Samuel Huntington’s terrifying world picture of an inevitable Clash of Civilisations relies, according to Edward Said, “on a vague notion of something Huntington called ‘civilization identity’ and ‘the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations’ of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion’s share of his attention.” Since more and more experts have now come to view the self-fulfilling Clash of Civilisations prophecy as the blueprint of American foreign policy post 9/11, we are compelled to take Huntington’s ideas seriously – including that of “civilisation identity.” Having forcefully announced in his controversial summer 1993 article “The Clash of Civilizations?” that “The fault lines between Civilizations will be the battle lines of the future”, Huntington went on to single out culture and religion as the most important elements of a civilisation identity.

For instance, he argues that “The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity.” If we accept, for the sake of argument, Huntington’s over-optimistic claim regarding the status of Christianity in modern Europe, we still have to ask: what constitutes European culture? Here, not unwisely, Huntington does not define what European culture is. He stops short of the trap of reducing such a hugely complex notion unjustifiably to merely one or two of its numerous and constantly evolving aspects. In his much-publicised Regensburg speech, however, Pope Benedict XVI took Huntington’s ideas one precarious step further. He attempted to nail down a European identity based on the contentious fusion of Western Christianity with Greek, and subsequently Roman, heritage – a fusion eroded by centuries of relentless dehellenisation from within the Church. Timed alarmingly close to the anniversary of 9/11, the Regensburg speech contrasts Europe’s supposed Greco-Christian identity with a cartoon-like mythical Islam, bloodthirsty and inherently irrational.

Let there be light

Despite the fact that the European Renaissance was preceded by a revival of the Aristotelian tradition – primarily through the penetrating commentaries of Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) who concluded based on the Quran that the study of logic was a religious obligation – the birth of modern science was marked, nevertheless, by the collapse of the Ptolemaic worldview. Ptolemy’s widely accepted theories had to give way to new theories based on experimentation rather than the authority of Aristotle and Plato. This empirical worldview was mathematically articulated using analytic geometry, powerfully combining Euclid’s geometry with the Algebra of Al-Khwarizmi (Iraq, 780-850). Ptolemy’s worldview had two main aspects, one optical and another cosmological. In cosmology, he elaborated Aristotle’s view that the Earth was the centre of the universe into a complete cosmological model. Although Ptolemy’s model of spheres within spheres gave generally accurate predictions, it nevertheless placed the Moon on an orbit that sometimes brought it twice as close to the Earth than at other times. This meant that the Moon ought to have sometimes appeared twice as big!

While this flaw did not prove fatal to Ptolemy’s model, a major technological breakthrough in around 1608 did. The invention of the telescope, by Dutch spectacle-makers, enabled Galileo soon after to observe various stars and planets with unprecedented clarity. Galileo found that the planet Jupiter in particular had several moons which orbited around it – in direct contradiction to Ptolemy’s geocentric model in which all heavenly bodies orbited around the Earth. Despite the Inquisition’s trial and subsequent persecution of Galileo, Ptolemy’s model was eventually replaced by Kepler’s heliocentric model in which the Earth orbits elliptically around the Sun. In optics, on the other hand, Ptolemy incorrectly explained the phenomenon of vision in terms of his “visual ray” theory, the origin of which goes back to Plato. According to the visual ray theory, otherwise known as the emission theory of vision, the eye emitted rays which travelled through the air sensing various objects. These rays then conveyed back to the eye a visual representation of the viewed objects. Ptolemy’s visual ray was said to be like a “blind man’s stick.”

Remarkably, at the turn of the first millennium, a major technological breakthrough in the form of an experiment enabled Arab physicist Ibn Haitham to successfully explain vision solely in terms of light travelling into the eye. Using the pinhole camera (the principle behind photography) which he pioneered, he experimentally demonstrated how reflected light-beams from illuminated objects travel into the eye to project a point-for-point image of the visual scene. Not only did Ibn Haitham’s work discredit Ptolemy’s erroneous emission theory, it also established experiments as the norm of proof in optics and, more generally, in physics. (See “The Miracle of Light,” A World of Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, October-December 2005). While, in optics, the study of the burning properties of lenses began shortly before Ibn Haitham, the study of their visual and magnifying properties was effectively launched with his seminal Kitab Al-Manazir or Book of Optics. This underpinned the craft of the Dutch spectacle-makers who, by holding one lens in front of another, invented the telescope – enabling Galileo to scientifically challenge Ptolemy and the Inquisition.

The Golden Age

“Let there be no compulsion in religion,” the Quran (2:256) unequivocally announces in opposition to violent conversion. Why? The famous verse goes on to explain: “Truth stands out clear from Error,” that is, through evidence and argument. In his article “Mohammad’s Sword,” Jewish peace activist Uri Avnery recently wrote: “The story about ‘spreading the faith by the sword’ is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims.” Since Christians are accorded the same status by Islam as Jews, it might be illuminating to ask whether Jewish minorities were forced under Muslim rule to change their religion. The same question can be put differently: what is Islam’s equivalent of the Inquisition?

“There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on Jews,” says Avnery who then adds, “As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time.… In Muslim Spain Jews were ministers, poets, scientists.” Avnery goes on to conclude: “That was, indeed, the Golden Age.” In fact, many of the works of Arab polymath Ibn Rushd (Spain, 1126-1198) only survived in their Hebrew or Latin translations, thanks to his Jewish and Christian students in Muslim Spain, and later throughout Europe. For instance, his influential commentary on Plato’s Republic was only recently translated from Hebrew back to its original Arabic! The crucial question, as put by Avnery, regarding the age-old participation of religious minorities in Muslim scientific, cultural and even political life, is: “How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the ‘spreading of the faith by the sword’?” As a genuine advocate of the often-elusive dialogue of religions and cultures, Pope John Paul II once observed: “A clash ensues only when Islam or Christianity is misconstrued or manipulated for political or ideological ends.” This insight – most applicable to the current crisis – perfectly mirrors that of Edward Said dispelling the myth of the Clash of Civilisations as a mere clash of ignorance.