This book seeks to dispel the myth that we have
ever been embroiled in some 'clash of civilisations'.
Adib-Moghaddam traverses various intellectual
disciplines in order to find a pathway through the
conceptual maze that has habituated us to think in
'tribal' categories. Accompanying the reader on this
journey from the wars between ancient Persia and Greece,
the Crusades, Colonialism and the Enlightenment to the
contemporary 'wars on terror' are thinkers from 'East'
and 'West': Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel,
Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, Weber. In asking
where ideas such as the 'clash of civilisations' come
from, and by whom they are perpetuated, Adib-Moghaddam
engages with both western and Islamic representations of
the 'other'. He demonstrates a) the discontinuities
between 'Islamism' and the canon of classical Islamic
philosophy distinguishing between 'Avicennian' and
'Qutbian' discourses of Islam, and b) how the violence
inscribed in the idea of the 'West', especially during
the period of the Enlightenment, continues to cast a
shadow on world politics today. Expanding the geography
of critical theory to include the canons of Islamic
philosophy and poetry, A Metahistory of the Cash of
Civilisations refuses to divorce Muslims from Europeans,
Americans from Arabs, the Orient from the Occident. As
such, it presents a frontal attack on our current
cultural reality and Islamist-Western agitation against
each other.
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