الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @

Pathways to an Open World

economic front (backed up by religion), confrontation, clash, conflict and confusion, between East and West, between Orient and Occident. 2. Into the East What the East, as a whole, has known of the West is not the best of the West, it has in fact most often been the worst. As for the West’s knowledge of the East, it is, to say the least, vague. The contours of this zone of ignorance can be extended by asking : what, in the present process of global degradation, does the contemporary West know about the best of the West, or the contemporary East about the best of the East ? In a wellknown phrase, often quoted, Rudyard Kipling made the declaration : ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ Most people who quote this phrase have never read the poem from which it is drawn. In the poem, a real meeting does take place – between Kamal and the British Colonel’s son – after a hard ride, on a mountain-top. To extrapolate from the poem, and on the basis of culture-analysis, it’s possible to say that at the summit of all the cultures, there is a common space. When there is talk, in the context of East and West, of a conflict of civilisations, what is really being talked about is a confused confrontation of sub-West and sub-East. To overcome this situation will take more than oecumenical gatherings full of pious wishes and moral declarations, it will take, on both sides, in both camps, education and culture-work aimed at the opening of that greater, common space.

Let’s look at that kind of work and movement in the East.

Anyone interested in the life and death of civilisations and in the development and decline of mind-space, is bound to turn sooner or later to Ibn Khaldûn, one of the great searching minds of the world.

-29-

Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter