Cultural Conflicts or Conflicts of Interests  
Conflicts are usually conflicts of interests, especially economic and political interests. However, material conflicts are embedded in and charged with ideological conflicts. If material conflicts can be known by statistics, i.e., who is owning what, ideological ones can be known by the mutual perceptions of the two contending parties. Actions are the outcome of perceptions. Actions are perceptions in actus while perceptions are actions in potentia.    
 
1. It is clear nowadays that there are two conflicting parties. They are no more the socialist bloc and the free world during the cold war. After the collapse of the first, the second formed a one polar world. Local conflicts in Africa and Asia persisted. Some have world amplifications like the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Indian-Pakistani conflict. However, a new dichotomy began to appear in different names such as Islam and the West, war against terror. It did not appear with the September 11th events, in New York and Washington, but even before since the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, political Islam in Lebanon, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, Serbian aggressions on Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovena. The West and the rest jumped again to the minds.    
 
2. Globalization accentuated that the dichotomy between the center and the periphery, the group of seven or eight, and the rest of the world, the over-developed and the under-developed, the producer and the consumer, the multinationals and the nationals, the rich and the poor, those who have and those who have not.    
 
3. Because Islam is the major religion in the periphery, in Africa and Asia, it played the role of a vehicle of protest. Political Islam shared the same objectives as people’s demonstrations in Seattle, Genoa, Davos, Prague, Paris and London. It became the voice of the voiceless. Islam also became the second religion – in number may be not in importance – in Europe and America seen as a threat to western national identities. A double standard is practiced since Judaism including its visible rituals is not.    
 
4. The tragic events of Washington and New-York of September 11th, 2001, may be a landmark in American history and American self perception. For others, these events may be a reaction to the previous September 29th, the beginning of the second Intifada 2000, left alone for a whole year without any support neither from the Arabs nor from the Western World. The total support of the USA to Israel created a tense feeling of Anti-Americanism in the Arab and Muslim world. Durban also was a landmark in the crystallization of this anti-American feeling, when America refused to apologize for kidnapping over 10 million Africans to the new world and when it refused, with Israel alone, to equate Zionism with racialism after all what it did to the Palestinian people. The World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House are symbols of power, hegemonic and unjust. Many writers did criticize these symbols of power.   Others do not know how to think but how to act. Doing may be thinking in actus and thinking may be doing in potentia.    
 

Western stereotyped images of Islam
Western cultural perception of Islam is determined by the stereotyped images accumulated throughout history. Islam and the West represent the two shores of the Mediterranean, South and North. If the North is strong, it expands to the South as happened during the Greco-Roman and modern colonial periods. If the South is strong it expands to the North similar to what happened during the Islamic Futuhat in early Islam, and during the crusades. In the past, the North was stronger twice than the South. One of the reasons of tension between North and South now is: What about the future, the presence of the West in the Arab and Muslim world and the presence of Islam in the West?    
 
These mutual perceptions are the most common in the massmedia and popular culture. Surely they are counter-balanced by opposite images by the elite, some academic circles and writings. One of the legitimate devices for conflicts is these stereotyped images in the mass-culture and popular mind capable of mobilizing the masses against the adversary.    
 
It is very difficult to make a distinction between Islam and Muslims as it is impossible to make a similar distinction between Christianity and Christians. Both are historical products. In fact the Qur’an as the first source of Islam can be distinct from history since it did not pass by a period of oral transmission. It has been written in the same moment of utterance. While the Old and the New Testaments passed by a period of oral transmission which varies in length, between 40-100 (AD) years in the case of the New Testament and between 700-300 (BC) in the case of the Old Testament. The Hadith passed through a period of oral transmission but collected by rigorous methods of multilateral transmission known ten centuries later in Europe as Biblical Criticism.      
 
1. Islam is a part of the semite religions labeled since Renan and Leon Gautier as irrational, anti-logic, mythical, superstitional and magic, symbolized by the flying carpet, Alauddin and the magic lamp and ”One thousand and one night.” At most, Muslims are carriers of knowledge, not creators. While the West, on the contrary, is Arian, national, scientific and creator of knowledge. This rootimage is behind the actual dichotomy between Islam and the West, Terror and Enlightenment.    
 
2. Islam is mystical, dogmatic and sectarian. It leads to fanaticism and bigotry. It lacks tolerance and recognition of the other. It is linked to the tradition, to the ”Holy Book.” It tends more towards the past when the golden age of Islam was at its prime. On the contrary, the West is secular, tolerant, pluralistic, critical to the tradition and futuristic. The difference between Islam and the West is not of degree but of kind, not related to history but to substance.    
 
