Abstract
At certain stages in history Islam and Europe had positive records of mutual impact. But they have also been at odds to the extent of waging war against one another, be it jihad or crusades.1 Despite the existing positive records the image of Islam in the West has been subject to continued stereotyping.2 Similarly, in the world of Islam the West does not enjoy a friendly image. These inter-civilisational issues touch on world politics and they became pertinent when Muslims after the end of the Cold War started to raise claims related to the question of ‘order’3 in the course of the crisis of the international system in its shaken post-bipolar shape. Some observers suspect that the debate on civilisation and world politics was launched by the West itself in a desperate search for a world political enemy supposedly to replace communism. It was suggested that Islam is the ‘candidate’. Of course this is wrong.4 Already in 1962 Raymond Aron spoke of ‘the heterogeneity of civilisations’5 as a source of conflict in world politics veiled by bipolarity. The end of the Cold War brought about the unveiling of this heterogeneity.
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Notes
See B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad. Der Islam und die christliche Welt, Munich, 1999; and
William M. Watt, Muslim—Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misperceptions, London, 1991.
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image, new edition, Oxford, 1993 (first published 1960). Also
Hichem Djaït, Islam and Europe, Berkeley, 1985.
B. Tibi, ‘Post-Bipolar Order in Crisis: the Challenge of Political Islam’, in Millennium, vol. 29, 3(2000), pp. 843–59.
The suspicion is directed against Huntington; see Fawas Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?, Cambridge, 1999;
Shireen T. Hunter, The Future of Islam and the West: Clash of Civilisations or Peaceful Coexistence, London, 1998.
Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris, 1962.
See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, new edition by Henrik Birus, 2 vols, Frankfurt/M., 1994; and on
Lessing Karl-Josef Kuschel, Vom Streit zum Wettstreit der Religionen. Lessing und die Herausforderung des Islam, Düsseldorf, 1998.
B. Tibi, Europa ohne Identität? Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft, Munich, 1998, Part 3 on ‘Islam in Europa’ and the concluding chapter; for the historical records see chapters 2 and 5 in Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad (referenced in note 1 above).
This is also the argument of Leslie Lipson, The Ethical Crises of Civilization: Moral Meltdown or Advance?, Newbury, CA, 1993, who covers all world civilisations. On Islam as a civilisation, see
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols, Chicago, 1974; see also
Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge, 1993.
See William McNeill, The Rise of the West: a History of Human Community, Chicago, 1963.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, New York, 1996; for a different perspective, see
B. Tibi, Krieg der Zivilisationen, new expanded edition, Munich, 1998 (first published 1995). See also Roman Herzog, Preventing the Clash of Civilizations: a Peace Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Henrik Schmiegelow, New York, 1999, which includes B. Tibi, ‘International Morality and Cross-Cultural Bridging’, pp. 107–26.
On these religions and civilisations, see the contributions in Arvind Sharma (ed.), Our Religions, San Francisco, 1993.
See the chapter on the Renaissance in Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad (referenced in note 1 above); and on anti-colonialism as jihad see Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: the Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History, The Hague, 1979.
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
On Islamic rationalism see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam. Der Islam von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edition, Munich, 1997, also available in the Serie Piper-edition, 1998.
See Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, new edition, Stuttgart, 1988; and also note 12 above.
Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World, Oxford, 1996, chapter 5.
Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, New York, 1995.
Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, Paris, 1937. I revive this interpretation in my book Kreuzzug und Djihad (referenced in note 1 above), chapter 2. See also
Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed and Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, Ithaca, 1983.
See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West (1500–1800), Cambridge, 1989; and
Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, 4 vols, Stuttgart, 1983–90.
David Apter, The Politics of Modernization, Chicago, 1965; and
Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization, New York, 1987.
David E. Apter, Rethinking Development, London, 1987.
J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York and London, 1993.
T.K. Oommen, Citizenship and Nationality: from Colonialism to Globalism, New Delhi and London, 1997; see my essay on pp. 199–226.
Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs McWorld, New York, 1996.
B. Tibi, ‘The Ethics of War and Peace in Islam’, in Terry Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace, Princeton, NJ, 1996, pp. 128–45.
This is also the correct argument of Najib Armanazi, al-Shar’ al-duwali fi al-Islam (International Law in Islam), new printing, London, 1990 (first published in Damascus, 1930).
Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley, 1993.
See Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven, 1995. See also
Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge, 1990.
B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.
See David Fromkin, Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality on the Balkan Battlefields, New York, 1999.
A very good example serving this end is the work of Francis Deng and Abdullahi A. An-Na’im (eds), Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Washington, DC, 1990. This book includes my contribution on Islam and human rights on pp. 104–32.
On Euro-Islam, see B. Tibi, ‘Les Conditions d’un Euro-Islam’, in R. Bistolfi/F. Zabbal (eds), Islams d’Europe. Intégration ou Insertion Communautaire?, Paris, 1995, pp. 230ff.; and also the parts on Islam in my book on Europe (refer-enced in note 7).
On the European origin of racism, see Ivan Hannaford, Race: the History of an Idea in the West, Baltimore, 1996.
Wilhelm Heitmeyer et al., Verlockender Fundamentalismus, Frankfurt/M., 1997.
On ‘democratic peace’, see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for the Post-Cold War World, Princeton, 1993.
More on Euro-Islam in B. Tibi, Der Islam und Deutschland — Muslime in Deutschland, Stuttgart, 2000.
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Tibi, B. (2005). Islam and the West in the Age of Conflict among Civilisations: the Alternative of Intercultural Dialogue as a Means of Conflict Resolution. In: Islam between Culture and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204157_11
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