A World Not Neatly Divided (November 23, 2001)

The widely held assumption that the fall of the Soviet Union had made the world safer was shattered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the wake of the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers, leaders and ordinary individuals alike cast about for an explanation of the horror they had witnessed. Many focused their attention on the fact that the plane hijackers were Muslim, positing a connection between the tenets of Islam and terrorism, and suggesting that Islam and the West were locked in a battle for cultural and ideological supremacy. Amartya Sen, an Indian academic then at Cambridge University, argued six weeks after the attacks that this rhetoric of “clashing civilizations” was ill-equipped to capture the complexity of a diverse world.

When people talk about clashing civilizations, as so many politicians and academics do now, they can sometimes miss the central issue. The inadequacy of this thesis begins well before we get to the question of whether civilizations must clash. The basic weakness of the theory lies in its program of categorizing people of the world according to a unique, allegedly commanding system of classification. This is problematic because civilizational categories are crude and inconsistent and also because there are other ways of seeing people (linked to politics, language, literature, class, occupation, or other affiliations).

The befuddling influence of a singular classification also traps those who dispute the thesis of a clash: To talk about “the Islamic world” or “the Western world” is already to adopt an impoverished vision of humanity as unalterably divided. In fact, civilizations are hard to partition in this way, given the diversities within each society as well as the linkages among different countries and cultures. For example, describing India as a “Hindu civilization” misses the fact that India has more Muslims than any other country except Indonesia and possibly Pakistan. It is futile to try to understand Indian art, literature, music, food, or politics without seeing the extensive interactions across barriers of religious communities. These include Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Jains,1 Sikhs,2 Parsees,3 Christians (who have been in India since at least the fourth century, well before England’s conversion to Christianity [sixth century C.E.]), Jews (present since the fall of Jerusalem [70 C.E.]), and even atheists and agnostics. Sanskrit has a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Speaking of India as a Hindu civilization may be comforting to the Hindu fundamentalist, but it is an odd reading of India.

A similar coarseness can be seen in the other categories invoked, like “the Islamic world.” Consider Akbar and Aurangzeb, two Muslim emperors of the Mogul4 dynasty in India. Aurangzeb tried hard to convert Hindus into Muslims and instituted various policies in that direction, of which taxing the non-Muslims was only one example. In contrast, Akbar reveled in his multiethnic court and pluralist laws, and issued official proclamations insisting that no one “should be interfered with on account of religion” and that “anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”

If a homogeneous view of Islam were to be taken, then only one of these emperors could count as a true Muslim. The Islamic fundamentalist would have no time for Akbar; Prime Minister Tony Blair, given his insistence that tolerance is a defining characteristic of Islam, would have to consider excommunicating Aurangzeb. I expect both Akbar and Aurangzeb would protest, and so would I. A similar crudity is present in the characterization of what is called “Western civilization.” Tolerance and individual freedom have certainly been present in European history. But there is no dearth of diversity here, either. When Akbar was making his pronouncements on religious tolerance in Agra [in northern India, near Nepal], in the 1590s, the Inquisitions were still going on; in 1600, Giordano Bruno5 was burned at the stake, for heresy, in Campo dei Fiori in Rome.

Dividing the world into discrete civilizations is not just crude. It propels us into the absurd belief that this partitioning is natural and necessary and must overwhelm all other ways of identifying people. That imperious view goes not only against the sentiment that “we human beings are all much the same,” but also against the more plausible understanding that we are diversely different. For example, Bangladesh’s split from Pakistan was not connected with religion, but with language and politics.

Each of us has many features in our self-conception. Our religion, important as it may be, cannot be an all-engulfing identity. Even a shared poverty can be a source of solidarity across the borders. The kind of division highlighted by, say, the so-called “antiglobalization” protesters—whose movement is, incidentally, one of the most globalized in the world—tries to unite the underdogs of the world economy and goes firmly against religious, national or “civilizational” lines of division.

The main hope of harmony lies not in any imagined uniformity, but in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions into impenetrable civilizational camps. Political leaders who think and act in terms of sectioning off humanity into various “worlds” stand to make the world more flammable—even when their intentions are very different. They also end up, in the case of civilizations defined by religion, lending authority to religious leaders seen as spokesmen for their “worlds.” In the process, other voices are muffled and other concerns silenced. The robbing of our plural identities not only reduces us; it impoverishes the world.

Amartya Sen, “A World Not Neatly Divided,” The New York Times, November 23, 2001.