3. Muslims as peoples are expanded mostly in Africa and Asia, called lately the underdeveloped world. That is why Islam as religion is linked to underdevelopment. The infrastructure in the Muslim world as geographic area is featured by lack of basic needs, problems of drought, hunger, desertification, poverty, unemployment, poor housing, etc...The super-structure is also characterized by illiteracy, oppression, monolythism, militarism, totalitarianism, violation of human rights, gender gap, minorities problems, corruption, disorder ...etc.Violence is practiced inside and outside. Oppressive violence of the ruler generates a counter violence by the ruled. State’s violence results in counterviolence. The state has priority on civil society. In short ”Oriental Despotism” at most generated the enlightened or the ”Just despot.” On the other side the West gave the world freedom, democracy, egalitarianism, human rights, equality of rights and duties, systems of check and balance.    
 
4. Arabs, Muslims, Middle Easterners are interchangeable names to denote a certain kind of behavior depicted in the mass-media and literature: discrepancy between logos and praxis, between words and actions. Esotericism, hypocrisy, laying, double-talk, double-face etc., all multiple features of the same conduct. ‘Cunning’ as an attribute is not in history but in the individual. Seclusion and exposure are two faces of the same behavior. The Europeans are clear-cut, open, frank and direct. Hermeneutics is not in behavior but in language.    
 

Muslim stereotyped images of the West 
These images are also built in the Arab and Muslim mass-media induced from western mass-media, literature, art, ideologies philosophies, social movements and history. They are popular images, selective and aiming at caricaturing the adversary. They are pushed to the extreme for the sake of polarization and self-legitimation.    
 
1. From the mediaeval West came the Crusaders, the first form of western colonialism. In the name of religion, western invasions of the Muslim world was legitimized. The crusaders did not succeed in their mission thanks to Saladdin and the discrepancy between the two cultural levels of the invaders and the invaded. However, the war of aggression stayed in the Muslim subconsciousness, a lesson from the past to be repeated in the future. Modern colonialism contained the same objective not only through the Mediterranean but from the ocean, not only to the heart of the Muslim World, Palestine, but also from the periphery around Africa and Asia after European expansion to the western hemisphere through the Atlantic. Almost all Africa, South East Asia and the New World were occupied. After decolonization and the fall of the socialist block, globalization became a third form of hegemony in the name of the free market, the information revolution, the world as one village, etc... Since the Muslim world, the less-industrialized world, is in the periphery and Europe, the more industrialized world, is in the center, North-South relations became one-way; the production of the North and the consumption of the South, creativity in the center and transfer in the periphery.      
 
2. After Greco-Roman, Mediaeval and modern western empires, Euro-centrism began to appear as a common dominator. The accumulation of world knowledge from the Far East to the Middle East to the West gave Europe a certain kind of epistemological arrogance forgetting the roots of knowledge. Science is not the history of science. European creativity went beyond history. A complex of superiority was born in the West generating another complex of inferiority in the rest. Sometimes epistemological arrogance intertwines with some kind of racialism based on color or divine election. Slavery was a common practice till the 19th century. Indigenous populations in the western hemisphere were killed or put in reservations. Millions of Africans were drawn as slaves to the New World. Western consciousness never forgot empires, from Imperial Rome to Imperial USA, from Pax Romana to Pax Americana.    
 
3. Western behavior is motivated by interest as Habermas observed in his ”Knowledge and Interest.” Materialism would express a major trend in western consciousness. Materialism is also linked to egoism which is itself an expression of extreme individualism. Out of these deep motivations in western consciousness came power without justice vis à vis others. The ideals of the enlightenment were norms inside Europe, the opposite ideals were practiced outside. Ethical norms became double-standards and lost their universalism. Injustice has been done not only to the present but also to the past in his historiography.  The history of the whole world was reduced to the history of Europe in modern times. The fruits were taken without the seeds, the conclusions without the premises.     
 
4. The West is very proud of its secular experience on the eve of modern times. Once it was impossible to combine the old and the new, tradition and modernism, the geocentric worldview with the heliocentric, the church and the state, a discontinuity model was necessary in favor of the new. Reason with nature can produce natural laws, and with society can discover social laws. God does intervene neither in human reason nor in nature. Secularism pushed to its extreme became atheism. God is not needed to explain the World System. Atheism leads to the loss of the focal point necessary for knowledge and action. That is why atheism leads to relativism, skepticism, agnosticism and finally to nihilism.    
 
God is dead and man is alive. Man is also dead and nobody is alive. If Western culture began its modern times by reason, nature, progress, culminating in the ideals of enlightenment it ended by the opposite ideals such as ”Decline of the West” (Spengler), ”Crisis of European sciences” (Husserl), ”Crisis of European consciousness” (Hazard), ”Farwell to Reason, Against method” (Feyerabend), ”Deconstructionism,” ”Post Modernism”(Derrida, Deuleuze, Lyotard).    
 
These mutual stereotyped images are the ideological basis for conflicts especially between Islam and the West. Intercultural dialogue is capable of dissipating these conflicting images to uproot these conflicts. Dialogue serves to enhance intercultural communication and mutual understanding. Cultural conflicts may hide conflicts of interests and may be at their deep roots. The question is: Where to begin?

Source:
Prof. Dr. Hassan Hanafi 2007