the failure of modern European culture to reconcile itself completely with the Jewish component of its Judeo- Christian roots, which ultimately led to the Nazi Holocaust, followed by the subsequent explosion of guilt and the desire to perform a historical atonement, even if this came at the expense of the Arabs of Palestine. Following the creation of Israel, American leaders continued to support the logic of might and made Israeli regional domination a concrete reality. In this regard, it is likely that they were motivated by a desire to reinstate the Judeo element of Judeo-Christian culture in Western thought, but in a manner tailored to the American brand of Puritan eschatology, which rehabilitated the Jews on the basis of a concord between evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Judaism. When the 11 September attack on against the US occurred, Israel and the forces of racism in Europe and the US quickly moved to exploit it in order to re-etch the boundaries between the East and West and to reaffirm Israel's affiliation with the latter. They simultaneously sought to reassert Israel's function as the forward bastion of the West in the Arab- Islamic world, in juxtaposition to Arab Muslim communities in the West, which they cast as a perilous fifth column. This dynamic continued to escalate, unfolding most dramatically in Sharon's invasion and destruction of Gaza, and in the siege against Muslim communities in the West, using the long reach of the US Patriot Act and the concerted stereotyping of terrorists as Arab Muslims. The world thus seemed set on a course of total polarisation between Judeo-Christianity in the West and radical Islam in the Arab world. The process and the insidious logic behind it continued to reap their horrendous toll in the form of one tragedy after another, and one war after another, largely in the interests of protecting Israel as a Jewish fortress gripped by an eternal paranoia and existential fear, feeding on the clash between two great civilisations, as played out in intermittent wars and mounting terrorism, and perpetually escaping forward. A year ago, President Obama came to Cairo to address the Islamic world as a "civilisational region", as opposed to the strategic zones familiar to American academia, and in the hope of promoting peaceful coexistence, in contrast to Huntington's logic of clashes. At the same time, he stressed that America's fundamental bond with Israel was beyond doubt or discussion. Did he mean by this that he hoped to keep this bond in the framework of that emotional attachment that elevates it above America's own national interest, let alone the principles of international legitimacy and the bases for peaceful coexistence with the Islamic world? If that, indeed, is his ultimate horizon, his reaffirmation of that bond negates the very essence of his "splendid" address, because it inherently implies the reassertion of the logic of might. The inevitable outcome of this is that his efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict will fail, his attempt to realise Islamic-Western coexistence will turn out to be no more than cosmetic surgery, and he, himself, will prove no more than an echo of President Clinton or President Bush Sr. If, on the other hand, Obama truly seeks the victory of the essence and wisdom of history, he will have to aim further and higher. He will have to reduce that exceptional "emotional" bond to the more normal level of supporting an ordinary nation, geographically defined by recognised boundaries, free to exercise the cultural affiliation of its own wishes but at peace with its neighbours and respectful for the surrounding political and cultural environment, which must include a fully sovereign viable Palestinian state. This is the only possible option, apart from the solution that calls for a single secular democratic state for all its citizens, both Arabs and Jews. While the second option is more humane and is advocated by some of the New Historians, most notably Avi Shlaim, it is rejected out of hand by the vast majority of Israelis, fearful of assimilation into the general fabric of the region. This onus is, naturally, a very heavy one to bear by a single man, even of the stature of the US president. In view of the urgency of the task, it needs all possible support from Europe, which can and should be a chief partner in the process of building a new world order capable of promoting political modernism and taking it to the heights of the Kantian vision. Certainly, the current moment seems conducive to such a partnership. Not only does the new liberalism of the US administration permit it, Europe, itself, is capable of asserting a unified will, now that it has emerged from the bitter rivalries that characterised its history before the two world wars and during the Cold War. It could also be a healthy partnership, with the US's greater economic and military strength tempered and refined by Europe's greater wisdom derived from its deeper cultural vision and sense of history, as the heir to and first hand participant in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the age of enlightenment and the age of industrialisation and modernism. Having lived through all these ages, engaging in the processes of war-making and peacemaking, and questioning others and introspection, Europe has a more subtle appreciation of all the complexities and passions of history, and thus is better poised to offer the US a clearer insight into the intricacies of the Arab region, especially given its geographic proximity to this region and the extensive history of interaction, in war and in peace, with it. Europe's consequent greater ability to understand and sympathise with Arab demands, which essentially involve the promotion of a mutually respectful relationship with the West and a just settlement with Israel, will help the US and the international community reach these ends. In the process, it will enable the humanitarian current in Arab culture to prevail, help rout the forces of extremism, and pave the way for the victory of the enlightened rational mind over the darker instincts of fear and terror. * The writer is a political analyst.
