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CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS A FACT OR FICTION My humanity is bound in yours; we can only be human together. (William Shakespeare) Introduction: Our shrinking and threatened world needs us to reach beyond narrow ideological boundaries of clash of civilizations. A civilization is a cultural entity, villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups; all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. It may include several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. The Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East. This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of ideology.These conflicts between princes,

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nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and nonWestern civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. Clash of civilizations A Fact of Fiction. The crises in the Middle East and the rise of militant Islamic movements against Western interests throughout the world in the mid 1980s began to be perceived in the West that Radical Islam would supplant Communism as the principal challenge for the worldwide ideological contest. Bombings against western interests in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Gulf region resulted in the rise of faith-based neo-conservatism in the United States. The tragedy of September 11, not unexpectedly, deeply sensitized Islam-the West relations and especially the U.S relations with the Muslim World. Then, the following questions have become of critical importance; how does the 'clash of civilizations' discourse make an impact on the post-9/11 relations between the Muslim World and the West/the U.S? How the event will influence perceptions of Islam and the Muslims in the mind of Western elites and people? How will the Muslims in the United States and Europe likely to be influenced by post-September 11 developments? These questions are obviously of profound importance and they will most likely to be centerpiece of numerous debates thereafter. Western media have used such variants of expressions ranging from Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic terrorism, Islamic Jihadists. Toxic television, rabble as well as trash tabloids are prone to use these caricatures. They feed on one another in ways fact becomes fiction, and fiction ignites facts. The Muslim world as a whole has suffered from this massive media manipulation. It has given rise to many different set of perceptions about clashes within civilizations, including among Muslims. You can also say that it is a clash of ideas about civilizations across all continents. Serious differences of the interpretation of Islam in Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia began to proliferate. Differing interpretations of the practical application of Muslim values are present in the Middle East among and within each Arab state, between Arab states and Iran, Middle East and Turkey, Muslims in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. And indeed, among Muslims within Malaysia, Indonesia. The cartoon caricature recently published in Denmark, which has caused such distress throughout the Islamic world, has once again raised the claim of a clash of civilizations, whose flames have been so persistently stoked by certain circles. The caricature in question and the idea of a clash of civilizations are nothing more than reflections of the dark mental framework, tending towards violence.

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The political scientist Samuel Huntington gave the idea of a monumental clash of civilizations intellectual credibility when he published, first an essay (1993), and then a book (1996), on the issue. The notion of a clash of civilizations is certainly not new. It was a convenient cover for Soviet and US imperial expansionism during the Cold War, under the ideological covers of communism and capitalism and the popularity of Huntingtons theory may reflect the desperate need to find a new enemy. Huntington divided the world into a number of vaguely defined civilizations, singling out the Islamic and Sinic civilizations as the main challengers to the West. In the intervening years, supporters of this thesis have seen the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as confirmation of this clash. And the current tensions with China might be viewed as an early dress rehearsal for a potential future confrontation with the Sinic civilization. Samuel P. Huntington's clash of civilizations paradigm also fosters and justifies negative images and stereotypes of Muslims such as 'violent, terrorist, backward, and immoral'. The negative stereotypes eventually distract the West from the search for critical understanding and dialogue with the Muslim World. Such theory plays the role to make possible the fiction as a fact. The clash is always between the moderate and radical. In the religion, between religion, in the government, in anywhere. Its the reality we are facing, everyday. Now, Islam vs. western is merely, a political game. Islam is seen as political power embedded with terrorism: antagonist. Meanwhile western is the protagonist, with its human right and freedom of speech. Which we all know, its not that simple. Islam is not just a bunch of radicals thought and terrorist, and Western not all with human right and freedom of speech. The fact of the matter is that there were even more serious clashes within civilizations, both in the West as well as in the Muslim world. Clash of Civilizations will always be valid and not only real; they are basic. The role of Western medias does not only hurt the Islamic world as a whole but also at the root level for Muslims living in Europe and America. From human behavior point of view, there are certain situations that produce more conflict than others as Muslims are tagged with Terrorism throughout the world after September 9, 2001. And then a large number of suspicious terrorists(Muslims) from all over the world were arrested in prison like Abu-ghuraib jail. Muslim families are being treated with insulted manner on airports for the sake of security reasons Incidents like ban on Scarf in France which the identity of the Muslim women, brutal murder of a pregnant Muslim woman in the very German Court room during the hearing of her racial case against the murderer. Recently in Switzerland where the matter of minarets became an issue on which the SVP, a Swiss political party, were so exercised that they forced a referendum. The results are discomfiting. More than 57 per cent of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons or provinces have voted in favor of the ban on building minarets. This may not be what the Swiss

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government wanted or expected. This populist vote may be seen as an emphatic sign that European nations in general are increasingly intolerant of Muslims within them. Conclusion: Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts. I have come to the conclusion that the clash of civilizations is both a fact as well as fiction, simply because facts are often inseparable from perceptions fiction. Some might prove it to be a fiction in our past times but the originators of this fiction has sponsored it so much that it has now become a fact of modern times. The more so because much of the debate has been exacerbated and distorted through media. The clash of civilizations, whether fact or only opinion, have potential and actual bad impacts not only on Muslim society around the world but also on other societies. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future..