The Democracy Wars

What is particularly striking about Shavit and what distinguishes him from his colleagues at MR is his worldview - more precisely his take on the Middle East and the West, and on the roots of and solutions to the raging conflict between them. This he spells out in his newly released book - based on his PhD thesis and other writings - The Wars of Democracy; The West and the Arabs from the Fall of Communism to the War in Iraq (published in Hebrew by TAU's Moshe Dayan Center).

- Your book deals with whether the clash of civilizations is inherent or whether it is politically motivated. Is there or is there not a real difference between Arabia and the West?

- There is a difference, but is it inherent? No. Do things have to be in the future as they are now? No.

What I try to show in the book is that the whole concept of "clash of civilizations" was mirrored from Western thought to Arab thought and back again, each time escalating. So, for example, when [Samuel] Huntington wrote [the 1993 article that would become a book in 1996] The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, he quoted only one Arab scholar: [Saudi Sheikh] Safar al-Hawali.

In turn, Hawali draws on the likes of Huntington when he says the West is on the brink of civilizational war against the Arabs. So, Huntington says, "Beware - we have an Islamic civilization that wants to attack us," drawing on Hawali who does the same by drawing on Huntington. And neither, I'm quite sure, read the other in the original.

This whole concept of a civilizational clash became ingrained in Arab thought after the end of the Cold War. It was something that most Western commentators either misinterpreted or completely ignored. The basic idea was that now that the Soviet Union had fallen, and the former opposing Western countries were now friends, the West would now do its utmost to attack the Muslim and Arab world - its last serious opponent. So, while for most Westerners, the liberation of Kuwait during the first Gulf war [in 1991] was a minor local event, for Arab intellectuals it signified an attempt by the West to start the reconquest of the Muslim world. They even cautioned that the whole [precursor to the] war was actually a plot to encourage [Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein to conquer Kuwait, so that the West could install some 300,000 soldiers on Saudi Arabian soil as the first step toward conquering Iraq at a future date, in order to establish Western global hegemony, benefit the little Jewish state, and to gain control over the world's oil reserves.

Hawali in some respects was Osama bin Laden's mentor. And what they both said was: "We must do to the West what the West is doing to us." This view, I believe, is the real root of al-Qaida.

To accomplish this, certain things had to be done, among them purifying the Muslim world of anything not Islamic, and using what they said was a Western technique: utilizing collaborators in the Arab world - regimes and intellectuals supporting Westernization from within. We - they said - must therefore use agents on Western soil to spread our own beliefs. This view was very widespread in Arab intellectual circles. Bin Laden's innovation was to add the word "violently."

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