13 - 19 December 2001
Issue No.564
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 December 2001 Issue No.564 |
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It's only natural
The cultural revival currently being experienced in Islamic civilisations is not a threat. In fact, it is nothing more than a natural consequence of the plurality of human culture, writes Ahmed Davutoglu
The most critical aspect of the process of Westernisation is the effect it has on the individual human being. Westernisation affects both an individual's self- consciousness (ontological existence) and his time-consciousness (historical existence). The Western experience of secularisation affects an individual through a process of continuity. There is a dynamic interaction between de-traditionalisation of cultural practices, and the way that these practices later find their way back into society through re-traditionalisation. The way Western institutions have changed and transformed is a natural consequence of the re-definition of the individual's stance. These changes have, in turn, been the intellectual, mental and historical foundation of the legitimacy of modernity.
Outside Western societies, however, the picture is more complicated. The process of secularisation in non-Western societies, especially in the Muslim world, has created a break between two categories of individual stance. On the one hand, the individual can choose to be modern and secular; on the other, he can choose to be traditional and religious.
Autocratic modernisation strategies tried to impose a new type of self-perception and time-consciousness on the masses. This was achieved using several machineries: institutional, political, economic and educational. The result, for self-perception, has been the question of the "divided self." Time-consciousness, meanwhile, has had to grapple with historic existentiality. These forces have led, in non-Western societies, to attempts to revive an "authentic" civilisation. In fact, this is a natural response to restore a "new stance" for the individual which will prove the ontological and historic existentiality of non- Westerners.
Non-Western traditions are simply trying to establish a new balance between their traditional and transnational self- perceptions on the one hand, and their modern and national self-perceptions on the other. The "Muslim mind" does not have any problem as such with the process of secularisation as a rational way of understanding nature and history without confining them to the dichotomy of profane and sacred. Nor is there any contradiction between the Islamic mentality and the egalitarian character of secularisation -- which tries to eliminate the privileges of a clerical class -- because there has been no such religious caste in Islamic ontological self- consciousness. There has never been a theologically justified religious caste in Muslim history.
There is a clear difference between earlier generations of modernisers and contemporary revivalists, however. Early modernisers tried to achieve national or civilisational self-preservation against the attacks of colonial powers. Civilisational revivalists at the end of the twentieth century, by contrast, aim at achieving self- assertion in the flow of mankind, in response to the transforming force of modernity. Whereas early modernisers saw the process of modernisation as an irresistible and inevitable stage of historical existence, the civilisational revivalists of today are attempting to revive their authentic stance in order to re-define their ontological and historical existentiality. The crisis of Western secular ontology accelerates this revivalist attempt to search for an alternative stance.
We have to see modernisation amore than just a simple process of economic transformation. Modernisation as a way to get the necessary means to survive can provide self-preservation, but cannot create a feeling of self-assertion. Today, man's fundamental problem is self-assertion rather than a simple self-preservation. The question of self-assertion necessarily leads to the question of self-perception.
The process of secularisation can been seen as a direct threat to the self-perception of non-Western societies -- which traditionally saw themselves as transnational -- due to the fact it has shaken their self- assertion through identifying human existence with the historical existence of Western civilisation. The search for self- assertion based on a historical existence has led to a re-definition of the classical self-perception. This is the psycho- ontological foundation for the civilisational resistance of non-Western societies, which were injected with a new impetus for civilisational revival towards the end of the twentieth century.
The syncretic atmospheres of the historical junctions between two or more civilisations has provided solutions to this type of extensive civilisational crisis by a cross-fertilisation of new and dynamic values. This process of civilisational synthesis is lacking today, however. Unlike in the past, today the co-existence and survival of different civilisational entities is under threat from a monopolising global culture. Western civilisation is globalising its own civilisational parameters as well as its civilisational crises. Meanwhile, other civilisations are trying to resist this process of homogenisation.
