Bernard lewis thesis

Bernard lewis thesis

Bernard Lewis, FBA (31 May – 19 May ) was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political blogger.com was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton blogger.com's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West Jun 14,  · According to Lewis Muslims are enraged at Westerners and their "hatred is directed against us". He elaborates his thesis by stressing that since In order to put across his thesis in the clearest way, Bernard Lewis sums up his disapproval of triumphalism, both in Islam and Christianity, with these words: “‘For those taking the triumphalist approach (classically summed up in the formula ‘I'm right, you're wrong, go to hell), tolerance is

Ottoman Decline Thesis - Wikipedia

An E-IR Open Access Book by Deepshikha Shahi. Available now on Amazon UKUSACaGerFrain all good book stores, and via a free PDF download. The academic discipline of International Relations IR awaited a new paradigm which could provide an outlook to delineate the picture of the newly emerging world politics after the end of the Cold War.

Interestingly, various contending paradigms cropped up, most of these originating in the West — particularly in the US, bernard lewis thesis. The linkage is in fact significant as it demonstrates the knowledge-power relationship in international relations.

If the US could disguise its empire building project and legitimise its aggressive foreign policy behaviour as a necessary defensive posture to contain the threat of communism and the USSR during the Cold War, it could not continue to do so after the collapse of USSR and the end of the Cold War. It was, therefore, bernard lewis thesis, in greater need than ever before of the legitimising discourses that many North American and European intellectuals of the right and liberal centre seemed eager to provide.

This chapter aims at demonstrating the various dimensions of this bernard lewis thesis of scholarship whilst adding a new dimension to it. It consists of three sections. The second section tries to categorise the various criticisms of it. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.

The bernard lewis thesis divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation States will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be battle lines of the future.

Huntington claimed that the fault lines between civilizations stemmed from differences in social and political values. The civilizations had different values on the relations between God and man, the individual and group, bernard lewis thesis, the citizen and state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy, bernard lewis thesis.

Bernard lewis thesis wrote. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent shaped Islamic block of nations from the bulge of Africa to Central Asia.

Violence also occurs between Muslims on the one hand, and orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders. Huntington enumerated six causes of intra-Islamic and extra-Islamic violence, bernard lewis thesis.

Militarism, indigestibilityor less adaptability, and proximity to non-Muslim groups, explained the Muslim conflict propensity throughout history while anti-Muslim prejudiceabsence of core state in Islam and demographic explosion in Muslim societies were held responsible for Muslim violence in the late twentieth century. With regard to Bernard lewis thesis domestic policy Huntington emphasised upon the need for tightening immigration and assimilating immigrants and minorities so as to increase civilizational coherence.

He favoured Americanisation and denounced multiculturalism, as it weakened the American creed. The criticisms of the clash of civilizations thesis can categorised under three headings — epistemological, methodological and ethical. The epistemological critique condemns the clash of civilizations thesis on grounds of its realist, orientalist and elitist outlook.

Firstly, bernard lewis thesis, it claims that the clash of civilizations thesis does not come up with a new paradigm since it neatly fits into political realism. The Machiavellian advice of Huntington to exploit the difference between Islamic and Confucian civilizations can only be considered within the realist realm.

It is the same Cold War methodology rebranded for maximum impact, a contrived clash that the US was pursuing for several decades by converting an old ally into foe post-World War Two. This repackaging for a new era was necessary because the old enemy, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. John Ikenberry, Rubenstein and Crocker assert that Huntington proclaims the slogan — long live the Cold War! Secondly, the epistemological critique argues that the clash of civilizations thesis is orientalist.

Edward W. Thirdly, the epistemological critique finds fault with the elitist orientation of the clash of civilizations thesis. Therefore, the agenda of US elites differs from that of the American masses.

Interestingly, bernard lewis thesis, the clash of civilizations rhetoric is not limited to American and European elites — many al-Qaida militants also view the current US-led conflicts in the Middle East as a proof of clash bernard lewis thesis Islam and the West.

Benjamin Barber further highlights the gap between the agenda of elites and masses in the Islamic world by stating that hyperbolic commentators like Huntington have described the current divide in the world as a clash of civilizations, but this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, who called for precisely such a war.

Firstly, it objects to the monolithic conception of civilizations which neglects the polycentric structure of both worlds. For instance, M. Ahrari asks Huntington as to how Iraqi and Turkish treatment of Kurds can demonstrate civilizational unity and coherence? Robert Marks is dissatisfied with the fact that Huntington mostly uses secondary sources in his bernard lewis thesis and shows a weak scholarship of Islam, China, and Japan.

Sato further raises the question as bernard lewis thesis why Huntington suggests setting Japan against potential Islamic Confucian alignment, when he defines Japan as an economic threat to the West? Second, it reduces the multiple dimensions of individual identity, thereby essentialising the civilizational factor bernard lewis thesis the chief aspect.

The scholars who bernard lewis thesis the essentialisation of a civilizational cause of conflict include Noam Chomsky, Fouad Ajami, Shireen Bernard lewis thesis. Hunter and James Kurth. However, he opines that the West is in clash bernard lewis thesis those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who bernard lewis thesis are.

They can be Catholics in Latin America or Communists in Afghanistan. Chomsky refers to Charles Tilly to assert that over the last millennium. Western states have been ruthlessly at war because of a central tragic fact that coercion works. Those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance, and from that compliance draw multiple advantages of money, goods, deference, and access to pleasures denied to less powerful people. Fouad Ajami complains that Huntington overestimates the cultural differences between civilizations and underestimates the influence of the West in hostile relations with the Muslim world.

Shireen T. The scholars who denounce the essentialisation of the civilizational aspect of individual identity include Amartya Sen and Achin Vanaik. Sen refuses it as it ignores the multiple dimensions of identity that overlap across the so-called civilizational boundaries, while Achin Vanaik rejects it as it overlooks the dynamic and historically contingent nature of the inter-relationship between civilization, culture, and identity.

He claims that the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorisation along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follows religious divisions, to which singular attention is paid. Sen warns that the increasing failure to acknowledge the many identities that any person has and to try to firmly place the individual into rigid boxes, essentially shaped by a pre-eminent religious identity, is an intellectual confusion that can cause dangerous divisiveness.

An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have identities other than being Islamic. What is surprising for Sen is bernard lewis thesis those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world.

According to Sen, the people of the world can be classified on the basis of many other partitions: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and so on.

Sen believes that the world is made much more incendiary by the single-dimensional categorisation of human beings, bernard lewis thesis combines haziness of vision with an increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.

He accounts for two types of civilizational studies. The first is a bernard lewis thesis and culturally essentialist reading of the enduring impact of some initial civilizational entity or root.

The second is a historically well rounded study where civilization is seen as a network of specific historical, geographical, economic, bernard lewis thesis, cultural and social complexes, and not primarily as transhistorical cultural complexes. Such civilizations follow the pattern of emergence, rise, decline, and fall.

In such an approach, it is difficult to talk — as Huntington does — of any specific civilization, let alone of many such civilizations existing through millennia. Vanaik further argues that the concept of culture bears a dual connotation — essence and process.

Here, culture is understood as an essence. By contrast, in a more materialist rendering of civilization which pays more attention to the problems of cultural transmission, the virtual isomorphism of culture is averted. Here, culture is viewed as a process. Vanaik continues that throughout modern Western intellectual history, there have been significant contestations of the cultural approach to the study of civilizations, bernard lewis thesis, an insistence that change is as basic as continuity to the cultural dimension of the civilization entity in question, and that the continuity of political structures may often better explain the continuity of the bernard lewis thesis tradition bernard lewis thesis. As opposed to the idea of religious resurrection proposed by Huntington, Vanaik demonstrates how there is an increasing desirability and possibility of a decline of religion as the space occupied by it is shrinking in modern societies.

He admits that humans must have identity for psychological wellbeing and stability, however this need for identity now exists more for personal-social, rather than for cosmic-meaning reasons. Therefore, religious identity, per seis neither inescapable, nor bernard lewis thesis. It proclaims that the clash of civilizations is a purposeful thesis that serves bernard lewis thesis interests.

Interestingly the personal bernard lewis thesis of Huntington was in tandem with the expansionary goals of US policy makers, bernard lewis thesis. The declaration of a possibility of World War III by Huntington fit well with the needs of the US arms industry. Noam Chomsky highlights that every year the White House presents to Congress a statement describing reasons for having a huge military budget, bernard lewis thesis.

For fifty years, it used the pretext of a Soviet threat. However, after the end of the Cold War, that pretext was gone. Therefore, Huntington constructed the Bernard lewis thesis threat as a pretext to justify the need for maintaining and enhancing the defence-industrial base. First, it enables the extraction of manpower and funds from the Bernard lewis thesis people for the ulterior motives of American elites. It causes the expected event to occur, and thus, verifies its own accuracy.

He feels that if the ideas of prominent thinkers have any impact on the real world, then the clash of civilizations thesis is potentially dangerous.

The validity of all these criticisms was proved to a considerable extent by several empirical studies. Bernard lewis thesis Norris and Ronald Inglehart used the World Values Survey database to compare the social and political values of Western and Muslim societies and concluded that Muslims have no less democratic ideals than the West, bernard lewis thesis.

Mildarsky similarly found that there was no negative association between Islam and democracy. This is not just amongst decision-makers and shapers, bernard lewis thesis, but also amongst the general population.

It is to this point that the discipline of psychology can provide a critical insight. Any attempt to check this trend requires a serious probing into the issue of how people become so receptive to such a provocative body of knowledge, bernard lewis thesis. In this regard, Philip G. Zimbardo notes that the process by which hostile schemas, aggressive scripts and other types of knowledge structures are activated is a cognitive one that can — with practice — become completely automatic and operate without awareness.

A more detailed account of the psychic dimension of knowledge structures can be traced in the work of Ilan Gur Zeev, bernard lewis thesis. Keith Lehrer further elaborates upon the psychological functioning of an accepted knowledge structure.

He states that the acceptance of knowledge is a sort of mental state that has a specific functional role, in thought, inference, and action. Such a person will reason and act in a certain manner assuming the truth of that body of knowledge. Psychology broadly offers three models for studying human behaviour — psychoanalytic, behaviouristic and humanistic-existential. However, this study holds the opinion that the humanistic-existential model is more appropriate as it has a methodological edge over the other models.

Prof. Bernard Lewis - Radical Islam, Israel and the West

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The Clash of Civilizations Thesis: A Critical Appraisal

In order to put across his thesis in the clearest way, Bernard Lewis sums up his disapproval of triumphalism, both in Islam and Christianity, with these words: “‘For those taking the triumphalist approach (classically summed up in the formula ‘I'm right, you're wrong, go to hell), tolerance is Bernard Lewis, FBA (31 May – 19 May ) was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political blogger.com was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton blogger.com's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West Jun 14,  · According to Lewis Muslims are enraged at Westerners and their "hatred is directed against us". He elaborates his thesis by stressing that since