Martha Nussbaum on religious extremism and the clash within civilisations ...

… a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today’s world … the popular “clash of civilizations” thesis, notably articulated by Samuel P. Huntington, according to which the world is currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America. India, the third largest Muslim nation in the world (after Indonesia and Pakistan), is far from fitting this pattern. Instead, in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, we find the use of European fascist ideologies by Hindu extremists to justify the murder of innocent Muslim civilians … the real clash is not a civilizational one between “Islam” and “the West”, but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations – between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition … the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to fdominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

… Facing outward, it is imperative to see the complexities and internal divisions that are there, rather than to divide the world into “good” cultures and “evil” cultures.

… religion can in principle offer a great deal to the public culture of a pluralistic democracy.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence And India’s Future (2007) Harvard University Press, pp ix-xi, Preface. Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, Department of Philosophy, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago.