Text/Edward Sayyid Translation/Tao Xiaolu Introduction/Wang Liqiu
Twenty years ago, the collapse of the World Trade Center was a blow to the course of Western-centric modernity after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a huge shock to the global intellectual community. The United States invaded Afghanistan with 9/11 as an opportunity, starting a long war on terror; and dramatically, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan at this moment, leaving a mess, and the Taliban regained power, as if it had returned to the original point of twenty years ago. Twenty years later, how much criticism and reflection are still valid in reliving that intellectual shock in the midst of aphasia?
The Surging Thought Market launched the "Archaeology of 9/11 Thought" topic, which attempts to trace the trajectory of international intellectuals' thinking about the attack and the "war on terror" launched by the United States and its allies after that. The articles and interviews included in the feature include both urgent and immediate responses to the attacks and reflections on the different historical stages after the incident.
Given the length of the two-decade time span, it is difficult to fully cover the intellectual response of the topic, and the ideological trajectory of our "archaeology" unfolds roughly according to several threads: to understand the attack in the context of the history of the United States' own atrocities and disaster-making, capitalist globalization and the world system, to question the background and root causes of the attack; to be vigilant against the dangerous expansion of state power after 9/11 - to expand surveillance methods, suspend constitutional rights, sacrifice civil liberties, and suppress political dissent in the name of safeguarding national sovereignty and security; and reflection The "war on terrorism" is a "war" between sovereigns and non-sovereigns in the name of punishing evil and upholding justice; pointing out the flaws in the interpretation framework of the "clash of civilizations theory", refuting the stereotypical presentation of the so-called "Islamic culture" in the West, and revealing the evil consequences of the West's ignorance of the complex historical reality of the Islamic world...
These clues are neither clear nor independent of each other, but are interrelated and intertwined, so that the specific analysis of scholars often links multiple clues at the same time. Despite the diversity of perspectives, the fundamental concerns of intellectuals are the same: how to reimagine the world to avoid war and conflict, and to find a way to coexist peacefully with others? At a time when the sentiments of grief, consternation, and fear triggered by the 9/11 attacks are engulfed in nationalist discourse, which then converge into a raging cry of battle and violent fanaticism, intellectuals strictly guard the space of dissent and debate, and perform their duties of criticism and questioning "at an inopportune time" to retain hope in desperate circumstances.
As far as possible, we invite relevant translators/researchers to write guides to each article covered by the topic, introducing the context of the thinker's awareness of the problem before and after 9/11 and supplementing the specific historical context. This topic will continue to be updated throughout the year, and readers are welcome to contribute additional articles if there are important perspectives that have been missing. The topic was co-curated with the assistance of intern editor Mao Chaoyu.
【Introduction】Untimely response
Text/Wang Liqiu (Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University)
On 9/11, Sayyid's ideas and actions were to some extent both irrelevant and relevant. Irrelevant because Sayyid, who has always focused on Middle Eastern politics, not only paradoxically adopted an evasive posture after the events, but also rarely talked about and analyzed the events themselves when they did talk about 9/11 later. But for thinking about 9/11, Sayyid is important. For long before the event occurred, he pre-critiqued the way of thinking and discursive logic that had contributed to it to a certain extent, and which in turn could (and did) further strengthen, and predetermined the roles he could and could not assume in the relevant discussions. This emphasis on the positionality of man, especially intellectuals, and the complex world around him that is beyond the ability of theory to grasp but is real, is both what Sayyid's ideas and actions want to convey, and an important and valuable point of his position.
After 9/11, Said did not immediately comment on the mainstream media like The New York Times, the main front of his operations, as he had always done. In subsequent media commentary, he also continued to express an evasive posture. He doesn't seem willing to take on the role of "domain expert" that people expect him to take on. In an interview with Progress magazine, he said 9/11 was particularly "shocking and frightening," that it "took symbolism as its goal, transcended the political dimension and entered the metaphysical dimension," and that it fell into the realm of "crazy abstraction and mythical generalization." In The History of the Impossible, published in Harpers magazine in July 2002, he called the attackers "extremely crazy fanatics who committed suicide to kill innocent people" and stated that "how could I possibly understand them?" In short, Sayyid believes that someone has hijacked Islam for their own purposes, and he does not understand what these people think. He didn't even think he understood Islam. He repeatedly emphasized the complexity of Islam and the impossibility of representing Islam in an assertive posture. He cannot provide the kind of expertise that people, especially the media, want that is driven by a simplistic worldview, which in turn supports and reinforces. The most he could provide was contextualized information that the American people of the time did not need. Because it makes simplistic judgments difficult, and in a simplistic framework of thinking, this emphasis on complexity can easily be misinterpreted and solidified as support for the party being judged to be evil.
