Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — War of civilizations? Violence-prone Muslims living out the inheritance of their prophet, Mohammed who, in marked contrast to Jesus Christ, established his creed on earth by a vigorous use of the sword. It’s all there in Princeton professor Bernard Lewis’ book, “From Babel to Dragomans”.
Labelled the neo-conservatives’ Islamic expert, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “the Lewis doctrine has become U.S. policy.” President George W. Bush valued him. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, claimed that the US government was assisting “the hand of Providence”.
Despite the passing of the charged Bush days, those who read both the future and the past this way still appear to have too much influence in the Anglo-Saxon political arena, even if there is a division of opinion on how best to confront it.
Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, author of the seminal “The Clash of Civilizations”, whose title he borrowed from Lewis, wrote in the book’s latest edition, “In the 1990s, Muslims have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization.” A slanderous falsehood, yet one that is often repeated.
Since 9/11, this school of thought has had a field day. Apologists for the argument are found even inside Islam)—as with the influential Pakistani, Husain Haqqani, a former ambassador to the US, who argued in the International Herald Tribune that Islamic peoples are beholden to “a cult of the warrior” and the Muslim world has an “obsession with military power”.
But what about the largest Muslim state of all, Indonesia, which conducts peaceful elections and where serious violence is now much reduced? What about Turkey, where the military is losing political strength by the day?
For all the worries in the EU about Turkish admission, the fact is that despite Turks being by far the single largest Islamic grouping already living inside the EU, there hasn’t been one arrest of a Turk as a suspected Islamic terrorist. And what about Bangladesh and India?
In neither of them (Kashmir apart) are Muslims at arms. It is these four countries that have the largest concentrations of the world’s Muslim population.
Now with a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), we have well-researched evidence to back up the argument. With its annual 14-year rolling study of major armed conflicts, the institute tells us that for each of those years, the number of civil wars (the overwhelming majority of present-day conflicts are not interstate) in the world has been declining, and that of those that still exist most are Marxist-led or are conflicts over territory, of which only a handful have an Islamic ingredient.
Marxist-led, in this day and age? It is so in Colombia, Nepal, Peru and the Philippines. These conflicts have been among the world’s most intense in terms of cumulative casualties over the last few decades.
The second significant group, which can be loosely characterized as conflicts over territory, have been in the Indonesian province of Aceh, in Cabinda, the oil-rich province of Angola, Myanmar with the separatist Karen people and Chechnya in Russia which may now be Islamised but certainly didn’t start out that way.
Of the conflicts that resulted in a significant number of deaths last year, only three, in Sudan, Somalia and in the Western Sahel, can be characterized as “Islam at war”. The other major ones—Ukraine, Congo, Yemen, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Syria—have absolutely nothing to do with Islam as a military threat.
The truth is the main cause of war today is not religion but poverty. Once a country has reached Western levels of per capita income, the risk of civil war is negligible. In middle-income countries, the risk is quite low. And where wars do occur, the history that counts is current history, not the history of the fourteenth or seventh centuries.
Wars often occur following economic collapse. Wars once started also are more likely to continue where there are rich mineral resources—rebels capture these and extort the gains from this trade to finance their operations—as diamonds did in Angola and Sierra Leone and timber funded the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
If we want to diminish these types of wars, we need to look at how the West’s own companies and arms traders (Russia’s, too) have helped sustain rebel wars. We need too to find ways to accelerate economic development in poorer countries. And more UN-type peacekeeping is a sine qua non for achieving stability—contrary to myth, it often works, as in the Sinai, Liberia, East Timor, the Congo and Sierra Leone in recent years.
Above all, we need to knock over the Aunt Sally of militant Islam on the rampage the world over. Osama bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda and ISIS are very much reduced and show no sign of revival or appealing to a new generation of young Muslims. More than anything, this excludes clear thinking. And more than anything else, this is one more good reason for wishing for the Republicans—the principal propagators of this myth in America—don’t return to power.
* Jonathan Power was for 17 years a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune, now the New York Times. He has also written dozens of columns for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. He is the European who has appeared most on the opinion pages of these papers. [IDN-InDepthNews — 07 February 2023]
Why not order Jonathan Power’s books? “Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International” Published by Penguin and “Conundrums of Humanity” published by Nijoff and Amazon.
Image: Clash of Civilizations. (2023, January 17). Wikipedia
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