الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

thought, reduce the world to their backyard. Again I am not talking only about someone else, first of all I am talking about myself. Yes because deep in our hearts, in the depth of our minds, we all suffer from the disease of simplification. We have been trained by a simplistic culture that avoids thinking and reflecting in the depth. We have been forced to it by the constant drumming of the media, in a world dominated by media. We have been raised to think simplistically and each one of us is or could be a simplifier. But here we are to avoid simplification. Here we are asking ourselves to go deep. This is why all the questions posed are of exceptional importance. It would be nice to touch them all but would require too long a conference. Civilization, Conflicts and coexistence The term conflict of civilization (we need to understand better what we mean with this word for I do not think Mr Huntington's definition is sufficient) is too often misused. Conflict has always existed. Mr. Huntington did not invent anything new. As an idea, the clash of civilizations is old: people have been writing about it for decades. And by the way there have always been clashes in the history of the world. The only difference is that today we see it as unavoidable and sometimes even welcomed as a defence of the purity of our civilization, ( if we can really call it that way – civilized is only one side the others are not) religion or else. The idea of the clash is most of all a simplification of a complex phenomenon that is global and cannot and must not be limited to Islam and the West. These two actors (it is an improper expression) in the international scene have a very special role to play but they are by no means the main actors. There are other actors that are as important. Let me just hint at the Far East as an actor on the world wide scene. Moreover it appears to me that the conflicts of our world are much more complicated than the ones between civilizations or religions. They often take place within the same civilization and within the same religions (the most brutal and bloody violent conflicts

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