THE NOTION OF THE INTERCULTURAL AS THREAT

Oliver Leaman

Oliver Leaman is Professor of Philosophy at University of
Kentucky. He specialises in the philosophy of religions, in particular
Islamic philosophy. He has written a number of books in the area, including
Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, Averroes and his Philosophy, and
has edited, with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the History of Islamic Philosophy and
Friendship of East and West: Philosophical Perspectives. He has written
widely on Asian philosophy, in particular Key Concepts in Eastern Philosophy
and Eastern Philosophy.

We often speak of one culture affecting another, or one culture
developing out of another culture. This can be problematic. Orientalism sees
Islam, for example, as predominantly something different from how it sees
itself, and as owing far more to the cultures out of which it developed than it
is prepared to acknowledge. This is profoundly insulting to Islam, since it
implies that it is not an independent religion but is a cultural phenomenon
dependent on what preceded it. On the other hand, there clearly is a strong link
between Islam and the preceding civilizations, a link which Islam itself
acknowledges and celebrates. We should not analyse the links between
civilizations as being a matter of either total identity or complete difference,
however. We can use the notion of conversation to explain how in a dialogue the
individuality of the participants in the discussion is not compromised by the
fact that they make allowances and accommodations to the other in order to allow
the conversation to continue. This is a useful model to explain the relation of
the intercultural, and it has the advantage also of respecting the relative
autonomies of both cultures. Does this mean that it must be accepted that all
cultures are equal to each other? This is not the case, there are perfectly good
criteria for distinguishing between cultures and valuing some more than others,
but the use of conversation as an explanatory model will suggest that
differentiating between the content of conversation does not imply
differentiating between how we value the speakers themselves. It will be argued
that this analogy provides a superior way of understanding the links between
cultures than many of the alternative theories.