Sayyid did not understand Islam, but he did understand the production of knowledge about Islam. From this perspective, although he did not foresee or understand the events of 9/11 itself, his critique of the effects and consequences of the events began as early as the publication of Orientalism in the 1970s. After 9/11, the Western mainstream media almost did not hesitate to appeal to Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory from the perspective of Islam, culture and civilization. The article "Clash of Ignorance" published this time is Said's october 2001 refutation of the "clash of civilizations" theory published in the magazine "The Nation" in October 2001. It is worth noting that this refutation is not entirely immediate and reactive. In fact, as early as 1998, Said rehearsed this section in a lecture he gave at the Media Education Foundation, "The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations." Reflections on Exile (2000) also included a more complete edition entitled Conflict of Definitions.
Sayyid's critique is simple: in his view, the clash of civilizations theory considers civilization to be a monolithic homogeneous entity, and presupposes a binary opposition between us and them when dealing with civilization. This apparently factual assumption was not original to Huntington, but came from Bernard Lewis and further derived from the Western Tradition of Orientalism. Civilizations are interconnected, interpenetrating, and communicating with each other, and they are inherently complex and constantly changing. Defining civilization, even from the inside of civilization, is an ongoing debate. It is wishful thinking to simply put a hat on a group from the outside. The clash of civilizations is an extremely simplistic way of thinking that has more to do with the ideological need for power than with the politics of reality. It shows a lack of reflection and too easy obedience of the commentator to his place in the world and in the power structure. And all this is what Sayyid has fully demonstrated before.
In a 2002 report in New Town magazine, Said clarified his attitude on 9/11: "I'm not saying the Arabs are innocent. Nor is it all wrong in the United States... Just as there is no monolithic Arab world or Islam, there is no monolithic America. But the former has now been compressed into a rather narrow, unpleasant one-size-fits-all formula. It is equated with terrorism, fundamentalism and fanaticism. ...... And all these stupid, transcendent, shrinking labels have unfortunately triumphed... Means endless conflict. ”
These simple truths are still true today.
(Bibliography)
Sayyid
【Text】
Sayyid: The conflict of ignorance
This article was originally published in the nation magazine in October 2001, and the Chinese edition was published in the Oriental History Review on September 27, 2018, with the translator Tao Xiaolu and The Paper reprinted with the permission of the translator.
In the summer of 1993, Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" Published in Foreign Affairs, this article was published and immediately attracted great attention and reaction. Because Huntington wrote this article to provide a completely new theory for Americans in the "new phase" of world politics after the end of the Cold War, the language in which he made his arguments seemed atmospheric, bold, persuasive, and even far-sighted. He paid close attention to his opponents in the field of policy studies, theorists such as Fukuyama and their "end of history" ideas, and many who hailed the arrival of globalism and the dissolution of the state. But Huntington argues that these people only knew certain aspects of this new era. He wanted to announce to the world "the key, central aspects of the possible face of future global politics." He put it flatly:
"My hypothesis is that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The main source of great divisions and conflicts among human beings will be cultural. Nation-States will still play the most powerful role in world affairs, but the main conflicts in global politics will occur between nations and groups belonging to different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The dividing line between civilizations will be the front line of future struggles. ”
Much of the discussion in the following pages is based on What Huntington calls the vague concept of "civilization identity" and "interaction between seven or eight major civilizations," of which his attention is primarily focused on the conflict between Islam and the West. His emphasis on struggle relies heavily on a 1990 essay by a veteran Orientalist named Bernard Lewis titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage," the ideological overtones of Lewis himself can be seen from the title. In both essays, so many countries and ethnic groups are divided into two camps, "Western" and "Islamic", and both authors use these two words recklessly, as if extremely complex issues such as identity and culture exist in a cartoonish world: one is Popeye and the other is Bruto, and the two are mercilessly beating each other, and the boxer of higher moral character can always defeat his opponent. Of course, Neither Huntington nor Lewis devoted much effort to dealing with the interrelationships and pluralism of the forces that exist within each civilization; did not consider the fact that one of the most important topics of debate in modern cultures was how to define or explain their respective cultures; nor did they consider how serious incitement and outright ignorance might be mixed with the act of speaking for religion or civilization as a whole. No, they ignore these issues, thinking that the West is the West and Islam is Islam.
