Culture wars

In a move that seems running against the modern drift towards multiculturalism and tolerance, the French National Assembly overwhelmingly approved a law that bans Muslim headscarves and other pieces of garment defined as ostentatiously religious.

The debate leading up to the new law was surprisingly brief, intense and lopsided. The opposition voted with the government to produce a landslide for this controversial law.

Some saw this as a step back to the Crusades. Others celebrated the new law as a major blow for secularism and against religious fundamentalism.

To be sure, this is a resounding act of state.

For many years, the drift in the democratic cultures of the west has been to favor cultural minorities lodged within their societies. Indigenous cultures – as in the case of the aborigines in Australia and New Zealand, the Native Americans, and the immigrant communities in Western Europe such as the Turks in Germany – have not only been respected; they have been celebrated.

In the US, public schools have been allowed to conduct their classes in Spanish, yielding to the reality of a large Hispanic population. Equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, religion or gender preference, has become a civic religion in itself.

Last year, the Anglican community stepped close to a schism over the elevation of an openly gay bishop. The last week, alone, Massachusetts voted to allow same-sex marriages while the City of San Francisco, openly defying California state laws, allowed "civil unions" of gay couples.

The French ban on Islamic headgear may be criticized for specifically targeting a religious community. But in the context of all that has happened the last few years, the ban, considering the domestic political support it enjoys, is understandable.

This could be an event signaling a shifting of the tides.

About a decade ago, influential political scientist Samuel Huntington put out a controversial book called The Clash of Civilizations. There he argued that the fissures and divisions in global politics will be along cultural – or civilizational – lines.

When that book came out, it was roundly criticized by the intellectual mainstream that was endlessly optimistic about the forward march of rationality and tolerance.

But events thereafter seemed to support Huntington’s thesis. In the Islamic world, specifically, a new fundamentalist strain referred to, for want of a better word, as jihadism, attracted support. That intellectual fashion was a minority within a minority. But because it was crafty, systematic and extremely violent, it confronted the world with an imponderable horror.

Jihadism did not require majorities. It did not require mass movements. It will never triumph in the arena of democratic politics. But it can shape the turn of events, dictate the flow of history.

No more than a few dozen men, willing to die so flamboyantly, caused September 11 to happen. The world will never be the same after the gruesome attacks in New York and Washington that day.

The lines of global politics were re-drawn that day. The concept of chaos that international cooperation was supposed to contain needed to be re-imagined. War needed to be reinvented.

By deciding to invade Iraq and topple the Saddam Hussein regime, the US proceeded conventionally. Iraq was a base for "international terrorism". By destroying a heavily armed dictatorship, terrorism will be denied a base. The biggest factor of instability in a strategic but endlessly volatile region would be eliminated.

That was basically the same paradigm that justified the forcible ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Because it involved attacking a patently fanatical regime in a most forbidding land, the effort in Afghanistan enjoyed wider support and involved lesser debate than the decision of the Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq.

In both places, however, skirmishes continue. The US, in Iraq, stares at the embarrassing fact that it lost more troops after the end of major hostilities was proclaimed.

For want of a better term, the media calls the guerrillas in Iraq "insurgents." Over the past few weeks, however, the nature of the violence seems to be something else altogether. In the violent attack on a police station in Fallujah last weekend, two of the "insurgents" killed turned out to be Lebanese. That suggests that the low-intensity warfare going in Iraq is not so much an effort to restore the Baathists to power as it is a continuing skirmish in the war of civilizations.

This is, in a word, not a continuation of the battle between the coalition forces and the Saddam loyalists. It is a new scene of battle between the US and the Al-Qaeda. The "resistance" is not about Iraqi sovereignty at all. Much less is it about restoring Saddam to power.

It is about relentlessly taking casualties on the forces of the West and their local allies. It is about weakening the resolve of the western powers and influencing domestic electoral outcomes in, say, the United States of America.

Over the next few years, we will have to continue changing the categories and concepts with which we try to imagine the phenomenon at hand. And new methods of war will have to be deployed in this struggle.

France so famously opposed the invasion of Iraq. And yet France now seems to be the front-liner in the culture war.

Fundamentalism is not geographically confined. We saw that in the wide theater of al-Qaeda attacks from New York to Bali. France, however, has taken a step to clear out a geographical area – its own nation-state – of those who flamboyantly assert their difference.

In the war between the Greco-Roman tradition of rational culture creation and an intensely irrational Islamic fundamentalism, the delineations might, in the end, turn out easier to mark. The greater difficulty might be in the culture wars within communities that might seem to be homogenous.

Consider the debate between the "straight" argument of heterosexuality and procreation on one hand and the "gay" argument of unions that transcend sexuality.

Or, closer to home, the intractable debate between two societies in one: the schism between modernizing sectors of society that emphasize rationality, efficiency and technocracy and the pre-modern sections that insists on irrational political choices on the basis of magic or inexplicable charisma.

The electoral battle we now deal with seems to be, in its own right, a culture war.