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"This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other."
Tony Blair "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone–its ideologies and inventions— which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
Susan Sontag "...there is a dangerous gulf of understanding between Europe’s elite, which is predominantly white and Christian, and its largely non-white Muslim communities."
Observer editorial Protests over the cartoons of Mohammed earlier this year were dubbed a ‘global crisis’. This was but one example of a growing sense of ‘them and us’, popularly presented as a clash between Western values and Islam. Everything from suicide bombers in Iraq to what young British Asian women choose to wear to school is recast as a major challenge to Western values. But is this an over-simplistic assessment? Has Islamism really become the major ideological challenge to the West in the early 21st century? Is the problem rooted in the Middle East, or are its roots closer to home? While many Islamists reject the Enlightenment ideal of free speech, so too do many Western liberals. Censorship - both formal and more insidious – is increasingly justified, from new laws against incitement to sensitivity speech codes designed to avoid offence. It is not only Islamists who denounce the West for its decadence and materialism - these accusations are made by everyone from Christian conservatives to the ethical consumer lobby. Anti-Western sentiment is hardly the preserve of ‘foreign’ critics; it is also a prominent feature of ‘Western’ intellectual discourse. Denunciations of Eurocentricism, rationality, science, the Western canon of arts and the rule of law are as likely to be found in the curricula of European and American universities as in the Middle Eastern madrassas. The prevalence of multiculturalism and ethical relativism seems to express a loss of faith in universal values. Is the ‘clash of civilisations’ really a new form of the Culture Wars, a crisis within Western civilisation itself? Is Tony Blair’s approach to ‘the battle between progress and reaction’ the right one, or have Western govenments and elites lost the plot? Chair: Dolan Cummings, Research and Editorial Director, Institute of Ideas
Professor Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent, author of The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right
 Professor Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle
and, with Chris Smith, The Suicide of the WestDavid Aaronovitch, Columnist, The Times
Sajjad Khan, Editor, New Civilisation |