Abstract
Hassan thought the reason of the never-ending clash between East and West is the difference between their varied time perception. Albeit accepting many of Hassan's claims, the author believes the difference between their time perception cannot be the sole reason of the conflict. Examining the conflict through power relations and seeing violence as a tool of it, the study aimed to show how structural violence helps sustaining global, national, local, and domestic economic, social, and cultural inequalities. As far as we know, the legal structures that sustained state-mandated overt discrimination have been dismantled in the West, meaning the equal treatment of all races and religions under the law. However, it is obvious that there are structural obstacles preventing the law from being practiced the way it is intended. Through the concepts ‘context' and ‘space', the researcher will try to explain how discriminative practices are sustained, produced, legitimized, which pave the way for the conflicts to go on (e.g., East and West).
TopIntroduction
Hassan (2018) in his essay “Sources of Resilience in Political Islam: Sacred time, earthly pragmatism, and digital media” pursued the answer of the intertwined questions of how could the groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS somewhat achieve to survive even though they are economically and technologically inferior to western countries they fight against and how have western democracies been unable to adopt coherent and long-term strategies to defeat the enemy, considering they seem to have the necessary tools to handle. According to him, political Islam and western modernity consider the time from a difference angle. Political Islam derives it from Quran mandating Muslims to consider time sacred and preordained and live for afterlife and western modernity’s temporal approach that judges everything, including time by efficiency, which creates asynchronicity between the West and political Islam explaining the persistence of the present conflict ‘Clash of Temporalities.’
What Hassan suggests might make us think that Muslim and Western civilizations not only experience and perceive time differently but also they turn out to be seem to live in another time period. Albeit accepting many of his claims on time and the proposed difference of perceived time between the aforementioned civilizations, I would suggest explaining the conflict might require dealing with the problem from many aspects. Considering that it is a conflict, even escalating to warfare, the author believes that violence should be the key concept as it is something conducted verbally, psychologically and physically to show one’s hate towards others, keep them under control and harm or destroy them.
Who or which actor should be allowed to commit violence, what has been legitimizing it and under which conditions can it be considered legitimate to use it are the questions which thinkers have been striving to answer. In a Hobbesian perspective, some might believe the authority of the sovereign, including the right to commit violence should be absolute to prevent a situation, named state of nature where every man fights against the other. Over years, following the limitation of sovereignty, the way the state conducts violence has dramatically changed in Foucauldian sense, at least the way the punishment is carried out has transformed from criminals being punished in public as a spectacle by means of states showing publicly that they do their part of the social contract into prison sentence that has seemingly no aim to make it a public show. However, the Hobbesian perspective remains somewhat same for ‘the modern world’ characterized by nation states and positive law, which means that states and citizens keep their word to obey the social contract metaphorically signed by our ancestors.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Space: Space is any media, mean or medium through which a message is sent and received. Its types are so varied from face-to-face communication and hard copy print to any electronic communication (e.g., radio, television, and digital formats). The reason why this concept is not reduced to the catchword ‘media’ but specified as the space is because it is aimed to reflect on the complexity of communication and interaction (human-human, human-machine and machine-machine).
Episteme: Episteme is the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses within a particular epoch in an unconscious manner.
Context: It is the focal event that cannot be properly understood, interpreted appropriately, or described in a relevant fashion, unless one looks beyond the event itself to other phenomena (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992, 3). In this study, concepts such as subjectiveness-belongingness (self-other perspective stemming from belonging varied groups, class, identity and geography. It is preferred to use a newly coined concept to explain it ‘discourse community’ and episteme-historical a priori (Foucaldian periodicity) and language-discourse are used as the dimensions of context,.
Structural Violence: A type of violence that might include physical or psychological elements or both and depending on the context might operate latently or manifestly, committed systematically against a certain group of people (or just a member of certain group of people) to discriminate and oppress for creating and sustaining global, national, local and domestic economic, social and cultural inequalities.
Discriminative Sub-Discourse: Subjective, veiled, and non-public discourses, immersed in particular culture or community, namely discourse communities. They contain hate speech against other groups in a particular society to be able to reproduce the related communities which people generally hesitate to use due to the fact that there might be legal, moral or social sanctions, especially in democratic and stable countries and they are based on the circulation of knowledge gained through not reason but speculation, which makes it impossible to figure out if a sub-discourse is authentic or not as they are highly subjective due to the fact that they are based on cultural values. It is not argued that these discourses never become visible in this type of countries, but people who use them are generally regarded as unstable and they are criticized and marginalized by almost each section of the society, including the very cultural or ideological group the one using that speech.
Discourse Community: A community one generally cannot participate in but belongs to due to the fact that people are born to a particular culture (even a sub-culture) within a society, which together with ideology they gain in time. So, this type of communities frames the way people perceive their external environment. Discourse communities produce a set of discourse to be able to reproduce itself, its identity and ideology. So, they are ideologically laden communities.
Power: X makes y to act against his/her will.