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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is University Lecturer in Comparative and International Politics of the Middle East at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (Routledge: 2006, 2009), Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press: 2008, 2010) and A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and them beyond Orientalism (Columbia/Hurst: 2011). His writings have been translated into many languages and he is a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and TV channels around the world. He can be followed via Twitter at www.twitter.com/Adib_Moghaddam.

Let’s start from the very title of your book. It’s quite resounding, eye-catching and significant. In what terms is your work a “meta-history”? Have you meant to develop a theoretical antithesis to Huntington’s Clash Theory? And what about moving beyond us-them binary opposition?

In general, titles are misleading and sometimes they are chosen for all the wrong reasons. But I choose the term metahistory because it has a methodical significance; it indicates that the book presents a history of a History, in this case a history of the clash idea and its underlying us-versus-them dichotomy. I have been affected, as a latecomer, by Hayden White’s book: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which had a huge impact on historiography and critical theory as it developed between different disciplines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His critical approach to the making of history, his emphasis on the tropes and discursive constructs that amalgamate to create ‘facts’ and historical ‘truths’ has a lot to say about the foundations of our sense of history and, to my mind, the making of national and international politics as well. I see an ‘anti-positivist’ resemblance between the thought of White, Foucault and members of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno. It seems to me that they had quite a positive obsession with smashing foundations - historical, political, ideological or other - and a healthy suspicion towards mainstream representations of ‘history’ or ‘facts’.  Much in the same spirit, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilizations focuses on the way the clash idea could reemerge with such intense vigor in the twentieth century and why it is that it continues to be a part of our political ‘reality’ today. There seem to be an awful lot of people who believe in some inevitable clash between Islam and the west, for instance. You find them everywhere; it is not only the fascist dastard the middle class loves to present as an exception, an aberration of ‘civilized’ society. It is within the mainstream itself where the ‘other’ is sacrificed. Given that I have thought and lived between cultures, I simply wanted to understand what it is that these clash disciples are saying and how it is that they continue to advocate xenophobia and fear, especially among the middle class. So I thought it logical to go back to the way our history has been written for us, and maybe to show that some of this is really science fiction, inventions of a specific period or mind.

Are we living in a post-orientalist era? In what ways if so?

Edward Said has given us some important answers about what went wrong in the ‘west’. But he didn’t say much about the trajectories in the ‘east’. And yet, it seems to me that ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Occidentalism’ need, beget and reinforce each other. Both are involved in a self-validating dialectic. Hence, I wanted to charter instances of ‘othering’ in both discourses. Indeed, I think there has been a rather salient image of Europe and the United States, especially in modern Islamic political thought which is why I focused on the emergence of the ‘west’ from that perspective as well.

You have cautioned that a range of political elements including academics, politicians and journalists have “habituated us to believe in the normality of conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’.” Do you have any specific group in mind who take the clash idea for granted and thus offer strategies for confrontation with the demonized “Other”? Are there any political school or party where one may detect a denser distribution of such elements and a stronger presence of such dispositions? And why in your opinion do they continuously propound and promote the notion of an irreversible clash between potentially competing universalist modernities?

One could refer to the obvious candidates, what is rightly called the ‘ultra rightwing’ in Europe: someone like Geert Wilders who has made a political career out of his clash of civilizations rhetoric. Last year in Germany, Thilo Sarrazin, a former board member of the Bundesbank and mainstream politician, published a bestselling book arguing the degenerative effects of Muslim/Turkish/Arab immigration to Germany. The book sold nearly 2 million copies and Sarrazin was paraded as the new ‘Volksheld’ or national hero in the mainstream media of the country. Today, Muslims are the only topic about which such obviously racist material can be published with great fanfare. There are resurgent right-wing parties in Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France and eastern Europe. For them, Islamophobia is a convenient way to secure votes. They preach the clash between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’ on a daily basis. In the United States, there is an equally disturbing anti-Islamic disposition among some quarters of the neo-conservatives and ultra-Zionist lobbyists. Ultimately, Islamophobia is a convenient way to conduct successful politics these days. It would be naïve, however, to think that belief in the inherent difference between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’ and the inferiority of the former are confined to the fringes of society or to political extremists. Bestselling doyens of the literary world such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis have also made their voices heard, and very loudly indeed. We can find influential adherents to........

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