One of the fundamental problems of our age, therefore, is the survival of pluralism -- of authentic cultures and religious traditions -- in the face of a global culture created by this hegemonistic-monopolistic Western civilisation. The Western challenge, which marginalises authentic cultures and civilisations, leads to a uniform mode of thought and style of life all over the world and seems to us to be a real threat to the diversity of the historical cultural accumulation of human beings.
The most important prerequisite for a global dialogue and interaction, therefore, is a re-examination of the existing transnational self-perceptions of civilisations -- because perception of the 'other' is a natural consequence of the perception of the self. Western civilisation should revise its own self-perception in the direction of inclusiveness, while other civilisations should re-structure and re-formulate their heritage in order to make it into an inevitable and efficient elements of world culture.
In the world today, there is pressing need for a new approach which will harmonise globality with plurality, inter-civilisational dialogue with intra-civilisational integrity, metaphysical and non-material happiness with the global standard of a minimum level of consumption for all societies throughout the globe. Otherwise, categorical classifications -- such as the cultural tension between "West and Rest" and the economic tension between North and South -- will continue to threaten the future of humanity.
In an article on the persistence and continuity of the basic elements of Islamic civilisation. Von Grenebaum asks a historic question. "Nations come and go," he writes, "Empires rise and fall. But Islam persists and continues to include the nomads and the settlers, the builders of civilisations within Islam and those that destroy them. What then are the factors that keep together as one ummah those many people that, consciously or not, are inclined to maintain their individuality while cultivating their tie with universal Islam as their most precious spiritual possession?"
This question has a special significance for both historical analysis and for projecting what may happen in the future. It is true that Islamic civilisation was historically able to produce a universal system -- a being-knowledge-value paradigm, a consistent normative foundation for a way of life, similar forms of a civilisational substance in the sense of aesthetics shared by all Muslim nations from Far East to Far West, from Eurasia to Sub-Saharan Africa. During the rise of classical Islamic thought, similar philosophical trends emerged in places as far apart as Central Asia and Andalusia in Spain. Similar architectural forms were developed to reflect the same aesthetic substance in several cities established and re-formed by different nations of the Islamic civilisation: Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo of the Arabs, Buhara and Istanbul of the Turks, Delhi and Agra of the Moguls, Granada and Cordoba of the Andalusians, Isfahan of the Persians, Sarajevo of the Bosnians and Kazan of the Tatars.
The main factor of this universality of the Islamic civilisation is an ontological consciousness which directly penetrates each individual human's mind regardless of his ethnic and regional origin. Common cultural and political responses to colonialism and modernity in different parts of the Muslim World are themselves the indicators of this consciousness. The rise of Islamic identity and its socio-cultural reflections in the lands which were recently governed by atheist Soviet authoritarianism serves to confirm the impact of this ontological consciousness.
This ontological consciousness will continue to provide the common ground in the universal substance of Islamic civilisation. The being-knowledge-value paradigm based on this consciousness may produce a new approach, which may challenge the assumptions of the modernist paradigm. The revival of Islamic civilisation should not be evaluated from the perspective of strategic pragmatism -- which creates an intra-civilisational and inter-civilisational tension. Rather, it should be assessed within its own civilisational and philosophical framework. Despite the sufferings of Muslims in several parts of the world (Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine for example), Islam has been declared as the new threat in the post-Cold War era by the defenders of strategic pragmatism. This contradiction creates a feeling of insecurity in Muslim societies. The feeling is similar to the anti-colonial responses at the beginning of the last century. In spite of the crisis and the difficulties faced in developing an alternative civilisational axis, this civilisational vivacity in the Muslim World will, in the long run, necessarily transform itself into a new theoretical framework which will be an asset for the whole of human culture.
A real and sincere civilisational dialogue will ultimately create a productive civilisational interaction and synthesis between hegemonic Western civilisation, reviving non-Western civilisational, and other cultural entities. The theoretical and practical reflections of the cultural revival of non- Western civilisations should not be used to legitimize a rhetoric of threat. Rather, they should be seen as natural consequences of the plurality of human culture.
The writer is professor of International Relations at Beykent University in Istanbul.
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