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The Clash of Ignorance


"The Clash of Ignorance" is an essay by Edward Said that first appeared in the October 22, 2001 edition of The Nation, published shortly after the September 11 attacks.

"The Clash of Ignorance" was presented as a rebuttal to Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of “The Clash of Civilizations”, which argues that after the Cold War, the dominant source of conflict for mankind would be cultural. Huntington’s theory principally revolves around the civilizations of “the West” and “Islam”: the author famously states that “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

“The Clash of Ignorance” provides a critical response to Huntington’s thesis, in which Said asserts that the uses of labels such as “the West” and “Islam” are dangerous and serve to confuse about a disorderly reality. Said argues that through “The Clash of Civilizations?” Huntington recklessly affirms the personification of enormous and complex entities such as “the West” and “Islam.” “The Clash of Ignorance” is also critical of Huntington’s thesis on the grounds that complicated matters like identity and culture are presented in a “cartoonlike fashion,” with the West always appearing more virtuous compared to the Islam adversary.

In “The Clash of Ignorance,” Said is critical of Huntington for presenting the concepts of civilizations and identities as closed, shut-down, and sealed off entities that are unchanging and homogeneous in the global community. Said argues that these concepts have in fact been open to “exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.” According to Said:

Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Said argues that the vocabulary employed by major American and European newspapers served to intensify passionate associations with “the West” and further established the notion of Us vs. Them, or the West versus Islam. "The Clash of Ignorance" states that the problem with these labels are that they “mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality..."


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