Huntington
Huntington said the challenge for Policymakers in the West is to ensure that the West becomes stronger and resists the onslaught of all other civilizations, especially the Islamic world. Even more disturbing is Huntington's assumption that this detached perspective of himself—severing attachment to customs and culture, looking at the world apart from the secret fidelity of the human heart—is correct, as if everyone else were looking around for answers he had found. In fact, Huntington was a theoretician whose formulations of civilizations and identities did not correspond to the facts, and in his pen they became static, closed concepts in which the countless currents and counter-currents that surged and gave impetus to the development of human history disappeared; in centuries of human history, these civilizations and identities made exchange, exchange, and sharing possible, not only religious wars and imperial conquests. This less obvious part of history is ignored in the article "Clash of Civilizations", and Huntington is anxious to highlight the wars in history, and the wars that have been absurdly compressed, to argue that human history is a clash of civilizations. In 1996, Huntington kept the title of his article and published his book The Clash of Civilizations, in which he tried to make his discourse more nuanced and then added a great deal of footnotes; however, all he did was make his own mind more confused, proving himself to be a clumsy writer and a rough thinker.
The basic paradigm of confrontation between the West and the world outside the West (a retelling of hostile relations in the Cold War) remains unaffected, and since the events of 9/11, this confrontation has often been implicitly expressed in discussions. The suicide attack, orchestrated by a small group of crazy militants, with morbid motives and a horrific mass of casualties, is considered evidence for Huntington's theory. Many prominent international figures, from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, talked about the problems of Islamic civilization instead of talking about the attack as it was: a handful of fanatics using some oversized ideas (I was using the word "idea" very broadly) to commit violence; Berlusconi used Huntington's point of view to hype up how superior Western civilization is, "we". In the middle of it is how to emerge Mozart and Michelangelo and so on, and they do not. (Berlusconi later apologized for his insults against "Islam.") ）
But why don't one see the similarities between bin Laden and his followers with the branch davidians, the Guyana priest Jim Jones, or the disciples of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, though the damage caused by these cults is less dramatic in comparison. Even The Economist, who is usually discerning, was tempted to make general remarks in a September issue, commenting on Huntington's unapologetic praise, calling his observations of Islamic civilization "cruel and sweeping, but insightful." The Economist writes in a very inappropriately solemn tone, "Huntington argues that in today's world, a billion or so Muslims 'are convinced of the superiority of their culture while at the same time grumbling about their inferior position in power. "Did Huntington come to his conclusions after investigating the opinions of 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and 50 Bosnians? Even if he did, what kind of sample would this be?
All the well-known American and European newspapers and magazines contribute to this large, unruly, "eschatological" vocabulary in their editorials, and every word they use is not intended to inspire their readers, but to arouse their indignation as members of "Western civilization" and what "we" need to do. Many Westerners, especially some self-styled militants in the United States, inappropriately use Churchill language to advocate war against the haters, plunderers, and destroyers of Western civilization—their simplistic arguments do not hold true in the face of a complex history; we can see this complex history exerting influence in different territories, in the process in which the boundaries that divided us into armed communities were transcended.
This is the problem with unpleasant labels like "Islam" and "the West": people want to understand disorderly realities, but these labels mislead and confuse people's minds, because reality cannot be so easily classified or distinguished. In 1994, I was giving a lecture at a university in the West Bank, and after the speech, a man in the audience stood up and began attacking my views as "Western views" rather than the strictly Islamic views he espoused. "Then why do you wear suits and ties?" Suits and ties are also Western. "It was the response that came to my mind for the first time. He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face. When information about the terrorists who created 9/11 began to be reported, I remembered it again. We know from the news how these terrorists have requisitioned aircraft and how they have mastered all the technology needed to carry out suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Where is the line between "Western" technology and Berlusconi's claim that "Islam" cannot be integrated into "modernity"?
Of course, people can't easily draw boundaries. How weak are labels, generalizations, and assertions about culture. In a way, primitive passions and complex knowledge work together to show that there is no indestructible boundary between "Western" and "Islamic", past and present, between us and them, not to mention the endless divisions and debates about the concept of identity and nationality. Unilaterally delineating these concepts, waging conquests, using our good deeds against their evil, eliminating terrorism, and destroying some nations once and for all (Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary) will not make it easier for people to understand these hypothetical concepts; it is easier for people to make belligerent statements in order to incite collective passions, rather than to reflect, examine, and sort out what we need to deal with in reality: the innumerable lives, "our" and "their" lives, are interconnected.
