By Dr. Sherif Hetata**
* Original: Arabic

Clash or Talk,
but stay away from the Dollar

That night, I stopped my car not too far from the house. I saw the lights shining over the garden fence and the entrance, as well as over the large tent erected on a vast expanse of lawn almost as if they were celebrating a wedding party or a reception for a pilgrim returning from Haj.

I had been invited for a late Ramadan supper to the house of a friend with whom I had had a long standing relation despite our differences. I had accepted, wishing to meet him and to glimpse a kind of life style brought to us from the Gulf, a world different from the one I am used to. So I crossed over the city to a quiet suburb of Heliopolis where beautiful white villas stand surrounded by their gardens, shaded by trees and palms.

I entered and was embraced by my friend. Beside him stood his eldest son, slim, fair of complexion with a pointed black beard gleaming under the shining lights. He wore glasses with a thin metal frame and a dark woollen wrap over his "djellabah", delicately embroidered around the neck, welcomed me in Arabic, with the accent of an American University graduate or of some one who had graduated from a foreign school.

Under the large tent, I found scores of young men and girls wearing Arab garb modified according to the latest fashion. Their eyes shone and their complexions were clear, different from the faces I usually saw walking the streets of Cairo. They conversed in English with, now and again, an Arabic word laboriously dragged from memory.

On one side of the tent stood a long table with a large open basket of warm local bread, and bowls of "tahina" and 'hommos' salads along with pickles, baked beans and sesame-covered 'falafel'. In another corner, a revolving vertical grill bore a large cone of ‘shawerma' meat, turning it over a flame. Around the grill stood a number of young people carrying their plates.

When I had accepted the invitation, I had not expected the scene that met my eyes. I stood surprised, looking around me, hearing the murmur of voices, the laughter and the echoes of music from a sound-system hidden behind the scattered tables, blaring in turn, oriental music, some old Arabic songs and, suddenly, the latest world hit, quick-tempoed, its moaning words reflecting that Arab and foreign cultural mixture which-has sneaked into many of our wealthy families.
For a moment I thought I had crashed a fancy-dress party by mistake, or that I had landed among a group of tourists who wished to share in some of Ramadan’s rituals, for fun. After a short while, however, I realized that I was witnessing one of the aspects of the cultural changes which had taken place in our country during the past decades along with the global changes of contemporary capitalism.

Cultural Pluralism is not incompatible with Hegemony

I left at almost 3 a.m., having sat with a few of the guests, the ones closer to my generation. I drove along, pondering over what I had seen, thinking of those young men and girls being groomed either for emigration or for the role of our country's future elite. In them I saw the embodiment of capitalism, crossing continents and countries to all corners of the planet. A nationless capitalism, with no particular land to settle on, no culture and no definite identity, no language of its own, even though it may favour English, with nothing to hold on to save its wealth, how to accumulate, concentrate and centralize it, how to increase its power and influence, how to develop its armaments, to monopolize knowledge, science, the arts and all the means of entertainment. It does not hold to any specific cultural or civilizational mold. It does not object to pluralism provided the latter remains a tool in its hands, a mask in the battle, which expresses its interests or hides them, a mask to be switched for another at any time. It is unimportant whether the civilization or the culture of Islamic, Christian, Western or Eastern, national, imported or hybrid. It does not care if the culture shows Marxist, or liberal, or enlightened, or fundamentalist trends, as long as it can be used in the struggle, or serve to mask its vested interests.

Let there be many cultures and civilizations, let them branch out, dialogue, meet, clash, mix with one another or contradict one another, let them safeguard their identity or relinquish it. What is important is for global capital to remain their driving force, their axis, able to manipulate them and make them ineffective, to transform them into gibberish, mere words, impotent battles or conflicts that weaken people and marginalize millions.
What is primordial is to maintain the network of global capitalist intact, interconnected and unbroken, assuming myriad cultural and civilizational forms, yet always mutually supportive against the poor, the youth, the women and peoples, not withstanding some contradictions among its constituants, sometimes because of this very pluralism.

There is no basic difference between the Christian capitalism of America and its "Western civilization" and between the Arab, Islamic capitalism of oil and its "eastern civilization", between "enlightenment" and "fundamentalism". In both cases people do not obtain their rights. In both cases neither men nor women nor the poor can be free from the capitalist partriarchal oppression and exploitation to which they are subjected, despite the ongoing struggle and dialogue between them, between the partisans of a religious state and the partisans of the "secular" state or the "enlightened" or so called "liberal" state. The difference is one degree or more forwards or backwards to which we can agree or disagree, as long as the struggle or dialogue has nothing to do with the structure of society, with economic and social relations, with class and sex, with poverty and with women.

