Mirage of Resources

Mirage of Resources

Categorization is an essential part of human life. The way the human mind works, we naturally put things into categories in order to understand the way things work. Categorization is constantly applied to human society. Ever since the first organization of a tribe, categories have had a huge role in human history. People do not only organize beliefs and ideas into certain categories, but they also put themselves in them. Civilizations are the most powerful of these categories of people. Samuel Huntington, in his essay Clash of Civilizations, states that "Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion" and that "The civilization to which [someone] belongs [to] is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies." These two qualities are essentially what differentiate civilizations from each other.

By using the dividing nature of civilizations, forms of government have been able to create an "us and them" in foreign policy whenever it suits their aims in the acquisition of resources. Throughout the past 1400 years, this method has been applied to Islam and the West, essentially creating a divide between the two. Although the divide is fundamentally an illusion of aesthetic qualities and cultural practice, it has the power to mask the acquisition of resources with an ideological mirage. The power in this fictional divide is important enough to make Islam and the West seen as separate civilizations, because any means of aggression upon the other can be masked by "us and them".

There are 3 elements which when joined together allow the West and Islam to become separated. The first element is visual and audible differences. The West and Islam can be portrayed to look different. Skin tone and garb serve to create a distinction between the two. Along with looks, they both speak different languages. The West speaks a variety of Romantic languages, while the Islamic world speaks Arabic and other non-Romantic languages. Different languages are able to be overcome, as seen in the discussions between Muslims and Euorpeans outlined in Richard Bulliets A Case for an Islamo-Christian Civilization. Yet the fact still remains that these differences can be used as a tool to widen the gap between Islam and the West.

The second element is a history of warfare. Throughout the past 1000 years, the two have engaged in war among each other. In the Crusades, with "[Urges] to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control by the pope, aristocrats as well as merchants and pilgrims also saw these long-distance campaigns as the means to seize estates and booty for themselves." (Tignor 26). There was also the Islamic Invasion of Vienna and the war between Muslim Spain and the Castilians. These conflicts have encouraged the division between