A Response to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Edward Said's Orientalism

Orientalism

Samuel Huntington predicts The Clash of Civilizations. He believes that as this world gets smaller and smaller, cultural communication becomes more and more inevitable and therefore more conflicts will arise and as a result, more compromises with cultural values will have to be made. Edward Said, in his book Orientalism basically states that western cultures are superior and have better values and higher quality ways of life than oriental, eastern cultures. He then goes into details about how this western superiority is concerning.

I have some issues with the way Huntington addresses his debate. First of all he condenses the world’s cultures into 7 major areas: Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox. This issue with this is that he completely leaves out Africa as a whole, stating that it is only relatively essential based on opinion, therefore not worth considering into his equation. He also leaves out Buddhism and those states. With this I think that if you are going to compare cultures, you must compare all of them, or only a few. But it is just a slap in the face to compare all but a few cultures in the entire world.

I agree with a lot of what Said has to say. He has studied the concept of “islamophobia” in a very realistic way. As an Arab himself it is interesting and enlightening to see his perspective. He studied this concept from many different cultures, and found it to be the same general stigma. He is acknowledging the issues that it the Westernized supremacy view of the Middle Eastern culture. This view, because the wetern world is so dominant, has somehow bleed into other cultues swaying them to have similar views. He is trying to bring realization to the stigma that is so worldwide.

One thing that doesn’t help this issue is the media in the United States. Movies are being made portraying Arabs as terrible aggressive people who always have a terroristic agenda. This is feeding into the stigma that we have based off isolated incidents of terrorism. Said does expound on the differences between the European view of the Middle East and the American view. He says that the stigmas coming from The United states are typically more generalized. They are stigmas based on vague ideas heard through the grape vine whereas the European culture isn’t quite and racist against Muslims because they are in closer proximity to the Middle East. This automatically makes them more educated on the matter because they have been to the middle east, or have more direct news sites from there. He is saying that they basically have a better a less stigmatized more educated view of The Middle East. Still there is room for improvement.

I think there are a lot of fundamental faults in cultural opinions. Growing up as a white girl with very sheltering parents I didn’t get much exposure to different cultures. As a child my parent certainly did not educate me on cultural diversity enough. I grew up not really thinking about it too much because it was all I had ever know. Then I lived abroad for a time and “woke up” in a sense. This experience really opened my eyes to so many things. I discovered so many differences in the Honduran culture than that of the American. Differences that I knew a little of, but considered my culture to be more well off because of them. This opinion that I once had is too common.

So I think it completely unjust to diminish and entire culture to one horrible stigma. I am sure that the Arab people are wonderful as a whole and have good cultural values and intelligent ways of living. As do all cultures, I am sure that they have many good things that other cultures can learn from, and then some things that might need improvement. You cannot name one culture and higher than another. I’m not saying that all cultures are equal. That would be dull and unattainable. I am saying that all cultures are equally right, and that some cultures have things that are better than others, and vice versa.

Cultures have differences because of some differing values, religions, situations. But here is the thing, there is more than one “right.” What is right and best for people living on the east coast of china is completely different than what is right for people living in German. Some “cultural clashes” just cannot be compared and argued. So in regards to this theory I do believe that cultures are clashing more and more these days because of so many reasons. But I strongly employ of humanity as a whole to be more understanding and considerate of other peoples views, and specifically why they have those views. Because as I have stated, views and values are relative to situations.