Meaningful Discourse

Two weeks ago Pope Benedict XVI made remarks that many Muslims found offensive. Since then much of the world has been busily shouting him down. Last week two jackasses made speeches at the United Nations that I found offensive, then were widely entertained by enthusiastic American audiences of their fellow jackasses. Also last week the US State Department denied a visa, again, to another voice I think should be heard. Tariq Ramadan is a scholar, a philosopher, and a thoughtful observer of the most important issues facing modern Islam. Whether we agree or not, and we can find much to disagree about, anyone wishing to understand the Muslim view of the world should hear what he has to say.

Ramadan’s visa was revoked two years ago, forcing him to resign a teaching position at Notre Dame. A number of prominent American universities would like to invite him back. The State Department doesn’t really say why they won’t allow him to lecture here, only that they consider him a threat to homeland security. It’s easy to see why they might. His maternal grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, he is rumored to have contributed to anti-Israeli Palestinian charities, and he is certainly no fan of American foreign policy. But that is beside the point. Ramadan is an unapologetic Muslim who analyses critically why his co-religionists think the way they do and puts it all in the context of life in the twenty first century. There is precious little of that going around. If we can justify Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking here on diplomatic grounds why on earth can’t we allow this man to speak on intellectual grounds? Do we just like being in the dark about what our fight with Muslims is all about?

Not that we are Ramadan’s intended audience, he refers to us as the Other. He speaks primarily to his fellow Muslims, especially those living in the West. His principle message is that they need to take a fresh look at themselves in light of the new millennium and of where they have chosen to live. He rejects the notion that a devout Muslim can reside in the West but remain apart from the West. He points out that a lot of Muslims are trying to just that and are being overwhelmed. They are attempting to maintain a culture from another place and frozen in time. It is not only an exercise in futility it leaves them with a stale sense of the religion they are trying so hard to protect. That’s why many of them are so angry, if it really is anger. Frustration may be a better word. They have the feeling the world around them is robbing them of their faith.

In Ramadan’s view these Muslims have confused faith with culture. In this age of globalization change is being forced on everybody’s culture. Western Muslims are doubly challenged, but it needn’t affect their faith. On the contrary, Ramadan argues that there is plenty of room to read authoritative Islamic texts in ways that are consistent with life and legal codes in modern America and Europe, and without compromising religion. By not doing so Muslims rob themselves and their children of the opportunity to participate fully in societies that have become their own. Worse, they deprive their neighbors of their own testimony as responsible citizens firmly in communion with God.

I don’t like everything Ramadan says or does. I certainly don’t like being called the Other, but I want to hear him out. I want American Muslims to hear him too.

Citizen Muslim

Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan asks a fundamental question. Is it possible for a devout Muslim living here to also be a responsible and loyal American? As a member of what Ramadan calls the Other, I find it disturbing it even needs to be asked. It isn’t trivial and Ramadan doesn’t ask it on behalf of Muslims. He asks it of Muslims because they ask it of themselves. We have people living among us who are unsure of the answer, millions of them apparently, some of them second and third generation Americans. More than a few have concluded the answer is no. Their devotion to Islam supersedes and is incompatible with any duty to their adopted country. The question cuts to the heart of what Americans have been asking since 9/11. What on earth are these people so angry about and what in heavens name does it have to do with us? In attempting to answer Ramadan directs his comments to those Muslims living in the West for whom religion is at the center of daily life, Muslims who are struggling with a very real identity crisis. Ramadan isn’t proposing an interfaith dialogue, though he thinks one is important. He is proposing an intra-faith dialogue. He wants to reopen a debate that has been closed for a thousand years.

At issue is the long held Islamic view of a world divided into two parts, dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, the abode of submission and the abode of war. This view didn’t originate in the Koran or with the Prophet. It was developed later by Islamic scholars to offer a code of conduct for Muslims living in or traveling through areas not subject to Islamic rule, places where any exercise of an alien religion was usually restricted and often prohibited. Muslims in these conditions were called not to compromise their faith, to remain apart, at all costs to avoid assimilating. Sometime around the 10th century it became pretty much accepted dogma throughout Islam. It still is. It is a view that has been noted with alarm by modern Western commentators. It is at the root of the attitude among many Muslims to reject as un-Islamic all things Western. Ramadan argues that the doctrine can and should be revised in light of changed circumstance. It is no longer an appropriate view of Europe or of North America because in the modern West the Muslim is free to practice his religion.