There is no fundamental difference between an association, an institution or a state dependent on "money from" "Rockefeller", or from an oil king or emir, from banks that call themselves "Islamic" or International, or even from an Egyptian capitalism acting as broker for a national company. Such differences and dialogues mask the reality of the situation of the age in which we live with slogans about national culture and the clash of civilizations; they mask it behind a narrow sense of belonging and of identity which is no longer related to the basic interests of peoples in the world of today.

I do not want to miss the forest in search of one tree, nor do I favour complications, details, fragmentation of knowledge or the very precise specialization favoured by so many all of which can only serve to lead us away from the fundamental realities of the stage in which we live. Nor do I want to deny the importance of choosing between fundamentalism and enlightenment, for if I had to, I would definitely choose enlightenment. Never the less, I do not want it to be the only remaining choice because, in my opinion, neither will lead us to the roots of the issue we are facing. Neither of them will go deep enough, nor abandon the interests of the higher social strata of the 'elite' whom they represent and serve, to serve the interests of people in our country or in the area where we live.

The time has come to examine all that is being said about "clash of civilizations" or "cultural dialogue" within a framework which, without disregarding them, transcends them to something that takes us back to the essentials which the partisans of the present situation want to bury in the dark wells of memory, even though these essentials need to be developed, enriched and renovated, need to be freed from the rigidity and inertia conferred upon them by successive regimes, classes and currents which continue to be controlled by an intellectual bureaucracy.

Our Need for an Independent Intellectual Current:

That night, as I drove back, I felt that the party I had attended reflected the problem of this conference, that there existed a link between the two; that they were aspects of the same issues being raised here today. I wondered about civilization and about culture. Civilization might be the sum of economic, social, political, cultural and historical relations binding a certain group of people or peoples in a certain area of the planet. Another question then came to mind. What is the relationship between culture and civilization, what is the difference between them and why (or how) can cultural dialogue be a substitute for the clash of civilizations? What is this clash of civilizations that has suddenly become the vogue in intellectual circles? Why has the word civilization become the centre of the discussions among the so-called elite of our country?

There are certainly differences, and important ones, between the civilizational and cultural trends characterizing religious, national or racial fanaticism and between civilizations and cultures which are "enlightened" or "liberal, despite our reservations as to what such words may be hiding. Yet to represent the ongoing conflict in the world as being a conflict of civilizations that we should abandon in favour of a "cultural dialogue" is to hide the truth about the real conflicts going on in our world; it is a mask, a false justification for the existence of such conflicts.

Some, for example, describe our conflict with Israel as being a conflict of civilizations, whereas, just a few years back, we spoke of it as being a struggle against neo-colonialism and against the international as well as the local forces implanted in our area since oil was discovered.
In its composition, Israel is on amalgamation of racial, national and religious fanaticism and of modernism, know-how, science and liberalism. Can Israel be considered a truly civilized country; can it be a model to be emulated? Should we admire it as do some "intellectual" circles in our country who are now calling for a dialogue with "the forces of peace" in Israel, in the name of "a civilizational position" or of the need to learn from our opponents and from the progress they have achieved? At the same time, we have not heard a single voice nor seen a real effort being exerted towards a serious dialogue among Arab Palestinian and Egyptian intellectuals and thinkers. Should we not begin with ourselves? Should we not study, research and discuss our problems through a collective effort, thus prepare for a serious dialogue with others?

Despite the importance of the intellectual and cultural battles now raging between what we call the currents of "enlightenment" and the currents of religious, national or racial "fundamentalism", somehow, they take us back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, to the old colonialism, to the orientalists who wrote so much about Europe's, "enlightening" role and about conflicts between Christian and Islamic civilization. These labels and the intellectual battles related to them lead us away from the fundamental truths they want to ignore. The intellectual and cultural circles connected to neo-colonialism and to global capitalism try to hide these truths, just as they refer to our present age as being post-colonialist, to hide the fact that we are living under a colonialism of a new kind.

They dominate institutions, information networks, education, science, the arts as well as sources of information and knowledge. Our culture, our thoughts and our inspirations drawn from the West, not from our own endeavors, nor from our own reality and history, nor from our own minds, hearts and senses. That is why they no longer express us, nor our country nor the peoples to whom we belong. They express others rather than ourselves. There no longer exists an independent culture nor independent thought, be it leftist, centrist or rightist. What we have is an imitation, a distorted hybrid which neither benefits from our own experiences nor even from the experiences and knowledge of others.

The "intellectual elite" in our country is now divided into two currents, an Islamic current looking backwards despite some attempts to "modernize" it, and another current which keeps gazing towards the West. An independent cultural and intellectual current, which benefits from the rest of the world yet stems from the reality of our own society and expresses it, expresses our past and our striving towards progress, our struggle against the forces that pull us back, the current which expresses our present and our future, such a current has not yet been born, in spite of the continuous efforts of a few researchers, thinkers and creators, men and women, working in different fields.

About the Clash of Civilizations:

The title selected by AAPSO for the conference reflects a way of thinking prevalent in the post-modernist era.

Why has the expression or concept of a clash of civilizations become so prominent? Is the main conflict in the world today really a conflict of civilizations? Why have words like class struggle or neocolonialism disappeared? Why, in this conference, are we using the expression "dialogue between cultures" instead of struggle", and what is the significance of such a substitution? Where does this 'agenda' come from? Does it stem from a 'post-modem' capitalist thought or does it stem from the concerns of Afro-Asian peoples.

The conflict between Arabs and Europe is an old one. From the earliest ages, European bourgeoisie depicted it as a conflict between two civilizations, between Christian civilization and the Arab infidels who occupied the Holy Lands. So they launched their crusades which lasted for years and they occupied parts of our territories in cooperation with the Catholic church and with the feudal knights.

At an early stage, the slogan "clash of civilizations" was linked to the age of mercantilism and the European invasions aimed at plundering the treasures of the "Orient", with the primitive accumulation of capital and manufacture. Later on, under colonialism, the slogan changed slightly to become "Europe's civilizing role" or enlightenment" brought by Europe to backward peoples, to savages who needed to be tamed and civilized.

But the recent conflict waged by America and Europe against the Arabs and Islam is linked to the discovery of oil in the Arab countries early in the twentieth century. Other reasons such as trade, markets, investment, the world division of labour and a strategic position remain, but oil remains the crux e of the matter. Oil is the main reason for the fear of Arab unity and liberation movements. Oil is behind the determination to implant Israel with its nuclear weapons in Palestine masked by slogans, campaigns and ideologies rehashing words about Western civilization. When president Bush announced his decision to invade Iraq following Saddam Husseins' attack on Kuwait, he held a bible in his hands and spoke of defending Christian Western civilization against the Satanic forces that threatened it.
Over the two last decades, the enmity of neocolonialism for the Arabs has taken the form of enmity against Muslims. Yet it is an enmity of a strange kind. Enmity in the media, in the field of culture, sometimes in political and military conflicts, yet never relinquishing with a mutual support between the economic interests of the capitalist system and those of the ruling classes in the Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf area, if sometimes there takes place a redistribution of capital in favour of one party at the expense of another.

Anyone who has followed the struggle in the Arab region will notice a rather strange phenomenon in the media: the word Arab has almost dropped out to be replaced by the word 'Muslims'.

It is a change fraught with danger which aims at portraying the conflict in our area and in the world as being a confrontation between Christian and Islamic civilizations. This campaign is propagated by the information, media education and culture in Europe and America, day and night, in different forms, overt and covert, obvious or subtle, and is backed by powerful economic and military interests.

For it to succeed, it needs an intellectual authenticity, needs an ideology to defend it. The 'civilizational' campaign launched by international capital in the name of the West, in the name of Christianity or of post-modern thought and needs to justify itself, to develop a theory on ideology in order to convince masses of followers to support it, to work for it, to take part in the conflicts and, if need be, to die in defense of it.

So Samuel Huntington appeared on the scene. In the summer of 1993 he published on article in "International Affairs" under the title "Clash of Civilizations". It was immediately taken up by many influential circles who made a big fuss over it as if it was a resounding breakthrough.

In this article, Huntington says: "My assumption concerning the future is that the fundamental source of conflict in the world shall not be basically ideology or economics .. The primary conflicts in global politics will arise between nations, between different groups belonging to different civilizations". He then went on to divide the world into eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox Fundamentalist, Latin American, and probably, "African", he said.
Despite the popularity of Huntington's civilizational theories in many circles, they were met with strong opposition from many intellectuals and commentators, even amongst those who shared his ideas, because of the oversimplification and crude division of cultures he resorted to. However he was not alone in adopting such ideas. He was part of a wave that has been rising in recent years. In 1992, Fukoyama published. "The End of History and the Last Man". Before that, in 1990, the American Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, wrote on article in the "Atlantic Review" entitled "The Roots of Islamic Rage" in which he said:

"We are facing an age in which the methods and the movement of events have changed, rising above issues and problems and also above the governments raising them. We are faced with what is almost a clash of civilizations" .

The partisans of these old but new "civilizational" theories have multiplied. The world capitalist market is willing to buy their wares and to publicize them everywhere.
The contagion has also reached us. In Egypt, members of the elite" persistently speak of "civilization" and "enlightenment" a prevailing tune in the press, and in the terminology and talks of those who are described as intellectuals, thinkers and writers and the examples are many. Only in the last two 9 months, I read several articles written in this vein like the one in Al Ahram on 26/12/1996 entitled: "The clash of civilizations... and the dialogue of cultures", perhaps inspired by this very conference. Another article entitled "Signs and warnings" in its last paragraph read as follows: "Our talk today is but a call for this effort in favour of the integration of civilizations at this stage of formulating the new world". (Al Ahram 14/l/97)

This phenomenon has even dominated our intellectual, cultural and political life in recent years. It is the axis around which revolves the struggle of the defenders of Islamic fundamentalism and those who defend enlightenment. The thinkers who belong to political Islam were the first to raise the slogan of "clash of civilizations". In Al Ahram weekly of January 16/1997, one of our Islamic thinkers reacts to Huntington by using the latter’s logic to defend Islamic civilization, so that they actually constitute two faces of the same coin. This dialogue leads us where they want us to go, portrays the conflict in our age as being a clash of civilizations and divides peoples into clans fighting one another for religious, national or racial reasons.

It is thus that the basic conflict between the poor and the rich, between the majority of men and women and transnational capital, a conflict which continues in the economic, social, political and cultural fields, is pushed into the background. In this struggle, the poor of the world can be joined by all those who, regardless of their class origin, sense the danger of the growing hegemony of a handful of companies dominating the destiny of the world.
Is the Solution a Dialogue of Cultures?

Our agenda today asks us to choose between a "clash or conflict between civilizations" and "a dialogue of cultures". If we reject the first because of its dangers, only the second choice remains. A dialogue of cultures is therefore the solution to our problems.

Note the use of the term clash when discussing the interaction of civilizations. Also note its replacement by the term dialogue when moving on to discuss the interaction of cultures, as if the word clash is not appropriate where culture is concerned.

In the working paper, theme one is drafted in a different manner. It is entitled "The dialogue of civilizations on the eve of the 21st century", and concludes with the following question: "Is the interaction of nations a dialogue of different civilizations or is it a clash?"

All the formulations and the terms used serve the interests of big capital of our age. They are a discourse stemming from" post modern thought", from the coltural logic of capitalism in its latest stage of development. Post-modern thought has drawn from the fall and much of its popularity, from the failure of Marxist thought to keep pace with the age, from its having centered on economic factors and their effect to interpret events, from an economic determinism. Marxist thought stressed what it referred to as the "infrastructure" of society, i.e. production relations and their movement, and neglected what it referred to as the "superstructure", i.e. culture, ideology, freedom of men and women, sexual relations, the complex world of the mind, the psyche and the body. So despite what Marxist thought has given the world, the regimes based on it ended in a distorted structure that collapsed.

Post-modernism taking advantage of the economic determinism in Marxist thought reversed its emphasis to make culture and thought the area of conflict and change. Talk of production relations or division of labour became linked to communism, hence hateful or obsolete, to be rejected in search of something more modern, more dazzling. Rather than talk of economics, every thing now revolved around culture and thought, as though life and society had nothing to do with economics, social structures or production and division of labour, or classes and the status of women. Contemporary capitalism transformed the struggle into an ideological a battle of ideas and words, separate from the material framework in which they move, or which they sometimes transcend in order to produce change.
Everything was changed into discourse, into a dialogue between concepts, terminology, opinions and ideas. into rhetoric, separated from reality and action. People now consumers on the world market, also became consumers of ideas, images, movies, of pleasure, and leisure of words, of everything that prevents us from action and change.

That is how the "dialogue of cultures" emerged as a key to solving our problems, and if we refuse this sterile dialogue, then there is nothing left but a clash of civilizations, nothing left but to differ and fight, to get caught in conflicts that keep us too busy to see the real enemy, or the way to change; too busy to rebuild the world order through a long, democratic struggle and effort, to build up solidarity among peoples, to globalize at the grass root level and stand up to the hegemony of the minority dominating the world with money, weapons and nuclear power.
The problems of the world will not be solved by a cultural dialogue, despite what such a dialogue can offer in various fields. The issue, now more than ever before, is to mobilize thousands of millions of people everywhere, in villages, towns, cities, provinces and countries, to mobilize them for peaceful, democratic battles against economic, political and military policies serving the interests of the forces dominating the world. We need to build up a world force to coordinate between popular forces, step by step, year after year, to struggle at both local and world levels, to loosen the grip of the 500 transnational companies controlling 80% of world produce and 75% of world trade.

Peoples are now facing a world force with enormous power, a force which moves freely across countries and continents. A mercurial antagonist whom you may sometimes see but who more often remains unseen like the money transferred by electronic signals and waves. An antagonist who possesses unprecedented means of pressure and influence, a gigantic nuclear power, information media penetrating into every home, shaping minds, misinforming them. No single people can, today, liberate them selves alone can build a society of justice, freedom and peace on their own, because the nation has become part of a larger world system. Liberation can only be achieved by relations with what is bigger, more global.

The cultural dialogue prevalent in our country is mainly between Islamic fundamentalist trends and so-called "enlightenment", it dominates our life, has increasingly become a polarizing and dividing factor. It is a sterile dialogue or 'clash of civilizations' which has drawn us into labyrinths from which we have not yet emerged. It is a dialogue which, to a great extent, has remained isolated from our daily life and its needs. Culture lives amongst the elite, separated from the experience and the body, cut off from reality and action.

Conclusion:

During the past few years, I was in America where I taught a course entitled “Dissidence and Creativity” at Duke University in North Carolina.
During that period which lasted four years, I attended several conferences and meetings in different parts of the United States. Most of them dealt with culture, its global nature, with multiculturalism, with interaction or exchange among cultures and with cultural identity.

The vast majority of intellectuals, authors and university professors I came across, talked much about cultural variety in the world. They expressed respect for other cultures, for cultures different from theirs; they spoke of independent identity and the importance of being broad-minded in dealing with it. I tried to follow up the flood of books, research and articles on cultural anthropology, which dealt with the different cultures in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But in the dialogues in which I took part at Duke University and elsewhere, whenever I spoke of the economic and social factors linked to culture and which could help us to understand them better, whenever I mentioned the material interests behind culture which influenced them at the local and at world levels, whenever I mentioned the role of neocolonialism and the dominating world order, I was met with a wall of silence, with evasive or aggressive reactions.

In the books and studies dealing with the cultures of the South, there was little mention of the influence of economic and social factors, of the role of colonialism and neo-colonialism in weakening the cultures and marginalizing or even destroying them. This lop-sided methodology portrayed such cultures as being strange, or backward or even savage, ugly and inferior to the cultures of the authors and researchers concerned. They served to give their authors and Leaders a sense of unfounded superiority isolated from history and material conditions. Such people in the American Academia are for me "the new orientalists".

These professors, researchers and writers did not mind cultural dialogue, for it did not require them to reconsider their discourse or the situation in their societies. They were not forced to examine the fact that they represent interests which grow and flourish at the expense of the very peoples they dealt with in their research, nor did they have to reconsider their position regarding the people in the South suffering from an unjust world order. As far as they were concerned, it was merely a matter of cultural difference to be discussed objectively.

During my years in the States I was able to study the status of Afro-Americans. I discovered that society allowed them to stand out and excel in fields such as sports, music, dance and song; other fields were almost out of bounds for them. At Duke University, for example, there were almost no black professors; I may have come across three or four of them during my entire stay. The economic and social rights of blacks are not respected; they are treated as fourth class citizens, notwithstanding talk about their culture and its contribution to the life of the nation. Rarely is one of them allowed to attain a high position in the economy, in politics, in science or the arts.

This made me wonder about the agenda of this conference as expressed in its title. Why did AAPSO not think of gathering us for an agenda related to the peoples of the South, such as "The poor of the South and how to stand up to the capitalism of transnationals", or "How can we restore Afro-Asian Solidarity."
Nevertheless, this conference will permit us to discuss many issues and will draw our attention to matters of importance. It will pave the way towards further steps in the long struggle awaiting the peoples of Asia and Africa to build a bright future where all their potentials can flourish.