Synopsis (Revised Edition)
 The conflict between the fundamentalist Islam and the West is a permanent feature of our life in the last half century. The flashpoints of this conflict fill the newspapers and are shown daily on TV screens. The murders in Algeria, terrorism in Egypt, the conflict in Israel, the Gulf War, the hostage crisis in Iran, the recurring Indo-Pakistani conflict, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor, etc. The list is endless. Add to these the exploding airliners, the World Trade towers in New York, bombs in the Paris Metro,
blown up embassies around the world and burnt discotheques in Berlin. Round the picture off with the possibility that the next bout of wars or terrorism will be with weapons of mass destruction, and one can see the importance of this conflict in the minds of policymakers everywhere. If it is not so, then it ought to be.
This book analyses the conflict and reaches a number of surprising results:
| 1. |
The conflict certainly exists without an end in sight. It seems that
it is not entirely rational. The East (Islam) sees in the West a hedonistic
entity, whose every action is designed to hurt the East. In addition, it
feels a terrible deprivation, a loss of birthright which was taken from it
by some ruse. It should be remembered that the loss of Eden, the Book
of Job and the story of Jacob and Esau are eastern tales. The West on
the other hand sees in the East an enemy which in historical times
endangered its very existence at least six times. It has no doubt that it will
be attempted again and again, with a real possibility that next time it will be
done with unconventional weapons. The interests of the West in the
oil reserves of the Middle East only complicate the matter. They do not
change the attitudes. |
| 2. |
The conflict has nothing to do with Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise. The
same conflict existed before Islam and before Christianity. Four out of the
six attacks were before the emergence of both Christianity and Islam. |
| 3. |
It is certainly a civilizational conflict, as defined by Prof. Huntington, except
the definition of civilization is by geographical area, not by religion. |
| 4. |
The expression "The desert against the forest" would fit this conflict much
better than the expression "Fundamentalist Islam against the West". |
| 5. |
Special attention was given to the question of religion. It was found that
neither in the East , nor in the West, did religions change anything. On
the contrary, religions adapted themselves to geographic areas.
Going by geographic areas there are today 7 groups of Christian
churches, and two groups of Islam. |
The book is organized into three major parts:
Introduction
One chapter explains the historical method used, which is historical determinism. Accordingly the basic thesis of the book is:
Human history is shaped by two factors alone: environment and human nature. Human nature is a biological constant, itself under influence of environment, both in outside appearances and behavioral traits. The same basic thesis claims that if there were people who seemingly led historical processes, those people were really identifying labels rather than independent factors.
The second chapter places the conflict in current historical context. It uses mainly the analyses of Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington and Paul Kennedy.
Pitfalls, quagmires and quicksand
The second part of the book analyses the historical elements, which shaped the conflict, from the beginning of agriculture to the creation of urban civilization, e.g. from the Neolithic Revolution to the Urban Revolution. This part demonstrates that:
| a. |
Agriculture was forced upon humanity because of environmental changes.
It caused misery, malnutrition and increased population. |
| b. |
Because of environmental conditions, the Neolithic Revolution, with all
that it implies moved from south to north according to need. It is
estimated that there were about 5000 years between the beginning of
agriculture in the Middle East and that of northern Europe. |
| c. |
Increased demographic pressure created the Urban Civilization, which
was really fueled by coercion of the primary producers to extract the
surplus to feed the unproductive urban population. |
| d. |
There was a time lag of about 5000 years in the appearances ot
agriculture in the Middle East and in Europe. The time lag in the
appearance of urban civilizations was rather less. Because of the uneven
development periods there were considerable differences between the
attitudes of the West and the East in all important points: in relations
between men and men, between men and authority, and finally between
men and God. |
| e. |
The religions of the area of the conflict originated in the period since the
Neolithic Revolution. There are three types of religions:
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Religion of the Mother |
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agriculture |
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the female trinity |
| - |
Religion of the Father |
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husbandry |
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the male trinity |
| - |
Religions of the desert |
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Monotheism |
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The conflict
This chapter has two major parts:
| 1. |
The first part examines the behavioral characteristics on both sides of
the conflict and associates them with the constraints of the Neolithic
and Urban Revolutions, with environmental conditions and with social
attitudes as developed due to the constraints.
The differences which were caused by the different pace and ways of
development of urban civilization in the East and the West, the feeling
of moral superiority on the part of the East, the feeling of material
superiority in the West, and the extreme poverty in the East against the
affluence in the West, brought an unbridgeable antagonism
between the two. The geopolitical differences, which would have
occurred in any case, only added fuel to the fire.
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| 2. |
This book claims that there is a single armed conflict, which started before
historic times, continued with colonization on the Mediterranean littoral by
both sides, and is still going on. The war was overt whenever the East
seemed to have an upper hand, as with the Carthaginian expansion,
the attack of Xerxes on Greece, the wars of Mithridates and of
Sassanid Persia, the expansion of the Islam in the 7th Century AD, the
repulsion of the Crusades and the conquest of the Balkans by the
Ottoman Empire. Whenever the Western side of the conflict held the
upper hand, the war became covert, with piratical acts on the sea,
guerilla warfare and terrorism on land. It is the assumption of the
book , that the participants themselves saw their parts in the violent
conflict as a continuation of a fight which started long before their time.
Thus, the Persians saw their invasion of Greece as revenge against the
destruction of Troy, and Alexander the Great saw his attack as
revenge against the invasion of the Persians. Similarly, the East sees
today in the matter of the head cover of Muslim girls in France, that of the
Turkish workers in Germany, and in the war in Bosnia and Kosovo, part of
a general war against the West, just as the actions of the rightwing
parties in the West and the general anti-immigration attitudes are part of
the war against the menacing East.
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