The late Eqbal ahmad published three notable series of articles in Pakistan's most respected weekly magazine Dawn from January to March 1999, targeting Muslims; Humanism, aesthetic, intellectual pursuits and spiritual inputs are discarded". And for these absolutists and fanatical tyrants to act in this way, a perversion of Islam is indispensable, "usually in a contextual context, to emphasize one aspect of religion in an absolutist way, completely ignoring the rest of that religion." This phenomenon is a distortion of religion, a debasement of tradition and a disruption of the political process. Ahmed begins by pointing out the rich, complex and pluralistic meaning of the word "jihad" ("jihad"), and he further points out that the current meaning of the word is only narrowly understood as waging indiscriminate warfare against presumed enemies, in which it is impossible to "recognize what Islam, which Muslims have long experienced and experienced, whether religious, social, cultural, historical or political" is. Ahmed concludes that modern Islamists "care about power, not the soul; these people mobilize people for political purposes, not to feel and alleviate their suffering, to feel their desires." The modern Islamist political agenda is very limited in content and has a time limit." Worse still, similar distortions and fanaticisms have emerged in the discourse systems of "Judaism" and "Christianity."
Conrad understood better than any of his own readers at the end of the 19th century that in extreme cases all the differences between civilized London and the Heart of Darkness would soon disappear, and that people living in highly developed European civilizations might immediately commit the most barbaric acts without any "warm-up period" or transition. In his 1907 book The Secret Agent, Conrad described terrorism's fondness for abstract concepts such as "pure science" (including "Islam" or "the West"), and wrote that no matter how high the rhetoric, terrorists would eventually degenerate morally.
The relationship between the seemingly warring civilizations is closer than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche have pointed out how the movement of people and goods often crosses carefully maintained, even tightly monitored, borders with great ease. But these fluctuating ideas call into question the ideas that many of us firmly believe in, and do not provide appropriate and practical guidelines for the situation we are now facing. Therefore, it is more comfortable to have various battle instructions (to start a new journey, the battle between good and evil, freedom and fear, etc.), which are based on Huntington's so-called theory that Islamic civilization and Western civilization are in conflict, and soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the official discourse of the United States began to appear in the language of "clash of civilizations". The vocabulary has been significantly reduced in the current official discourse, but the theory is still shared by the fact that hate speech and hate behavior have not diminished, and by a series of reports of Arabs, Muslims, and Indians being targeted by law enforcement across the country.
Another reason for this persistence is that the number of Muslims in Europe and the United States is increasing. Looking at the populations of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, the United States, and even Sweden today, it must be acknowledged that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West, but at its center. But why do people think that the Muslim populations of these countries pose a great threat? The historical memory of the arab conquests, which began in the seventh century AD, has been buried in the cultures of European countries; as the famous Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark mohammed and charlemagne (1939), the Arab conquests destroyed the long-standing unity of the Mediterranean region. Undermining christian-roman synthesis and giving birth to a new civilization dominated by the northern European states (Germany and Carolingian France), Henry Piran seems to have a mission to defend the "West" from its historical cultural rivals. Unfortunately, Henry Piren did not write that in creating this new line of defense, the West borrowed from Islamic humanism, as well as the science, philosophy, sociology, and history of the Islamic world— which have always exerted influence from the classical world to the world of Charlemagne. Islam has existed within the Western world from the beginning, and even Dante, who regarded the Prophet Muhammad as his great enemy, had to place him at the center of the Divine Comedy of Purgatory.
Moreover, the tradition of monotheism has continued for a long time, with Louis Massignon aptly calling it "the abrahamic religions." The traditions of Judaism and Christianity, each of which have been inherited, linger, and for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends prophecy. So far, no decent history book has clearly recounted and demystified the many aspects of the rivalry that existed between the three religions (which were never monolithic unified camps), although the confluence of the three religions in Palestine has led to many bloodsheds and offers a very rich secular illustration of the irreconcilability that exists between them. It is therefore not surprising that Muslims and Christians can easily talk about crusades and "holy wars" and often turn a complete blind eye to the existence of Judaism. Iqbba Ahmed said such an agenda was "very comforting" for men and women who are trapped between the two deep waters of tradition and modernity.
But we all swim in these waters, whether Westerners, Muslims or others. And since these waters are part of this ocean of history, it is futile to try to divide them by a barrier. We are now in a period of tension, but it is better to consider which groups are in power and which are powerless, to discuss secular political questions of reason and ignorance, to think in terms of universal principles of justice and injustice, rather than to stray from the right track and look for abstract words that may give us short-term satisfaction but do not allow us to be self-aware or form analysis based on facts. "Clash of Civilizations" gimmicks like "the war of the worlds" reinforce people's wary national pride against others without helping to critically understand the confusing interdependence of our time.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin