A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations

"This book seeks to dispel the myth that we have ever been embroiled in some 'clash of civilisations'. Adib-Moghaddam traverses various intellectual disciplines in order to find a pathway through the conceptual maze that has conditioned us to think in 'tribal' categories. Accompanying the reader on this journey from the wars between ancient Persia and Greece, the Crusades, Colonialism and the Enlightenment to the contemporary 'wars on terror' are thinkers from 'East' and 'West': Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, and Weber. In asking where ideas such as the 'clash of civilisations' come from, and by whom they are perpetuated, Adib-Moghaddam engages with both western and Islamic representations of the 'other'. He demonstrates first the discontinuities between 'Islamism' and the canon of classical Islamic philosophy, distinguishing between 'Avicennian' and 'Qutbian' debates, and second how the violence inscribed in ideas of the 'West', especially from the Enlightenment, casts a shadow on politics to this day. Expanding the geography of critical theory to include the canons of Islamic philosophy and poetry, 'A Metaphistory of the Clash of Civilisations' refuses to divorce Muslims from Europeans, Americans from Arabs, the Orient from the Occident. As such this book presents a frontal attack on our current cultural reality and Islamist-western agitation against each other"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket.