I always find these introductions rather embarrassing because, first of all, they make me seem older
than I actually am with all the things that happened in my life.
And it's also rather surreal, as Jan indicated, a rather surreal moment for me to stand here
at the lectern when I was a student here about two decades ago, sitting up there like you
guys now, and not really understanding what the person down here was saying.
I'm glad that Jan said that there are no former professors of mine today here, otherwise be
even more embarrassed.
So whenever there is no understanding about what I'm saying, by all means, I was in the
same position when I was on that side.
Of course, I thank Jan Wilkins for the amazing work that he's doing here, really pioneering
work.
I was always looking forward to coming back to Hamburg in particular, but to Germany as
well in order to foster more dialogue between different social sciences that are happening
in Europe.
And unfortunately, there is not enough dialogue about that.
And it was also here in Hamburg where I first read The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington.
I remember I studied at the Institute of Political Science, the Fähtersteil, just down the road.
And there were heated debates between myself and other students about this book, which
was really prominent in the early 1990s.
The end of the Cold War, everyone was excited.
On the one side, you had Francis Fukuyama talking about the end of history, and with
the neoliberal American model winning out, and there won't be any competition anymore,
and we all live happily in a global village.
That was Fukuyama.
On the other side, you had Huntington saying, no, this is not what will happen.
What will happen actually is that we'll be embroiled in a clash of civilizations, in
particular between Islam and the West.
So we had these heated debates in the smoke-filled tear room.
Smoking was still allowed then in public buildings.
And of course, everything else than tea was drunk in the tear room.
That's another story maybe for later.
But we had heated debates, and even then as a young, maybe arrogant, youthful young student,
the Huntington thesis seemed unconvincing to me, and I think to most of my other student
colleagues as well.
And since then, I think it has been refuted on many levels, whether it is intellectually,
academically, methodologically, or theoretically.
So I will not get into Huntington himself in the book in this lecture, but rather a
general mindset or psychology that continues to sustain this idea that there is an inevitable
clash between Islam and the West, a whole machinery, if you want, of narratives and
norms and institutions, discourses attached to this rather dangerous idea, I believe.
And it's out there.
It affects us all.
You have it on both sides.
You have Islamic radicalism affecting us in our daily lives through terrorism, for instance.
It's a real threat for all of us.
You have the resurgence of right-wing movements, as Jan himself indicated in Europe, with the
Pegida phenomenon in Germany itself, with the Marie Le Pen phenomenon in France, with
the Gert Wilders politics in Belgium.
So the idea that Islam and the West are battling with each other is a very powerful idea.
It's a powerful myth, but it's still out there.
So we have to, I think, address it and to see what kind of assemblage is behind that
idea, not only to leave it there, but then you move on and you try to deconstruct, criticize,
resist that idea.
Because if you leave a theory just in a descriptive level and you will have that in your course
papers as well, then you just provide description.
You have to go beyond that and maybe find out how can we then criticize a particular
idea.
That's the next step.
And that's always a difference between a merit, as we call it, kind of good essay and a very
good essay.
And a very good essay goes beyond mere description and criticizes.
So let me look, and I won't speak more than I think 50 minutes, for a person who claims
to talk about dialogue and communication would be rather hypocritical to monopolize the dialogue
and turn it into a monologue.
Of course I want to hear what you have to say about this topic from your own experiences
and then we'll have hopefully a good conversation about it later on.
To ease us into the topic, what are the general principles of this clash idea?
How is it sustained?
And this is just kind of abstract general, if you want, focal points, some signposts
to understand what we are talking about.
The first one is that differences among civilizations are thought to be unchanging and fundamental.
That is the starting point of the theory.
The idea is that there are separate civilizations, Islam on the one side, the West on the other
side, and that they are essentially different.
There are clear boundaries here, according to the clash theorists.
There is no hybridity that you find in an abstract painting, for instance, no, according
to the clash theorists, the contours of the civilizations are clear cut.
And then in a second step, once that is done, once you pull the civilizations away from
each other, this is what this mechanism does, it pulls civilizations away from each other.
Then you come up with the idea that this civilization or clash has always been there, that it is
historically contingent, a historical in the sense that, you know, what are you talking
about?
Islam and the West has always been in a battle, you know, the Crusades, Ottoman Empire, you
know, and this is just an extension of it.
This is what the clash disciples tell us, that this clash of civilization between Islam
and the West that we are experiencing today is an extension of what happened before.
Second point, phenomenon such as postmodernity, globalization, multicultural experiments,
these are thought not to create dialogue and communication and empathy.
Clash disciples would tell us that they actually heighten the consciousness of civilizations
and the identity of the self or the in-group, West, Islam, whatever, against the out-group.
So again here, hybridity interaction, interdependence is refuted.
And fourth, there's a particular emphasis on identity.
Identity becomes the big issue here.
And identity politics as an extension of the theoretical construct becomes an issue as
well.
So it's all about identity for these people, you know.
We are determined not by our class, gender, by our social status, no.
We are determined by grand civilization constructs in our individuality such as something remote
such as Islam or the West, okay?
So a big abstract idea is turned into the main ingredient of individual identity.
That in itself is, of course, problematic.
Some people would say, well, in our daily lives, you know, we lead lives according to
how much we earn, you know, whether we are a mother or a transsexual or a homosexual.
These identities may be more important for us than, you know, being Muslim or, you know,
white European male, whatever.
So these are the general contours, I think, the common denominators, if you want, of the
clash of civilizations.
And you can see them, you can use them, I believe, as an analytical tool to look at
the pamphlets of people like Marie Le Pen or Gert Wilders or Pegida.
If you read them, I'm sure you will find all these mechanisms at play and you will understand
what the purpose of these mechanisms are.
These are just very general signposts, but there are more sophisticated forms of institutionalized
discourses that create the impression of difference and battles.
And these are not only out there in the media and in politics and in the general public,
but here in our universities, you know, whether here or in Britain or France, it doesn't matter,
residues of an approach towards the other that actually reifies difference rather than
transcending it.
And I want to give you two examples from both sides.
One example from the Western representation of the East, if you want, and the Eastern
representation of the West.
Western representation, Orientalism, Eastern representation, the Pondant, if you want,
of that.
Occidentalism.
Well, let me start with Orientalism.
Now, Orientalism is a discourse, an idea, analytical construct that was created by the
late Edward Said in his book 1979, and it imagines and emphasizes, again, a particular
difference between the East and the West.
Not only a difference, but it involves seeing the other, primarily Arab and Muslim people,
as exotic, as inferior, and, in some way, as in need of rescue.
Now, Edward Said, and I will quote here in his book Orientalism that I mentioned, defined
it as the acceptance in the West of the basic distinction, you have the emphasis on difference
here again, the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate
theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient,
its people, customs, mind, destiny, and so on.
So he's saying that this whole Orientalist corpus permeates art, literature, politics,
the media.
It's very powerful.
He dates it from the European Enlightenment, and he says that the general historical context
of Orientalism was the context of imperial domination of the East.
That is very important.
It was also, and he used Foucault and his connection between discourse and power, he
said, Orientalism is not only a false depiction of the East, but it serves to fortify and
rationalize Western imperialism, again, a very important point that he makes methodologically.
And this then can be seen not only in art and literature, but also in Orientalist depictions
and paintings and photography in the 19th and 20th century, and according to Said and
others also in the social sciences.
So you still continue to see awkward depictions of the East in all our social sciences, whether
it's in international relations or political science or sociology and so on and so forth.
That's the general idea behind Orientalism.
So you see already we are confronted with a bigger problem than just Huntington, because
we already have a very powerful discourse that does exactly what in many ways Huntington
and the clash theories do, creates difference.
So Orientalism is one, a clear distinction between self and other, us and them.
This is what Orientalism does.
Now already problematic, already we are seeing more and more problems.
Now another problem is added to it, and that is the discourse of Occidentalism.
Of course, where there is Orientalism, there is also Occidentalism.
So suddenly the others say, well, okay, we agree with you.
You guys are different.
You don't like us, we don't like you.
So they use the same grammar and syntax, the same clear boundaries.
And they say that, yes, we Muslim and Arab people or whatever are distinct from you in
the West.
You in the West are decadent, materialistic, imperialistic.
The West has created a caricature of what the West is.
And we are better.
We are spiritual, we are better people.
So the mechanism is essentially the same.
And the most powerful discourse within Occidentalism is Islamism, brings us to some of the things
that are floating around today with the politics of ISIS, with the politics of Al-Qaeda, with
some of the other phenomenon that are bothering us in Europe and beyond.
Islamism came to the fore in the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century
in response to Western imperialism.
So it is in many ways a political ideology, and I will get to it why it is ideological,
that was born in crisis.
A crisis situation for the Islamic world because the main Islamic polity, the Ottoman
Empire, was in the process of being disintegrated.
There was the real threat of colonialism, the real threat of creating a new map which
then was also, of course, created in the 20th century.
And this emphasis on Islam as a political ideology came as a natural choice in many
ways, certainly for some of the pious Muslims, you know, people like Mohammad Abdul and Jama
Ladin Al-Afghani.
And they slowly, here's the process that comes, you know, in the genealogy of what is happening
today, they slowly stripped Islamic ideas of their philosophical content and their dialogical
potential.
If we take a look at the writings of the classical Islamic philosophers, people that even in
Europe are stars of philosophy, you know, Averroas, Avicenna, these kind of people,
there is no emphasis there on being Muslim or on identity.
These were philosophers who were reinterpreting Aristotle, Socrates, and these kind of things.
Obviously because they were living during a time where identity was not an issue, it
was not a colonial period, the Islamic Empire was expanding, they didn't care about the
West, the West itself as an idea was not created, the West is a creation as an idea
and as a term of the Enlightenment before it was the Christian Empire, no one talked
about the West, the West was created and, you know, primarily in the theories of Marx
and Hegel and others.
So you have Mohammad Abdul and Jama Ladin Al-Afghani suddenly talking about Islam in
a more ideological way.
The first generation, this is the first generation of Islamists, Mohammad Abdul, Jama Ladin Al-Afghani.
When you start to study Islam as politics, Islam as ideology, then you start with these
two people.
There were both activists, theorists, philosophers, and very influential in what they were doing.
And they were not primarily only focusing on Islam as spirituality or religion anymore,
but primarily as a political instrument.
And yet, Abdul and Al-Afghani still had a dialogue going on with the idea of the West.
And it's renowned, for instance, the famous French philosopher had this interesting punch
out with Al-Afghani.
And Al-Afghani was insisting, saying that Islam is not against rationality, is not backward,
is not against sciences.
So they were still engaging with the idea of the West and trying to forge a discourse
that was in dialogue with the West.
The same with Mohammad Abdul, who had a famous dialogue with Lord Hartington, who was the
English minister of war during that period.
And again, he was also saying that, why are you emphasizing these differences when there
is a lot of dialogue throughout history here?
So with Abdul and Al-Afghani, things were not as awful, if you want, as they became
with the second generation of Islamists.
And here you have other people appearing during a different period of time, a period of time
when the Ottoman Empire was gone, beginning of the 1920s.
New nation states were created, Sykes-Picot, the map of the Middle East.
And authoritarian militarized states were at the helm of them.
So suddenly, you had oppositional activists, such as Syed-Otoban Hassan-Al-Bana, the engineers
of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al-Muslemin, the one that ruled Egypt for one and a half
days and then was kicked out, but who's still a movement that is still one of the most powerful
institutional Sunni Islamic movements until today.
With these people, Islam becomes even more ideological, even less based on a form of
kind of philosophical dialogue.
I want to give you an example from Syed-Otoban, who was referenced by even the most radical
jihadists, sometimes in an unfair manner.
But certainly with his prison experience in Nasser's Egypt, the torture and the awful
things that he had to say, he started out as a poet and literary critic, but the violence
of the state that he encountered changed him as a person.
And this is what he had to say about the functioning of Islam.
And really, when you hear it, for those of you, I don't know if there are still residues
of Marxism at the University of Hamburg.
When I was still here, the communism was already gone, but there were generations and generations
were still believing in Marx, and so there was still lingering on.
Maybe they died out, I don't know.
But even those who study ideology will recognize that this is a very ideological statement.
And I will give you the quote here.
And in your mind, maybe you can even substitute Islam with something else like communism or
fascism even.
This is ideology.
It doesn't matter where it comes from.
It's just that the terms are changed.
So this is Syed-Otoban, main engineer of the Muslim Brotherhood, and as I said, referenced
in the so-called Jihadist literature as well.
This is what he says.
So what is Islam?
Islam is a revolutionary concept and a way of life, a revolutionary concept and a way
of life, which seeks to change the prevalent social order and remold it according to its
own vision.
Based on this definition, the word Muslim becomes the name of an international revolutionary
party that Islam seeks to form in order to put its revolutionary program into effect.
So you have revolution already appearing four or five times.
Jihad, and here you have the emphasis on Jihad not as a spiritual salvation but as a violent,
extremist form of conduct.
Jihad signifies that revolutionary struggle, again revolution, involving the utmost use
of resources that the Islamist party mobilizes in the service of its cause.
So there is no emphasis here on anything but ideology, a movement towards violence,
not only violence against the authoritarian states of the region, but also violence against
the West.
Syed-Otob, the first famous theorist who spoke in favor of, if you want, a clash of
civilization between Islam and the West.
Islam was seen not, as I said, as a religious, spiritual entity, but as an ideology of the
state.
Islam deen wadola in Arabic.
So you have that particularly apparent in the writings of Syed-Otob Hassan al-Banna,
others also influential people like Abu'allah Mu'udhi in the subcontinent, and Rashid Rida
who was one of the most important person instrumental in the establishment of Saudi Arabia.
And then you had, of course, the Iranian Revolution as well with similar discourses.
We take a look at the writings and activism of Iranian revolutionaries in the 1960s and
1970s.
Again, there is this emphasis on creation and invention of a self, an identity that
was different to the identity of the West.
Others such as Bosgash B'chish, Return to the Self, Ali Shariati, one of the main ideologues
of the Iranian Revolution, Ghab Zadeghi, West Toxification, again, you see the West here
being represented as a cultural disease, right?
Of course, these people were, again, in opposition to a very authoritarian state that was allied
to the West.
But still you see here an emphasis on an us versus them dichotomy.
And then all of this was politicized by Tawla Khomeini, of course, during the Iranian Revolution
with the repercussions that some of you know, you know, antagonism towards the United States,
new alliance patterns, antagonism towards Israel, and so on and so forth.
So again, a lot of Occidentalist ingredients there.
Of course, now Iran is, you know, everyone likes it, oil and gas and all of that, you
know, Rouhani is a great reformist.
So you know, things have changed for those of you who follow the news.
But you know, we should never underestimate the resilience of the right wing whether it
is here or there for that matter.
So we have this institutionalization of Islam as an ideology that is pitted against the
West throughout the region.
And you know, with Al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on and so forth, I don't want to get into
that because you have lectures on that as well.
It gets even worse, this dichotomy.
So Occidentalism, as an example, Islamism.
Before that I had Orientalism.
Before that we talked a little bit about the clash of civilizations itself.
So we see the problem is growing bigger and bigger.
We now understand that these kind of ideas are, you know, they're fed from different
sources and they're not only unidirectional, they come from different directions.
This is important and this is why they're so powerful, it's such a powerful myth.
It's like a phantom of the opera, you know, it appears whenever you don't expect it.
But of course then we have to go beyond that and say okay, now this is the situation, it's
quite dismal and we are all suffering from it, but what can we do in order to go beyond
it?
Just simply sit back and say well, you know, we have to accept it, you know, this is our
fate.
We will forever be tyrannized by the clash disciples and all of us will have to suffer
from it.
Or do we go ahead and say no, you know, let's look whether or not these guys are factual
and if they're not factual maybe we can, you know, resist, we can combat them.
So this is what I'm trying to do, you know, to give you a few formulas if you want that
can be used against the clash of civilization thesis.
The first one is of course that Islam as an entity does not exist, okay.
There's no such thing as a coherent, unitarian Islam.
There are many Islams floating around, there are Shia Islam, Islams floating around, there
are Sunni Islams floating around, there are Wahhabi, Ismaili, you know, Islamic mysticism,
Islamic communists, Islamic transgender movements, Islamic gay movements, Islamic lesbian movements,
whatever you want to call, you know, they're all out there and they're all claimed to be
Islamic and they don't agree on anything.
Even when you take a look at the news and the geopolitics of the region, you see that
right now the problem of everyone is the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two Muslim
majority states.
They fight each other in a cold war in Syria, in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Iraq and pretty much
everywhere else, okay.
These are two of the most powerful, if you want, Islamic states in the region.
So how can they be coherent?
And then people, especially in the media, especially in Germany, I have to say, you
know, a little bit still in Britain but less so, but especially here people conflate wars
in West Asia and North Africa with civilizational wars, right.
This is one of the biggest mistakes and here I have to go back to the late Huntington and
that is because first of all he was a Harvard professor, don't forget, and he was also the
director of one of the most powerful security centers in the world that gave consultancy
and pamphlets and white papers and reports to successive U.S. governments.
So a very influential person, a very influential guardian, if you want, of U.S. security.
And this is what he had to say about Operation Desert Storm.
That is the war in 1990 when Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, invaded Kuwait and
the United States in the first Gulf War came and kicked him out of Kuwait.
Operation Desert Storm, that was before 2003.
Some of you were not born in 1990 but in 2003 you remember it was pretty much the same but
the Americans had more support than they had in 2003.
But this is how Huntington describes this war and I quote from him, the warfare between
Arabs and the West culminated in 1990.
So you have the Operation Desert Storm seen as a conflict between Arabs and the West.
When the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf, this centuries old military
interaction and you see here the emphasis again on it being historically contingent,
centuries old, it's always been there.
The centuries old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline.
It could become more virulent.
So in the second sentence you have suddenly this conflict not being between Arabs and
the West but between Islam and the West.
Now what are the problems with that?
First of all, Huntington is mixing being Arab with being Muslim, right?
Ignoring that there are 15 million Arab Christians that are obviously not Muslim and about one
billion non-Arab Muslims, there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims.
So that's a horrible mistake by someone who should know better and then of course he fails
to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein, the guy who was killed in the aftermath of the second
government in 2003, the former president of Iraq, that his government was not at all an
Islamic government, right?
It was a secular Baathist, Arab nationalist government that was in many ways in terms
of ideology and conduct closer to European fascist governments than to anything the region
ever saw, right?
Arab nationalism, secular Baathism borrowed a lot from people like Fichte and Hadar, the
German romanticists of the 19th, 18th century.
So if anything, this was a war against a secular dictator.
And then moreover, and for anyone who knows about this war, of course the Muslim majority
states of the Arabian Peninsula were the staunchest supporters of the United States, right?
There were in the Western camp, they financed the war, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait of course, Qatar,
United Arab Emirates and so on and so forth, Bahrain.
So how could this be a clash of civilizations?
A second myth that empirical flaw, if you want, empirical mistake is to think that Iran
is the leader of the Islamic international.
Appears in Huntington, it appears also in some of the activism of prominent politicians.
For instance, Tony Blair tried hard a few years ago with a chill code inquiry and so
on and so forth, former prime minister of the UK, tried hard to depict Iran as the main
evil in the region and as one of the main perpetrators of this war against Islam.
But of course Iran and its foreign policy is not at all restricted to the Islamic world.
As indicated, there was a cold war going on between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Iran has better relations with Communist Cuba, you know, the Castro brothers, the welcome
guests in Tehran all the time than with Saudi Arabia or some of the states in the Arabian
Peninsula.
Indeed, Iran supports Christian Armenia over Shia Muslim majority Azerbaijan in their conflict
in the southern caucuses.
Iran as any other nation states follows its national interest.
And if Islam is conducive to that end, then it is used, if not, it is set aside.
For instance, another example, why is it that Iran never says something about, you know,
the onslaught of, you know, Chechens in the caucuses by Russia?
Because it has wonderful relations with the Russian state, right?
Why doesn't it say much about the killings of, you know, Uyghur Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang
province in western China?
Because it has wonderful relations with China.
But whenever something happens in Europe, you know, then they're very loud.
So here again you see that states, nation states, for those of you who study international
relations, follow their national interest.
And in that regard, everything goes, and for Iran it's the same thing.
As you can see, you know, now they're, you know, almost friends with the great Satan
as they used to call it, America.
So the clash mentality, I think, this whole apparatus, the discourse, is not only theoretically
stunted, but it is empirically flawed.
It doesn't have any factual basis.
So let me end, and this is the last part before we get hopefully to a conversation, and let
me end with a few examples about how differences, in terms of thinking and engagement, how differences
can be overcome.
And this is based on a recent talk I gave in Berlin about the cultural dialogue between
Iran and Europe with Hamid Abashi, and I'm in Hassan Sheraton, which was a really wonderful
event organized by, you know, by the people in Berlin.
And I think, you know, the gentleman that just left, you know, I wanted to impress him
with poetry, because there's a bit of poetry now going on as well after, you know, all
the heavy stuff.
We can afford, you know, a bit of art and fun here, and you will not be surprised that
I chose Goethe as my first reference point, because, of course, Goethe wrote this beautiful
East-Western divan as an ode of love to the Persian poet Hafez, which is one of the most
beautiful manuscripts of a cultural dialogue out there.
And then I will get to the Muslim Sufi, Persian, whatever, mystic, Jalaluddin, Rumi, Rumi,
you may have heard the poet of love, as he is called.
But this is Goethe first, and I will give you the German original, and then the English
translation.
This is the East, apart from the East-Western divan, as I mentioned, ode of love really
to the Iranian poet Hafez.
When people keep themselves apart in mutual disdain, a truth is hidden from the heart,
their goals are much the same.
Do you see a very different kind of thinking, though?
I mean, this doesn't sound like a clash of civilizations at all.
It sounds like empathy, creating connections, appreciating the humanity of the other.
And this is then Rumi, the poet of love, Madonna loves him, by the way.
Why, you guys, Madonna is too old.
I don't know who's around these days.
I have no idea.
I'm out of step.
But, you know, he is big also in popular culture, especially in the United States.
So he's a big figure.
And there's, of course, 600 years between Rumi and Goethe.
But I think there is still a meeting of minds here.
And this meeting of minds, in many ways, defies what we talked about, about cultural location
determining everything.
If cultural location determines everything, how can these two minds meet when they're
600 years apart?
One of them lived, you know, in West Asia, you know, during, in Muslim, but very multicultural
context and Goethe, of course, in German.
So this is Rumi, what he had to say about his own predicament of identity.
And for him, identity was an issue.
But it was a different kind of approach to identity, a more libertarian approach that
I think freed himself from the shackles of identity.
What can I do Muslims?
I do not know myself.
I'm neither Christian, nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian, nor Muslim.
I'm not from East or West.
My place is placeless.
My trace is traceless.
As I mentioned, 600 years between these two poets who lived under very different circumstances
and cultural conditions, yet there is a meeting of minds that defies this whole issue of,
of identity within the aesthetics of poetry.
In many ways, a poetic dialogue that defies time, space, and geography.
It accentuates, I think, a deep cultural conversation, which highlights connections, mutuality, interdependence,
respect, hybridity between subject and object, self and other, us and them.
So identity is seen here as a complex mosaic rather than as a clearly defined black and
white issue.
And I think this is more true to the reality.
Even when you look inside yourself, you try to look at your own identities, you will find
that they are composed of many different factors.
Part of it may be cultural, but others are socioeconomic.
They are based on family, on upbringing, on education, on other factors that compose
who you are as individuals.
And this poetic dialogue, I think, stands against seemingly coherent identities encapsulated
in false dichotomies such as West against Islam or a clash of civilizations.
It defies a form of geographical determinism and merges rather than divides people, categories,
East and West, North and South, and so on and so forth.
Thank God this, or whoever else you want, thank people, humanity, this kind of approach
is more and more prominent, not necessarily with poetry merely, but this kind of approach
of a dialogical interaction with the other is more and more prominent in the social
sciences as well.
So you have disciplines such as global history that is focusing on creating a new archive
of history that is not antagonistic towards the other, but appreciates connections.
You have comparative philosophies and global thought as to other disciplines that are emerging
in a similar manner, where philosophy is not only seen as Western philosophy, but is appreciated
that Eastern philosophy carried forward the old ideas from Greece, and that there has
been a lot of connection and dialogue in between.
And they're busy in many ways.
These disciplines and the scholars that are engaged with it are a busy integrating East
and West rather than separating them out to write history if you want as a dialogue rather
than a clash.
There's no doubt that differences do exist, but they should be considered as a part of
a common human experience.
Such a mindset yields a dialogical communication in which self and other object and subject
talk to each other to understand and to create empathy.
The other is not viewed as something profoundly disturbing and alien that needs to be oppressed.
As such, this critical form of resistance to the clash of ignorance, if you want, opens
up spaces in which empathy with the individual as neighbor is combined with solidarity with
her as a fellow human being.
After all, communication and dialogue are what makes us human in the first place.
On that hopeful note, if you want, I shall leave it, and I'm looking forward to talk
about all of these issues with you.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Artin.