Ramadan draws an all-important distinction between faith and culture. Islam requires Muslims to dress modestly but exactly how that applies in different societies is open to interpretation. There is also a difference between what is required by law and what is permitted. That alcohol may be legal does not force one to drink. There may be occasions when civil law presses an individual to violate his conscience, to participate say in an unjust war, but those occasions are rare and there are ways for Muslims to deal with them short of outright rejection of the offending legal system. Islam has adapted to differing cultures before. Indonesians are very different from Pakistanis and they can both be authentically Islamic.

This all seems obvious to us, the Other. That it does not seem obvious to so many Muslims is incomprehensible. Americans are accustomed to immigrants. We expect them to become naturalized, take their citizenship seriously, participate fully in our society, make it their own, even take on leadership roles. Ramadan wants his fellow Muslims to do that too, and he believes they will. He certainly believes they can, and without compromising their religion.

Faith, Reason, and Cross-cultural Dialogue

Benedict XVI addressed a subject last week that has bothered me all my adult life. How far do I trust this brain God gave me and what do I simply accept because I have been taught that it is true? I’m not the first to ask of course and we aren’t counting angels on the heads of pins here. The answer has changed the course of history time and again. Benedict chose the topic because he thinks it is changing again. He began his lecture citing the musings of a man fighting to preserve a civilization, a man whose son would be the last Roman Emperor. It was a fitting choice. Manuel II Paleologus was recounting his discourse with a learned Persian on the differing views of God in Islam and Christianity. That such conversations could take place in the fourteenth century is remarkable. That we need them to take place in the twenty first is unquestionable.

I wish there were a better word for it. To reason with someone is to talk them out of something. To be reasonable is to compromise. Benedict points out that John the Evangelist opened his gospel using the Greek word logos to define God. In that context it is usually translated as “the Word” but it can also mean reason and is the root of the English word logic. Like Manuel, the Pope concludes that God is Reason and therefore to be unreasonable is to be ungodly. Maybe it made more sense in German. I think he means that to act on blind faith without thought is to act contrary to God’s will. God intended us to use our heads. The Pope being Catholic, he argues that we should use them with faith.

He is on defensible ground when he warns of the dangers of faith untempered by reason or conscience. History is filled with horrors committed by men who sincerely believed they were acting on God’s behalf. But Benedict is also making the opposite point. Human reason that ignores the divine and restricts truth solely to the scientifically verifiable is just as dangerous. It relegates ethics and morality to the realm of the subjective and personal. It limits us and cannot contribute to intercourse among cultures that are fundamentally religious. In fact those cultures see such unfettered reason as inimical to their faith and themselves as under attack.

Benedict acknowledges a number of deep thinkers who would disagree. For Manuel’s interlocutor God was not to be bound by any human constraint. He need not even be rational. Immanuel Kant had to set thinking aside to make room for faith. At the other extreme are those for whom nothing exists outside the realm of logic and empirical experiment. The Pope’s position is that neither view offers an adequate basis for the meaningful interchange we need. One has no room for faith, the other no room for reason. Any productive discussion that would cross cultural boundaries must provide for both.

Benedict’s faith is grounded in the New Testament, a work written in Greek by men who were conditioned in a system of thought begun by Aristotle and Plato. As a scholar he is a product of a University. In his remarks he challenged his fellow scholars to continually rediscover that great system and use it in addressing the great issues of our day. We live in a multicultural world and we have to speak with one another in terms we can all understand. The Pope thinks a place to begin is in the University. I hope somebody is listening.

A Tale of Two Water Districts

If this were a fairy tale the North Texas Municipal Water District would be the little pig who built his house of straw. But this is no fairy tale and we find ourselves at the mercy of fall and winter rains if we are to avoid severe water shortages. Dry land farmers expect this sort of thing. Droughts, floods, late freezes, hail storms and all sorts of local weather risks have been their bane for as long as there has been agriculture. But we city dwellers hire water boards, appoint planning commissions, build reservoirs and pay taxes to prepare for such contingencies. Farmers can recover from failed crops and even if there are several in succession we have all manner of emergency relief programs in place to help keep them afloat. But we just don’t expect our city water supply to fail. That’s what pipelines are for. It we are short of water in one place we import it from another.

