'West meets East here'

As part of its Distinguished Lecturer series, Michigan State University (MSU) Dubai last week hosted Saudi journalist and author Turki Al Dakhil, who gave a lecture on globalisation and personal identity.

Mohammad Al Khalil, director of the Writing, Rhetoric and American Culture Department at MSU, which organised the lecture, introduced Al Dakhil and translated his lecture into English for the audience.

Al Dakhil gave various interpretations about the meaning of one's identity and concluded that the Arab identity is everything that distinguishes Arabs from other people in terms of culture, ethnicity and history.

He asked whether civilisations really clash, as suggested by American intellectual Samuel Huntington, and whether as English author and poet Rudyard Kipling said: "East is East and West is West and ne'er the twain shall meet".

Relationships between East and West must be based on communication, trust and 'civilisational responsibility'.

"If we were to map the three religions, would they be more prevalent in the East or the West? & As for liberal believers, where do they belong: to the East or the West? & Who owns the great philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Maimonides? We can't separate the East from the West," he said.

"If civilisations last because of their might, then the greatest civilisation of all would be the Mongols. The greatest civilisation lies in its humanism, justice and positivism towards others," Al Dakhil said.

"The East is already meeting the West here," he said.

According to Dakhil, the clash between civilisations is moving towards an internal conflict within civilisations. Extremist movements in the world are minorities with loud voices and they should be marginalised, he said.

"There are Islamic extremists on one hand and Islamophobes on the other hand who will rise in power as the opponents' voices rise& . The solution starts with the rise of the moderate ones," he said.

Speaking on globalisation, he said: "Globalisation is often mistaken for Americanisation or neo-liberalism, which is an economic paradigm. Globalisation started with the end of the Cold War and the protectionist economies and with the advent of competitive markets, communication and the internet. It was hard to be seen as a solely political phenomenon because it has to be studied from a civilisational understanding," he said.

"Areas that are lacking in education tend to breed more extremists, but at the same time there are extremists who are very well-educated," he said. The general impression of the relationship between education and extremism, in his point of view, is that the more widespread education is, the less extremism grows.