Medievalism Re-oriented

This chapter examines interfaith encounter and conflict in the Islam Quintet, a suite of historical novels written between 1992 and 2010 by British-Pakistani author and commentator Tariq Ali. It explores the novels’ engagement with ‘Clash of Civilisations’ ideologies and with neocolonial politics, particularly in the three novels that are set in medieval Islamicate contexts shaped by interfaith and intercultural encounters: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, set in fifteenth-century al-Andalus, A Sultan in Palermo, set in twelfth-century Sicily, and The Book of Saladin, set in Crusade-era Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. The chapter argues that the novels develop a tension between convivencia, interfaith cohabitation achieved under Arab governance, and occupation, a hostile monocultural regime imposed under Christian rule. The chapter does not recuperate the Islamicate world into Western chronologies; rather, it complicates Western understandings of ‘the medieval’ by exploring how these novels highlight the linked destinies of Western and Islamic societies.

Saladin, The Latin Crusaders, and Palestine: David Eldridge's Holy Warriors and the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ Propaganda

This article explores representations of the Third Crusade in David Eldridge's play Holy Warriors: A Fantasia on the Third Crusade and History of Violent Struggle in the Holy Lands (2014). It argues that Eldridge tries in some instances to present the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a legacy of European imperialism in the Middle East and warns against contemporary Western involvement in the region. However, on other occasions, he suggests that Islamic cultures are incompatible with Western values of secular democracy and therefore the two-state solution is more applicable a solution that the one-state settlement. Ultimately, Eldridge shares some of the ideas behind Huntington's theory of the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and supports Western military action in Muslim-majority countries.

The Appropriation and Weaponisation of the Crusades in the Modern Era

The introductory article proposes the hypothesis, which informed the decision making and editorial work in the present volume, that appropriations and weaponisations of the crusades in the modern era rely on culturally embedded master narratives of the past that are often thought to encompass public or cultural memories. Crucially, medievalism, communicated through metonyms, metaphors, symbols and motifs frequently acts as a placeholder instead of the master narratives themselves. The article addresses differences between medievalists’ and modernists’ conceptions of crusades, especially highlighting how the very meaning of words – such as crusade – differ in the respective fields. But the matter at hand goes beyond semantics, for the notion that the act of crusading is a live and potent issue is hard to ignore. There exists a complex and multifaceted crusading present. That people can appeal to master narratives of the crusades via mutable medievalism, which embodies zero-sum, Manichaean-type “clash of civilisations” scenarios, helps explain the continued appeal of the crusades to those who seek to weaponise them. It is hoped that the contributions to the special issue, introduced towards the end of the article, further a better understanding of the ways this has happened in the modern era.

Editorial

This special issue of Critical Survey has a twofold purpose: to mark the twentieth anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001, when Islamic terrorists piloted two planes into New York’s World Trade Centre, killing some three thousand innocent people; and to register some of the cultural changes that have taken place in the subsequent two decades, and can be directly or indirectly attributed to that world-changing day. The attacks of 9/11 soon came to represent an extensive typology of collisions: the ‘clash of civilisations’ between East and West; the unstable boundaries between war and peace in our contemporary world; and (to many, but not all academics) the destructive violence that potentially underlies Western values of liberty and peaceful co-existence. It has long been a commonplace that 9/11 profoundly and irreversibly changed our world. This issue sets out to represent and reflect some of those changes.

Religion and International Relations: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?

The article surveys the recent scholarly study of religion and international relations/International Relations (ir/IR). The focus of the article is on two discrete periods: pre-9 September 2001 (‘9/11’) and post-9/11. During the first time period, Iran’s Islamic revolution (1979), the civil war in former Yugoslavia and Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ (1993) were major foci of attention. The second period saw a large number of scholarly accounts following the 9/11 attacks on the USA, with a sustained focus on the international securitisation of Islam. The article also briefly surveys the position of religion in IR theory. The article concludes that following the recent diminution of the threat to the West of Islamist terrorism—subsequent to the apparent demise of Islamic State and the fragmentation and dissipation of al Qaeda—the study of religion in IR theory needs to take better account of changing circumstances to arrive at a better understanding of how religion impacts on international relations/International Relations.

On the Very Idea of Civilisation

The concept of civilisation is a controversial one because it is unavoidably normative in its implications. Its historical associations with the effort of Western imperialism to impose substantive conditions of life have made it difficult for contemporary liberalism to find a definition of “civilization” that can be reconciled with progressive discourse that seeks to avoid exclusions of various kinds. But because we lack a way of identifying what is peculiar to the relationship of civilisation that avoids the problem of domination, it has tended to be conflated with other ideas. Taking Samuel Huntington's idea of a “Clash of Civilisations” as a starting point, this article argues that we suffer from a widespread confusion of civilisation with “culture,” and that we also confuse it with other ideas including modernity and technological development. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes, the essay proposes an alternative definition of civilisation as the existence of limits on how we may treat others.

Pluralism of Values: Its Scope and Limitations

Value Pluralism is an ethico-political philosophical doctrine upholding the principle of the clash of values which decrees that values are heterogeneous and incommensurable among themselves. The appearance of this doctrine was surrounded by specific conditions: 1. The recent condition based on the principle of conflict between reason and religion, serving as the cause for a manifestly unrestrained rationality. 2. Liberalism based on the principle of conflict between politics and ethics, serving as the cause for a pervasive political hegemony. 3. The idea of the ‘clash of civilisations’ based on the principle of conformity between culture and ethics, and serving as the cause of a far-reaching cultural extremism. The upholders of Value Pluralism pursued conflicting methods in dealing with this valuational clash: 1. The method of ‘determination’ (Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin), 2. The method of ‘demonstration’ (J. Habermas and K.-O. Apel), 3. The method of ‘separation’ (John Rawls), and 4. The method of ‘connecting’ (Michael Walzer). All this calls for seeking a new value pluralism upholding the principle of ‘coinciding values’ feasible only by eliminating the causes of clash comprising three defects: rational unrestraint, political hegemony, and cultural extremism. The author, in turn, repels the defect of unrestrained rationality by disseminating the value of faith into reason, dispels the defect of hegemony by disseminating the value of the Good into politics, and dislodges the defect of extremism by disseminating the value of human ‘innate nature’ into culture.

Tribalism: A Genealogical Enquiry on Contemporary Terrorism

This text is in reaction to Samuel Huntington's celebrated piece on Clash of Civilisations, especially the discourse after the Twin Towers attack in 2001 (9/11) and subsequent commentaries and explanations on contemporary terror, especially by David Rapoport and the Wave Theory. The principal arguments are providing critiques on both Huntington and Rapoport, the former viewing the rising tide of contemporary organised terrorism as civilisational conflicts (in a historical sense of super cultures) and the latter, as generation wide waves at a global scale starting from Anarchism in late nineteenth century Europe. Here the genealogical enquiry refers to social--psychological perspectives from prehistoric times, shaping modern minds and the explanation around the disconnects between modern institutions like the nation states, (post French Revolution) and the exclusivistic perspectives of the little culturesthat refuse to forgo its identity in the nation state and democratic ethos of modernity and the modern world.