Hafsa's review
recommended for:
those seeking to dislodge Huntington
status:
Read in March, 2007
Tariq Ali is a prominent leftist intellectual in Britain who is originally from Pakistan. His book, “The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity” serves as a strong counter to the dominant scholarly understandings of the conflict between Islam and the West and of world history in general. He seeks to explain the historical roots of the attack on September 11th, as well as provide a background to India-Pakistan relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict and additional topics that relate to Islamic identity and politics. It is important to understand that in his writings, Ali has a strong bias. He is a liberal, a Marxist, an atheist, a strong opponent of the foreign policies of the United States and the state of Israel and a severe critic of globalization and its negative impact in developing countries. He expresses the views of many in the Third World that are often overlooked in Western scholarly discourse.
Ali argues that world history has been defined by the “Cl...more
Tariq Ali is a prominent leftist intellectual in Britain who is originally from Pakistan. His book, “The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity” serves as a strong counter to the dominant scholarly understandings of the conflict between Islam and the West and of world history in general. He seeks to explain the historical roots of the attack on September 11th, as well as provide a background to India-Pakistan relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict and additional topics that relate to Islamic identity and politics. It is important to understand that in his writings, Ali has a strong bias. He is a liberal, a Marxist, an atheist, a strong opponent of the foreign policies of the United States and the state of Israel and a severe critic of globalization and its negative impact in developing countries. He expresses the views of many in the Third World that are often overlooked in Western scholarly discourse.
Ali argues that world history has been defined by the “Clash of Fundamentalisms” instead of the "Clash of Civilizations" as presented by Samuel Huntington. Tariq's clash is either manifested as religious fundamentalism or imperial fundamentalism. In the first half of the book, he explores the history of Islamic civilization. He covers the early days of the religion, the conquests into other territories, the split between Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam, the Crusades, the rise of Wahhabism, and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. He also goes into a brief account of the colonial and the post-colonial period and the creation of the modern Muslim world, including the causes of the Palestinian and Kashmir conflicts. Through exploring these diverse but connected events, his goal is to show that Islamic history or civilization has not been a monolith and has been affected greatly by political or economic factors.
The political or economic factors usually end up being Western interventions in the Muslim world. On a political level, Ali mentions that throughout the Cold War, the United States manipulated local actors in the Muslim world. He states that at this time, the United States had no reservations about supporting the Islamists who were staunchly anti-communist because these groups helped US interests in the region. Thus, the US directly supported some Islamist groups, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Furthermore, Ali believes that much of US foreign policy was driven by materialist objectives. He states that securing influence over the oil reserves in the Middle East played a large role in policy towards the region, especially after the 1970’s.
Ali also critiques Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis which argues that the progression of human history is a struggle between competing ideologies ended after the Cold War, and that the world will settle on liberal democracy as the ideology that has triumphed. Fukuyama calls for promoting liberal democracy and foreshadows that there will be a conflict with these views and those held by many Muslims around the world. Ali argues that the conflict will not occur because Muslims are inherently predisposed against liberal democratic values but because of the fundamentalist nature in which the West seeks to militarily impose these values in their countries.
Although the book's title is about the clash between the fundamentalisms, Ali spends a greater amount of time covering the political and intellectual history of the Arab and South Asian Muslim world. Nonetheless, he provides an excellent counter to the prevailing views of Huntington and Fukuyama. His work should be, but of course isn't, considered on par with them.
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The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity 
