Ingrid Mattson – The clash of civilizations CDI 2008
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
So who here has heard of the Clash
of Civilizations?
Who's in the Clash of Civilizations?
Who's clashing?
According to Samuel Huntington, who wrote an article
in Foreign Affairs,
it is Islam and the West that are
clashing.
And you have heard many people
over the past few years
talk about the need to reorient
the whole vision of the world to deal
with this reality.
And foreign policy, domestic policy, and security policy
has been changed because of this.
In the United States, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of
dollars
have gone
into new businesses
designed
to analyse
and provide security services
to save us from this clash.
By the way, if Islam and the West
are civilizations
in clash,
it seems a little odd. The West
is a geopolitical
category
and Islam is a religious category.
So how do they clash?
Well, these are a few of the civilizations
that Huntington identified as part of the world.
Do you know where Mexico is, in the
civilizations?
He wasn't quite sure.
He said that,
'Certainly Canada, the United States, Europe,
they are part of the West,
and also Australia and New Zealand.
Latin America
would have to make a decision
about where it wants to fit in, in
this new world order.
When you look at a map of the
globe,
this category
becomes even more strange
when you see
how religions,
the majority of religions,
fall out across the world. Yes. Here, green
is
Islam.
Red is Christianity.
Blue is a blue is Catholic Christianity.
So you have a mixture,
but you have these big blocks of color.
Where is Judaism in North America? I don't
know.
What about Judaism in Israel? Is it the
same as it is in the United States
or not?
So what does it mean? Well, some would
say, 'Okay. The idea of
a Western civilization in clash with an Islamic
civilization
is a little bit odd because we're dealing
with apples and oranges.
But there are many who took that idea
and said, 'Certainly,
the two major religions of the world, Christianity
and Islam,
are in clash.
And what I want you to think about
today
is how you think
about religious categories,
how they look in your mind.
Does the world
of religion,
and if we take the 2 religions
that constitute together
over 55%
of the world's population,
are they into blocks like this,
with two
clear distinct borders,
different
colors,
different entities
that exist in blocks that are in clash.
In fact, if we
look back
before nation states were established
and before this idea of a new world
order came,
most people thought about their religious
identity
in this way. You could substitute
where it says Islam for Christianity.
They lived in a world of meaning and
symbol
that surrounded them.
And far off on the horizon, there were
some other worlds that they knew about.
If they were
living in
12th century,
Northern Africa
or the Middle East,
they would know that there were many horizons
out there. They lived in a multi religious
society, so they knew about them. They were
part of their horizon.
If they lived
in medieval Europe,
10th century,
or even in some later times, depending on
their level of education, this horizon might push
so far that they didn't even realise
there were others out there.
But it wasn't about
equal blocks
of civilizations
existing in the world. It was the world
you lived in with some distant horizons.
But there were people within those civilisations
who had points of contact.
And often it was the points of contact
that they were most productive
for humanity
that yielded
new ideas,
new thoughts, new technologies,
new forms of art and communication
that lasted
and that changed the world and filtered out
into different civilizations.
This is
a picture of
medieval Venice,
a very productive place where the merchants
and thinkers and traders of the East
met with the merchants and traders and thinkers
of the West. And you see them here
portrayed
in their various
gowns and garbs and distinctive dress. I wonder,
when I was looking at this picture,
I was wondering if the Muslims
and the Christians, and there's probably some Jews
in this trading environment in Venice,
I wonder if
all of them looked at all of us
today,
if they would feel that
they were more like each other
or they were more like us. So would
the Christians in this picture feel that they
could identify more with the Christians in this
audience
than with the Muslims and Jews in that
picture?
What about the Muslims in that picture? Would
they identify more with those
Christians and Jews in that picture than they
would identify with me? Would they recognize me
as a Muslim? Would those
Christians recognize you as typically Christian?
And if not, what does it say about
our conception of these civilizations
that have passed through time?
That we are part of a continuing
line
of a religious tradition
that we belong to and someone belongs to
something else.
Well,
if we had some mixing up, what is
this space where we mix together? What do
we call it?
Here's a medieval
portrait
of a Moorish Muslim, an Andalusian
Muslim,
and an Andalusian Christian
jamming.
Right? So they're both playing
their medieval
guitars.
So what is that? Is this some kind
of secular space
that they shared, and we say,
this is where the positive
interactions are. This is what we need.
We need to get rid of all of
those religious differences that cause violence.
And
yes, Muslims contributed something that can benefit.
It's this kind of thing. It's passing on
the medieval oud that became a guitar, the
Spanish guitar, and led
then on to
music, both classical and popular.
We need to have
this kind of interaction
that is secular and positive and uplifting.
So we would have a model in which
Islam and Christianity
and Judaism
are in the world
like this.
We have our own spheres. We have our
own spaces,
but they are little islands floating up
in this sea of neutral space.
Neutral space where we can interact, we can
leave and walk out of our individuality,
of our specificity,
of our religious faiths.
And as a Muslim, now I can meet
you as a Christian or as a Jew
in this neutral space.'
Sounds good. And there are some things about
it that are good.
But what does that mean? What does it
mean that we would lose with this?
Well, it might mean that when I walk
in the public space
that I no longer hear the church bell
ringing.
And that's true where I live in the
United States. Zoning laws, you can't hear a
church
bell. And I can't hear
the sound of the Muweddan,
the Muslim caller to prayer,
calling me 5 times a day to prayer.
But I can hear
a lot of annoying music.
I can hear
that.
And what about our time?
What about our sacred time?
Our distinguished previous speaker is here on the
Sabbath,
on a day that is,
for Jews, holy and special and apart part
and different?
To what extent does our creation of a
secular space
make it very difficult
to live that and feel that.
We make adjustments, and we can make adjustments
for important
events or occasions, but if we have to
make those adjustments
all the time, what have we lost?
People say that
we should just get rid of these conflicts.
And I know you've already
had a debate about religion before.
I'm not going to just talk about religion
here but about the way that I conceive
Islam and the world and maybe it will
help you consider how you
think about
your relationship with Muslims and Islam and people
of other faiths than your own faiths. Now,
I was raised to be
a person who avoids any vulgarity, so you
have to excuse me for this poem. But
I put this on because it makes me
think about how so often we say, well,
let's just get rid of it. Why don't
we just get rid of these
differences and these divisive things that separate us?'
It's a poem by Philip Larkin about families
in which he said, they
blank this is the f word, right? Four
letter word. They blank you up, your mum
and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
and add some extra just for you.
But they were blanked, 4 letter word, in
their turn by fools in old style hats
and coats
who half the time
were soppy stern
and half at one another's throats.
Men hands on misery to man, it deepens
like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can, and
don't have kids yourself.
Okay?
Families can cause problems for us, so let's
just stop having families. Let's just stop having
children.
Religion, faith causes trouble for us, so why
don't we just get rid of it?
But what do we lose? What I would
lose as a Muslim
are these sacred spaces,
places where I can go
that are not just beautiful. There are many
beautiful places,
museums, beautiful architecture,
but a place that I can
go that is devoted to
that connection with God.
That's what going to a mosque means to
me. That's what prayer means to me.
That's what being a Muslim means to me.
It means losing this sense
that
knowing as the whirling dervishes who
are Muslim mystics
demonstrate
as they turn
that we are
on the Earth that is turning.
This dance
is in fact a recognition and acknowledgment that
we are on an Earth that is turning
around the sun
and the sun that is turning around in
the galaxy.
It gives us our place in the Universe,
and that is something
that I don't get through science simply.
It tells me where my place is. It's
beautiful. It's an important place,
But
I'm not at the centre of the universe.
It is something that tells me about relationships.
We heard about family life and how family
life is so degraded now.
What does my religion teach me about family
life? You might say, 'Ah
I know that's what Islam teaches. Look at
that girl.
There she is, an oppressed Muslim woman having
to wear that thing on her head as
I do.
So here's a young man and a young
woman, a young married Muslim couple, they happen
to be Mexican American,
who are happy and in love.
And yes, they have a wonderful relationship. And
what does this form of dress
do? It means that
she is out in public.
In public, she can
work,
be respected,
present herself
as a respectable
professional adult, be judged for her ideas, her
book in her hand. She's probably a student.
But when she goes home,
the scarf comes off,
the nice dress comes on,
and she is with her husband in the
intimacy of their home,
having a special
private space.
In modern secular society, we don't have that
difference.
We are the same in the house as
outside of the house. So we wonder, what
do we do? Do we look?
Do we bring the sexiness outside?
Or do we take it away from the
home?
The way we live as Muslims is not
to oppress
women
but to preserve both spaces,
to preserve the beauty and the intimacy of
home life,
and to be able
to be a
respected person, not a woman who is judged
for her figure, for her look,
when she is trying to simply be a
member of society.
What it does for me is
give us relationships.
This man in this picture is a friend
of mine. He used to be a high
fashion model.
You can see he is very handsome.
But he left that
to become a religious scholar.
He left the life
of
being judged for how he was outside
to develop an inner life,
A rich inner life of devotion to God
and study of sacred scriptures.
Here he is teaching his daughter that, passing
it on.
So this religious life, this life of studying
the Koran,
of reading it and reciting it as generations
have done,
gives him this
relationship with his daughter that is unique.
It gives us
an ethical foundation.
It's a wonderful organization
in Pakistan, the EDI Foundation.
You know, you see these two people, and
probably from what you see on the news
all the time, you say, oh, these are
Taliban, these people must be loading this car
with explosives, they are going to go blow
up
some place.' Right?
Actually, this is an ambulance.
This is an amazing organization
that works with the poor
throughout Pakistan.
They go and they completely on donations, and
donations of many
people who are not wealthy, just ordinary people
who give a little bit
and many more who give their time
are trying to help in a society that
does not have a very
well developed structure.
The political situation is not good. It's not
effective.
There aren't good public services, so they have
stepped in and they have done this. And
they have a beautiful program
where they leave
creches outside of hospitals
and other centers that they have to make
sure that women
who become pregnant
and they can't keep their children for whatever
reason,
that they can leave their children and they
can be adopted and loved and cared for.
Ordinary Muslims.
99%
of Muslims in the world are ordinary good
people like this. But when we see
men dressed in these uniforms, we think bombers.
We think terrorists.
And that's a tragedy.
Our religious models also need to be shifted
because we are not just religious, we are
cultural.
A Muslim in Mauritania
is not the same as a Muslim in
Brooklyn,
a girl whose family died in a fire
in Brooklyn,
and here, with her community,
is writing in graffiti and spray paint on
the wall a verse of the Koran
in English translation saying, to God we belong
and to him we return.' She is American
and she is Muslim.
She is very different than these. Same religion,
different culture.
Chinese Muslim.
So maybe our religious model needs to look
more like this.
There is no white,
There are cultures, there are religions,
we are
mixing together
all over the world.
But we keep our specificity.
None of us are neutral.
Some of us are more colored
by our religious practice. Some of us are
less colored.
We are all colored by
the cultures that we have.
So our model of
religious identification
needs to change.
And Islam fits in this
puzzle, in this picture, in this mosaic of
humanity
across the world, and that's the reality.
But we can have problems. A beautiful scene
of 2 boys walking along
with their
home, their culture, their faith. It can be
changed by violence.
There is violence.
And then anger
turned against,
and then religion, my religion, becomes a source
of strength for revenge
even though it's a political cause.
And then
the crackdown
that doesn't
discriminate
between the innocent and the guilty
that has a boy, a little boy like
this,
whose father has been detained
by the American troops in Afghanistan
having this experience and now
what will they do in the future?
Will religion be a cause now for them
to take strength and revenge
against those who did this or for reconciliation?
My view and what I'm doing with my
friends,
who are Muslim leaders from all over the
world, is saying we have to make it
a source of reconciliation when there are political
problems, when there is violence.
And this is why just
over a year ago a
group of Muslim leaders, a 138 Muslim leaders
across the world, issued an open letter to
the Christians of the world
saying
that
Muslims and Christians together make up well over
half the world's population. Without peace and justice
between these two religious communities,
there could be no meaningful peace in the
world.
The future of the world depends on peace
between Muslims and Christians.
The basis for this peace and understanding already
exists.
It is part of the very foundational principles
of both faiths,
love of the one God and love of
neighbour.
This letter
was received by Christians all over the world,
an enormous
wonderful reaction.
Since then, thousands of Christian leaders from all
over the world have accepted this and have
implemented this, the common word as the basis
for joint action, for social justice, for for
religious reconciliation.
I just came here
yesterday from Rome
where I met
with major Muslim leaders, senior Muslim leaders,
and Catholic leaders and then with the Pope
who issued a statement
in support of
this, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
American Evangelicals.
And we have a similar
initiative
with Jews.
So we can
use our religious
differences, the specificity of our
religious identity.
And then it can be good for everyone.
So I end with this one of my
favorite people, Nobel Peace
Prize winner Mohammed Yunus,
the founder of the Grameen Bank, micro lending,
who is a Muslim
raised as a devout Muslim
using the idea of the principles in Islamic
finance that
usury, so unjust interest,
is a source of great oppression,
has used it to benefit people from all
over the world. Not just his own community,
not just Muslims in Bangladesh,
but those all over the world. That's something
we can do. And it's this time where
we can have
the meeting together that is the most
creative,
dynamic, and helpful for all of us. Certainly,
in the economic sphere, that's what we need.
Thank you.