Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations

Us and Them Beyond Orientalism

By: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

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Hardcover | 1 February 2011

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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 habituated 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, 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 a) the discontinuities between 'Islamism' and the canon of classical Islamic philosophy distinguishing between 'Avicennian' and 'Qutbian' discourses of Islam, and b) how the violence inscribed in the idea of the 'West', especially during the period of the Enlightenment, continues to cast a shadow on world politics today. Expanding the geography of critical theory to include the canons of Islamic philosophy and poetry, A Metahistory of the Cash of Civilisations refuses to divorce Muslims from Europeans, Americans from Arabs, the Orient from the Occident. As such, it presents a frontal attack on our current cultural reality and Islamist-Western agitation against each other.

Industry Reviews

'This passionate and elegant work is a vigorous antidote to a constellation of discourses steeped in the Weltanschauung that the title of Samuel Huntington's infamous book encapsulates so well. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's reflections are a stimulating contribution to Edward Said's legacy of radical critique of all essentialist constructions of otherness.' * Prof. Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust and (with Noam Chomsky) Perilous Power: The Middle East and US foreign policy *
'What Adib-Moghaddam has done is to establish an exceptionally powerful refutation of clashing civilizations. Eloquently, rigorously and imaginatively, he traces and critiques genealogies of binary and simple oppositional thought and argues that the future of the world depends on our accepting and understanding complexities and internal oppositions.' * Prof. Stephen Chan, 2010 International Studies Association (ISA) Eminent Scholar in Global Development *
'Eloquent, powerful, incisive and impressive in its range, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations is a masterly work of critical deconstruction in the finest tradition of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. For anyone wishing to better understand the current state of international politics, this book is absolutely essential.' * Richard Jackson, Secretary of the British International Studies Association (BISA) *

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