Lake Lavon is our principal water source. There are no natural lakes in Texas so, as are most other lakes in the region, Lavon is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project. It has three primary purposes; flood control, reservoir, and recreation. Right now it looks like a scene from one of those doomsday movies with wide expanses of dry cracked lake bed where there ought to be water. If it drops another two feet we will go from mild water restrictions to serious rationing. It shouldn’t be that way.

Last weekend I drove across Lake Ray Hubbard from Rockwall into Garland. Ray Hubbard begins only a few hundred yards downstream from the dam at Lavon. That’s where Dallas gets most of its water. It’s down about four feet, noticeable if you look but you have to look. It’s what you would expect in drought conditions. There is talk of water conservation in Dallas but not the alarm the rest of us are feeling. The difference is that Dallas has adequate supplies in reserve for any foreseeable conditions. We don’t.

The operative word is “foreseeable.” It’s true the drought is severe, probably the most serious in fifty years or more judging by Weather Service records. The Lavon watershed got as little as half its normal rainfall last year and we are down about a quarter so far this year, but it isn’t the stuff of the 1930s Oklahoma Dust Bowl. The big issue is we have not provided for the population growth we have experienced since Lavon was last enlarged in 1975. Anybody who has lived here since then can attest the growth has been phenomenal, steady, and predictable. There has been a constant frenzy of construction. We have built roads, schools, churches, shopping centers, power lines and commuter rail. What we have not done is obtain adequate water supplies to support it all.

Droughts happen. Responsible government officials all the way from the municipal level to the national level plan for them. We are seeing a great deal in the news about the drought and the need for conservation measures. Maybe for now that’s all we can do, but we also need reliable water supplies. I’d like to know how we are going to get them. How did we get to this sorry pass? What are we doing to address it for the future? Why hasn’t it been done already? Shouldn’t somebody be held responsible? Who runs NTMWD? When can we expect new supplies? Where are they coming from? Dallas doesn’t have this problem. Why is the wolf only at our door?

Breaking Eggs and Making Omelets

Maybe Pope Benedict XVI is smarter than we think. Maybe he is sending Muslims a not so subtle message. Maybe he’s saying he isn’t going to let them get away with proclaiming Islam a religion of peace against a backdrop of carnage. Maybe he wants them to take a look at themselves as the spectacle unfolds. They demand an apology for characterizing their religion as one of violence while they fire bomb churches to make the point. Maybe by quoting a 14th century emperor whose domain was about to be consumed in the fire of Islamic conquest, he was pointing out that this isn’t something new. It has been going on from the beginning of Islam and it’s time for it to stop. Maybe he’s saying he wants a dialog but it will have to be a serious one.

Benedict is a scholar. As a theologian he is a heavyweight even by Papal standards. He thinks and speaks at a level I frankly have trouble following. I suspect that’s true of most people but he made his recent controversial remarks to an audience of fellow scholars at a time when he is planning a trip to Turkey, his first to a predominantly Islamic country. It is reasonable to think his choice of time and place was no coincidence. He would have expected that if he were to comment on Islam anything he had to say would be followed with interest by Muslims. He would also have known that xenophobes among them would react as they have, with intemperate outrage and violence. But nothing he could possibly say would mollify that sort of mindlessness. The question becomes, if the Pope wants a dialog, with whom? To whom were his remarks directed? To Islamic scholars?

Well, why not? It’s easy for us to get caught up in the constant barrage of vituperative from fire breathing Muslim clerics and to think they are all like that. They aren’t. There are thinkers among them too. They’ve just been on the sidelines for a while. Too many of them have been so busy pretending there is no problem with Islam they have forgotten their own responsibility. If their religion is to be brought into the twenty first century it is they who will lead it. Benedict can preach as long as he likes but the average Muslim isn’t listening. They will listen to their own however, and if the Pope can appeal to an Islamic intellectual elite he could accomplish more than we might imagine. The offending lecture was a call to renounce violence and reconcile reason, theology, science, and faith. Islamic scholars are no different from their western peers in priding themselves on rational thinking. One view of the speech is as an attempt to open a discussion with all the pertinent issues on the table. So long as Islamic violence is a forbidden topic there isn’t much to talk about.

