Padrão de Resposta

Berman’s statement that Muslim radicals will not curb their destructive efforts as long as the West continues to influence the world seems inescapable, at first glance. One could almost be led to believe in a “duel to the death” between two cultures: liberalism, with its core belief in tolerance of individual choices, and Islam, with its own values.
Reality, however, is never as clear-cut as the statement above would imply. Neither the liberal West nor the Muslim World are the absolute, monolithic entities they are often depicted as being.
Islam is less like a centuries-old, undisturbed lake of values and beliefs than it is like a raging river, winding its way though the hills and valleys of history and spawning countless tributaries, each with its own personality and identity. Around the world, from the bazaars of Morocco to the streets of New York, Islam has demonstrated that many of its forms are wholly compatible with tolerance and individual liberties.
Liberalism has revealed itself to be an entity just as complex as Islam. In spite of its guise of Enlightenment rationality, it has in many cases demonstrated that its secularity and “cultural neutrality” are only skin deep, and that the values and precepts of Christianity still lurk below the surface. The tolerance of liberalism can also be called into question, as evidenced by the deep-seated prejudices in many supposedly liberal polities.
These two cultures cannot, therefore, be considered in any way homogenous. Indeed, the disputes within each regarding the ideal way to organize social life make this blindingly obvious: the “European model” and the “American model” which vie for prominence in the liberal world are as dissimilar as the Jordanian and Indonesian experiences in the Muslim one.
It is at the very least misleading, therefore, to speak of a “clash of civilizations”. It is much more accurate to refer to two large, heterogeneous cultures, with no clear leader on either side. These cultures have murky, undefined borders, which frequently overlap, leading to both clashes and creation.
This is not to say, of course, that those who speak of a clash of civilizations do so out of ignorance our naïveté. Leading the charge against the (supposed) enemy is an effective way to gain ascendancy within one’s own group. This tendency has been aggravated by the acceleration of technology. Revolutions in science not only brought us closer together, but allowed the purveyors of fear to convince us that the enemy is forever close by. We have developed tools that can be of great value in reconciling estranged cultures – we have just not learned how to use them properly yet.