Talmiz Ahmad's Book Counters Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization Theory

"Children of Abraham at War"

By SIRAJ WAHAB | RIYADH

Published in The Sunday Guardian and Arab News on Dec. 12, 2010

The new book Children of Abraham at War by Indian ambassador Talmiz Ahmad was hailed as an unbiased counterpoint to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, at its launch in the Saudi capital this week. Ahmad worked on the book for more than five years. “Its origins lay in the concern that, after 9/11, Western, particularly US, discourse was increasingly demonising Islam — the religion, and Muslims — the people,” he said during his presentation.

“Bernard Lewis’ two books, What Went Wrong? and The Crisis of Islam, were readily seized upon by the American public and had considerable impact in solidifying the prejudices and animosities of Western readers with regard to Islam and Muslims,” Ahmad said. “Such a broad-brush approach denied all political context or legitimacy to Muslim grievances and did not attempt to take into account the complexity of Islamic history and contemporary politics and culture.”

Veteran Indian regional expert Ranjit Gupta praised the book for its perspective. “The title of this book reminds one of another book, much celebrated when it first hit the stands, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. To me it appears that the author of that book had already decided his conclusions before commencing writing and then worked backwards to offer rationalisations,” Gupta told an audience of Indian, Saudi and foreign nationals gathered at the Indian embassy in Riyadh. “It reeked of arrogance, the tendency to see all right on one’s own side and all wrong on the other, the self-assured, conviction that “my civilisation is superior to yours, yours is narrow minded, bigoted and doomed to be defeated in the looming and inevitable clash of civilizations’.”

Gupta said Ahmad’s work presented a more accurate view of events absent of Western tendencies to vilify Islam and the Arab people. “Due to the Western domination of the world during the past two centuries, Western parameters and narratives of discourse have set the standard of what is right and what is wrong. Since the West essentially controls the media and the flow and interpretation of information it becomes extremely difficult for a more balanced viewpoint to get traction,” Gupta said. “In Ahmad’s scholarly and impeccably researched effort, which for additional credibility is based overwhelmingly on Western sources, we see the beginnings of the breaching of these bastions.”

He likened Ahmad to a walking encyclopaedia on the Middle East and its many issues. “This is manifested in his learned articles, in books and journals, his speeches and presentations at umpteen professional forums,” Gupta said. “He is among India’s top two or three experts on the Gulf region.”

Amid the commendations for the five years of research for the 476-page book was one lament about the duration of the project “I hope it won’t take him five years for another book,” Ahmad’s wife, Sunita Ahmad, said to a smiling audience. “This book kept him away from me for quite awhile.”