When news of the quote from Manuel II Paleollogus became public I assumed the trip to Turkey was off. As Muslims call on the Pope to apologize, lots of western commentators have been eager to apologize for him. All Benedict has said is he regrets the reaction to his remarks, not that he is sorry he made them. Now I am surprised to see reports of a letter from the Turkish foreign minister asking him not to cancel the visit. He views it as an important opportunity for dialog between cultures. Is there hope for this after all? I’m going to go back and read that transcript again.

Muslim Baiting

What in heaven’s name just happened? Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in Germany this week quoting an obscure 14th century Roman Emperor’s derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. There is no surer way to incite anti-Christian passions among Muslims. The Pope has to know that. The Vatican quickly issued a clarifying statement maintaining no offence was intended but it’s hard to believe it wasn’t deliberate. Muslims cannot abide criticism of the Prophet. I know it, the Vatican knows it, Christians and Jews have known it from the earliest days of Islam. To cross that boundary is to pick a fight. It works every time.

Absent the offending passages, and they are brief, the lecture stands as an erudite analysis presented by a scholar to a group of scholars concerning the inherent tension between and among human logic, the scientific method, faith, and theology; more the stuff of a debate on Darwinism that on the politics of radical Islam. Benedict was speaking to the faculty at the University of Regensburg where he once taught. He reflected on the proper role of the theology department in a modern university. He titled his lecture “Three Stages in the Process of De-Hellenization,” a reference to modern attempts to cleanse biblical scholarship of Greek metaphysics. He discussed Islamic and Christian philosophers’ attempts to reconcile an omnipotent God with the constraints of human concepts of reason. It’s all pretty esoteric except for the reference to Muhammad.

In choosing the particular emperor to quote the Pope put the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople in an awkward spot. Presumably that was also deliberate. I’ll bet I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know who would recognize the name Manuel II Paleollogus, but Turks and Orthodox Christians recognize it. His capital is now Istanbul. It was the last remnant of an ancient empire that would disappear altogether only a few years later. The Patriarch is still there because of the city’s history as seat of the Orthodox Church. The Pope had been set to visit him in November in an ecumenical outreach that would now appear doomed. It is unlikely he will still be welcome in a predominantly Muslim city. More is the pity. It is one of the few places where Christians and Jews have stood arm in arm with Muslims in opposition to terrorism.

It’s hard to see why the Pope would do this. We’ve only just gotten past the brouhaha over Danish political cartoons depicting Muhammad in unflattering light. This lecture was ostensibly to renounce violence in the name of religion and to promote dialog based on reason, but no dialog will take place with Muslims in any forum where Muhammad’s name is to be disrespected. I’d like to take the Vatican at its word and view the remarks in an inoffensive context. But having studied the text of the Pope’s prepared address I can’t find an inoffensive context. I have to go with the Muslims on this. It was a purposeful provocation. Maybe it has something to do with Benedict’s opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union. He has been voicing objections since he was Cardinal Ratzinger.

Whatever his motives the Pope has pointed up one more time just how far we have to go in learning how to get along with Muslims, and they with us. Westerners aren’t about to sit quietly by when Muslims engage in barbaric behavior towards us, no matter how sensitive they are. They are going to have to accept criticism, but I wasn’t expecting to hear this from a modern Pope.

One Man’s Prescience

I confess to enjoying this week’s dustup over ABC’s docudrama “The Path to 9/11.” Practically every newspaper in the country weighed in on it, mostly to complain about the portrayal of Clinton administration officials as soft on terror. Some of them called on ABC to pull the plug all together. The producers did bow to pressure to delete some scenes but nobody was satisfied. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch. These are the people who thought “Fahrenheit 911” was good clean fun.

Of course they were soft on terror. In fact I can think of only one senior official from either party who took the rising threat seriously before 9/11. That was George Shultz. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State was giving speeches in 1984 warning of the danger. That was nine years before the first attack on the World Trade Center, and seventeen years before the second. At the time Shultz was widely dismissed as an alarmist by many of the same folks complaining the loudest now. He’s still at it, still calling a spade a spade, and still being ignored.

He shouldn’t be. If anyone has earned the right to a respectful ear he has. He is no fire breathing radical who thinks we should turn ourselves into a police state or who thinks the solution to every problem is a military one. On the contrary, he believes the fight can be won without unduly compromising civil rights or abandoning diplomacy. He does advocate a stance based on moral clarity and dismisses out of hand the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Terrorism has no place in civilized society. It cannot be condoned as a legitimate means to redress even the most egregious grievances. We all know what a terrorist is. We should call them that and stamp them out whether they operate in Palestine, Kashmir, Singapore, or Madrid. We should insist that our friends do that as well and know that those who refuse are not our friends. They are apologists for the unspeakable. This is not something on which reasonable men and women can afford to disagree.

Shultz points to the Great Seal of our republic for the appropriate metaphor. “The eagle faces the olive branches to show that the United States always seeks peace but holds onto the arrows to show that we in the United States understand that, if we are to be effective in seeking peace, we must be strong.” Shultz believes peace is possible even in those parts of the world where violence is at its worst, but first the process must be wrenched from the hands of terrorists. No progress can be made until you have two parties who can say yes. As long as terrorists control the agenda they can always set off a bomb somewhere and disrupt any positive change.

As we argue today about who was or was not soft on terrorism in the 1990s, it’s worth remembering Shultz’s words in 1984. “We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.” But we did become the Hamlet of nations and in our current bickering we are in danger of reverting to form. For whatever reasons, whoever was at fault, we did not respond effectively in the two decades leading up to 9/11. For a time we did respond forcefully after 9/11. There are those among us who would now undo that. If they are allowed to succeed there will be other catastrophes. We really ought to be listening to George Shultz.

Autism and Older Dads

Sigh. Here we go again. I don’t know what causes autism. Nobody does. It would appear it’s the vaccines but nobody wants it to be vaccines so we ignore that and look for other answers. Even the people we trust the most do it. Scientists do it. Pediatricians do it. Nobody trusts bureaucrats but they do it too. They all tell us it can’t possibly be vaccines. It has to be something else. We don’t even look at them. If that’s the answer we don’t want to know.

Now there’s a new study out suggesting autism may be correlated with the age of the father, anything to distract us. Never mind the study only considered people born in Israel in the 1980s, or that there were very few cases of autism in the sample, only thirteen born to fathers over 40. If there has been an increase in the incidence of autism in Israel the study didn’t address it. If someone would explain to me how Israeli experience from the 1980s bears on a phenomenal increase in American autism beginning in the 1990s I would be very much appreciative. Maybe they could also explain why autism seems to affect Israeli girls as often as boys. In this country boys are at a 4:1 disadvantage.

The study is welcome enough. Anything new on the subject helps us to understand it better. I just don’t want it to divert attention from the obvious and a number of things are indeed obvious. Older dads aren’t new, no pun intended. If something bad were happening to their children somebody would have noticed a few thousand years ago. We would have old wife’s tales to caution us. That we don’t helps to explain why autism hasn’t been around any longer than it has. If nothing else, natural selection would have weeded it out by now.

Anybody who wants to explain what causes autism has to address that basic fact. It’s new. We didn’t just miss it for all those years. It wasn’t there. Ask anybody who’s been a teacher. Schools are seeing something extraordinary. They had autistic children twenty five years ago and didn’t know what to do with them but there were only a few cases. Today’s numbers are astounding. To suggest it’s caused by delayed parenthood is unconscionable. Something has changed and that isn’t it.

Who are these people? Why do they refuse to ask serious questions? Why do we trust them? Why do we call them scientists? Is it their doctoral degrees? Does that give them a pass? Does it give us a pass? Do we cede to them our responsibility to make rational judgments? Do we just set our brains to one side? We are talking about our children here. We can’t transfer that responsibility to anyone.

The new study’s conclusions may be right, as far as they go. Something may be happening to us as we age that poses a danger. Prolonged exposure to some new environmental factor could be doing tragic damage. The question is what? What happened in the 1990s that caused this? If not vaccines then what? Sonograms? Cell phones? Processed foods? The internet? Oprah? What?

Could we please start by conducting a real investigation into the childhood immunization program with its attendant risks and benefits? Don’t tell me it’s been done. I’ve looked. It hasn’t been done. Until it has don’t give me these bizarre theories and pass them off as science. And don’t ask me to trust the people in charge. My grandson has autism. I’m not in a trusting mood.

Last Throes

Westerners easily refer to Christianity and what was once called Christendom without confusing the two. It is often pointed out that in Islam no such distinction exists but of course it does exist. The lack of words to differentiate them just contributes to the difficulty. It makes it harder to adapt and Islam must adapt. It is my thesis that a civilization cannot survive constantly at war with stronger neighbors, particularly when the neighbors are as numerous and powerful as those faced by modern Muslims. In its Arabic form Islam quickly rose to grandeur. It was once the world’s most powerful empire, and its most enlightened, but has been in decline for over a thousand years. It continued to thrive in Andalusia for several centuries but that ended permanently in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of Spain. It had already been resuscitated by Turks to the East and enjoyed a long renascence there. That renascence peaked with the second siege of Vienna and belligerent Islam resumed its descent into depravity where it finds itself today. Islam will survive as a religion. It will not survive as a civilization intent on world conquest. That Islam is in its final days.

In its early years Islam expanded to fill voids left by exhausted Byzantine and Persian Empires, a Europe mired in the Dark Ages, and a China turned inward on itself. Muslims enjoyed organization, unity, and a sense of purpose missing from everyone else in the world. That hasn’t been true for a long, long time. The scientific revolution that emerged in 16th century Europe has bypassed Islam right down to this day. So has the industrial age that it brought with it. The rights of man that took hold in eighteenth century America have enabled an explosion of knowledge in a thousand fields and spread themselves around much of the globe. Islam has ignored it all; telling itself its culture is superior, that what the West calls progress is thinly disguised moral corruption and weakness. Liberal democracy and its attendant capitalism continue to expand through most of the world. Empire, fascism, and communism have all come and gone as alternative ideologies. Millions of Muslims watch from the sidelines and seethe.

Radical Islam’s heroes call for a return to an earlier age, an age that is gone forever. Rather than adapt they would go back in time. Worse, they call for jihad in its most virulent form. They attack others with a brutality that cannot go unchallenged and they have no defense against counter attack. They cannot muster either military or economic power to compete with those who would leave them alone if they could. Where peace is on offer they reject it. They insist on sowing the seeds of their own destruction, expecting God to defend them and lead them to victory in the face of impossible odds. They might as well ask their followers to step in front of a speeding train. No where is this quite so evident as in the Middle East where Islam began.

A few Muslims have recognized what is happening and tried to steer their people into modernity. Atatürk took a ruthless approach in Turkey. Jordan’s Hashemite Kings have taken a longer term route to reform. Whether either attempt will be ultimately successful remains to be seen. If they are, the Islam that survives will be as different from the Islam of the past as the West is from the Christendom of the Crusades. As we have known it through the ages we are witnessing Islam on its death bed.

Islam Stands Alone

Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations” quickly became a modern classic. His central observation was that the post Cold War world was settling out along cultural fault lines based primarily on religion. He predicted these faults would produce conflicts and define a new historic era. Events in the intervening years suggest he may have overstated the case. The civilizations he considered have all more or less put aside their differences in favor of a new world order based on trade; all save one that is, Islam. Even there we have to distinguish between Arabic civilization, which begat the faith, and Islam among non-Arabs.

Huntington enumerated seven or eight current civilizations; Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. He modified the list somewhat later on but for purposes of this discussion I will stay with the original. He wrote at a time when the breakup of the Soviet Union was fresh. That of Yugoslavia was still in progress. In that context his conclusions appeared prescient, but in retrospect a number of the conflicts seem to have been no more than the pains of adjusting to a new reality. Stalin and Tito were gone. In their absence there were old scores to settle, and quite a lot of jockeying to fill the resulting power vacuums. Some of it spilled over into war. A new term entered the language, ethnic cleansing. The conflicts were tragic enough. Even Europe experienced destruction and an exodus of refugees that hadn’t been seen there since WWII. In Yugoslavia it looked like Huntington was right. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniacs were at each others’ throats. All three were busy slaughtering or expelling minority populations while expanding their borders to include as many of their ethnic kin as possible. Serbs turned on Albanian Muslims in Kosovo to avenge a centuries old massacre perpetrated by an Ottoman Sultan. Europeans were reminded that WWI began there, and over the same conflicts.

