(Login pigeti) Forum Owner Posted Oct 17, 2001 10:58 PM
The subject of the clash of civilizations seems to be getting important lately. Almost everyone is trying his or her best to convince the masses that there is no clash of civilizations as in Islam versus the West. And, since this is the case I kind of wonder if there is really a clash of two civilizations here. Why bother with such a task if there is no such a clash, or its possibility?
My guess is that there is such a clash, and my worry now is where Turkey should stand in such a clash. Both the Ottoman Empire, in its last decades, and Turkey, in the beginning, were in the forefront of the struggle between the Westernists and the Islamists, which at the time, resulted in the almost total victory of the Kemalist forces. Then came not so religious states of the Middle East, and so on.
Today, it looks like, we are witnessing another revival of the political Islam. And, this revival is once more, as it was before, predominantly anti-West. I would not try to approach this whole thing in terms of the strict dichotomy of West versus Islam. There are probably a lot of gray zones. After all, not every Muslim is like bin Laden. Yet, there is still something out there that gets people to act against the West in unison either in Islamic terms or in the name of Islam. There seems to be, if not plain hatred, strong dislike towards the West, and this dislike, this strong reaction, is finding the ability to come forward through Islam. This is the case even for those who are not really so religious, who may not even know the basics of their religion.
What is this new Islam all about? The question that what this new political Islam is about makes sense, since the movement is not really about just true believers, but also others who may be in it because of the feelings associated with this clash of civilizations thing. If there is a clash then what kind of clash are we going into?