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THEOLOGY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS by Jack Miles
(JACK MILES, Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty Trust and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God)
" ... Samuel P. Huntington. ... his controversial 1993 "The Clash of Civilizations ... What [he] saw was, on the one hand, economic and cultural globalization and, on the other, resistance to it by those who saw it as merely the latest form of Western, historically Christian, and at this late date specifically American imperialism. ... many non-Western powers had cast their lot with the emerging global order ... China and world Islam had not done so, might never do so, and might even join forces in a joint counteroffensive against the West."
"The border separating what Muslims call dar al-islam, the "House of Submission (Islam)," from dar al- harb, the "House of Warfare" seems increasingly to define a long irregular battlefront, one that as of September 11, 2001, stretches across four continents. ... An incomplete list would include, moving from east to west: Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, Kashmir and India, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Eritrea, Uganda, Cyprus, Bosnia and Kosovo, Algeria, and Nigeria."
" ... the umma ... the House of Islam must surely seem a civilization under siege. ... umma refers to 'religion, shared values, and common concerns' yet 'does not denote nationality, kinship, or ethnicity.' Only the umma matches the international community in internal variety, geographical dispersion, and potentially global ambition."
"The clash-of-civilizations question, from the Muslim side, is whether the umma can join the international community or whether it must incorporate the international community into itself. From the Western side, the clash-of-civilizations question ... must begin with the perhaps grudging recognition that there exist, in the first place, two bona fide international communities separated by a genuine cultural border along which for a long while now there has been more war than peace. ... from the Muslim side where modernity, Christianity, and the West are a single unholy stew, all these struggles are understood to be the same struggle. For the West, the defining struggles of the twentieth century have been, in succession, democracy vs. fascism and democracy vs. communism. But for the umma, these are simply the latest civil wars in the long, bloody history of the House of Warfare. ... Secularized Christianity, as seen from inside the House of Islam, is simply degenerate Christianity and as such is even more alien to Islam than its ancestor."
"Osama bin Laden ... thought that the umma, rallying to a jihad in Afghanistan, had won the real victory and would now proceed to win a second victory over the United States itself. American astonishment at the grandiose claim and American horror at the lethal ambition may stand as a measure of the chasm that separates Western and Muslim civilization. Unless this chasm can be bridged, the world may slide into a war of terrorist reprisal and counterreprisal with no end in sight."
" ... in the House of Islam, religious leaders typically have a far greater claim on the public than do civilian leaders, and it is a fatal mistake to leave the Muslim public -- the umma -- out of the equation."
" ... secretaries of state may have to learn some theology if the current clash between Western and Muslim civilization is to yield to disengagement and peaceful coexistence ... If Osama bin Laden is a spiritual leader ... the first, crucial insight should be that he and his movement must be dealt with as what they are. To suppose that we can achieve security by dealing with him as a common criminal and with the Muslim governments that harbor his movement as secular governments unconcerned with the religious dimension in his appeal is to fight this new war as if it were the last war. ... Osama bin Laden does not represent true Islam. Who does represent true Islam? 'Will the real Islam please stand up?' This is the kind of question that our military and diplomatic institutions are designed never to ask and never to notice that they are not asking. ... Engaging a jihad for the soul of Islam as if it were an international manhunt for a common criminal is a battle plan guaranteed to fail."
"It is the Muslim umma as a whole that has harbored this murderous movement within it, and it is the Muslim umma as a whole that must somehow be persuaded to break with it. ... Decapitation does not deal a death blow when the enemy has many heads. Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his network of secret agents have been "surgically" excised but when an authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam that makes the vision of victory-by- terrorism irrelevant and unwelcome."
"The development of such an alternative vision, however, will require a major paradigm shift in Western diplomacy. It will no longer suffice to treat religion as a mere happenstance ("I happen to be Jewish," "I happen to be Muslim") and therefore as a political irrelevancy. This method of dealing with religion politically may have served us well enough in overcoming Christianity's own hideous wars of religion. But the old way will not meet this new challenge, for it takes off the table just the topic that militant Islam finds most compelling. One can no more discuss that topic without discussing theology than one can discuss communism without discussing ideology. Theology is the ideological element in religion, and nothing at this moment could be more tragically evident than that we have ignored it to our peril."
" ... the acculturated Muslim communities of North America ... why may it not be the voice of these Western Muslim communities rather than [bin Laden's] voice that is heard most loudly in the world umma? Rather than the enemy within, the Muslims of the West should be seen as the ally within. ... Is there not good reason to believe that an authentically Western and authentically Muslim voice would find a wide audience?" ... [more]
11:33:24 AM 
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