The dismembered Yugoslavia is quiet now. NATO intervened and still patrols. Slobodan Milosevic is dead and though a few war criminals are still free they are fugitives and international pariahs. None of them remain in power. No one expects a repeat of the 1990s. Most of the people there are ready to put the past behind them. They look around at their former communist brethren in Hungary and Poland and envy their progress. They haven’t forgotten, but are ready to move on.

As for the others on Huntington’s list, except for a separatist movement or two nobody seems to be permanently at loggerheads with anybody but Islam. Japan hasn’t been any where near a war since 1945. North Korean saber rattling could change that but you can’t fairly call that a civilizational conflict. South Korea is more threatened than Japan and in any case the issues are left over from an earlier ideological war, not a new cultural one. Despite what some consider a menacing military buildup, China isn’t close to open hostilities outside her borders; her issues with Taiwan are intramural. China’s desire to become a global economic power demand integration with the world trade community and she has joined the WTO. That will constrain her militarist faction for the foreseeable future. There was a major incident with an American reconnaissance plane in early 2001 but that isn’t likely to be repeated. There is too much commerce at stake. The same is true with India. Despite several border wars with China in the latter half of the twentieth century, their rivalry today is economic, not military.

What about Latin America? The United States has been at odds with Fidel Castro since 1958 but for ideological reasons, not cultural, certainly not religious. The Cuban Missal Crisis was between the US and the USSR. Cuba was a not-so-innocent bystander. We will never reconcile with Cuba while Castro is in power because so many Cuban exiles have become influential American citizens in a state that can swing presidential elections. It’s hardly a civilizational conflict. Neither is our disagreement with Hugo Chavez. His country has been a major oil supplier and an ally for much of the past half century. There too our conflicts are commercial. Our invasion of Panama had to do with the drug trade and a century of interventions in Nicaragua also had to do with commercial interests. What problems we have with Mexico have mostly to do with illegal immigration. The eventual solution will require economic progress in Mexico. There will be no armed conflict. The dominant topic in the Americas for the next decade will be NAFTA, CAFTA, and the other trade agreements in varying stages of consideration.

That leaves Islam. None of the others are involved in anything like Huntington’s clash with each other, only with Islam. Even Islam breaks down into components, some more confrontational than others. We don’t see much about this but there are at least three distinct Islamic cultures. There are Turks, Malays, and Arabs. Somewhere in there you have to fit Indians, Pakistanis, Kurds, Iranians, non-Arabic Africans, and other Asians and Pacific Islanders. But Indian Muslims are still Indians. They differ from Hindus in diet and religion but to an outsider the differences are superficial. Many Pakistanis are culturally akin to Indians in the same way, though others are from the wild tribes of the Hindu Kush. None of them are Arab, though in recent years they have been heavily influenced by Wahabi financed madrasas. Kurds are a distinct people but their consuming interest is separatism and there aren’t enough of them to be called a civilization. All of these groups have their problems with the neighbors of course but it seems to me that the conflict of historic proportions predicted by Huntington comes from the vision of global domination associated with Arabs and Iranians. Others are infected by it but to not nearly the same degree. Only in the Middle East and parts of North Africa do Islamic extremists have the power to influence the decisions of war and peace that might make them a serious risk for even regional conflagration, let alone global.

Everywhere else Islamic communities are being forced to adapt and accommodate their neighbors. They are finding that they must control their more radical elements in order to survive and prosper, and they are doing just that. Indonesia’s neighbors don’t feel any need to intervene there to track down terrorists. Authorities may ask for and get international intelligence cooperation but they are more than capable of policing their own populace. They aren’t about to wink at groups of adventurers that might drag Indonesia into a foreign war. Even Pakistan has begun to think twice about allowing her territory to be used for guerrilla operations in Indian controlled Kashmir. The prospect of nuclear holocaust has a sobering effect even among war mongers and more than a few Pakistanis have noticed India’s emerging prosperity. There is a reason why American Diplomats are welcome in Islamabad. Huntington was wrong. Everywhere the forces of the modern age are having their effect. Civilizations, cultures, and religions are learning to live with one another. The world is slowly becoming a more peaceful place.