The dispute about the Ramsay Centre sponsored Foundation for Western Civilisation had everything for those who like pub brawls: university governance, teachers unions, Howard and Abbott, culture wars, academic freedom, the power of money in establishing institutes, and a three-line whip for media bullies. These issues have been noisily herded and milked.
The question least discussed but perhaps most intriguing is precisely what may be meant by Western Civilisation. Protagonists in the debate seemed certain of its meaning, praising or damning its ideological associations, but rarely troubling to share their understanding of it.
Yet neither western nor civilisation nor their joining in the sonorous phrase, Western Civilisation, is self-explanatory. If Western Civilisation is taken to include its religious traditions, it immediately extends to the Middle Eastern cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. If it is defined by its antecedents, it must include the Roman Empire, which included much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. If it is identified geographically with Western Europe, it must take account of the Jewish and Muslim contribution to Spain.
If Western Civilisation is defined by the intellectual traditions which shaped it, it must certainly take account of the philosophical and literary tradition of Greece and Rome. But it must also give full weight to the ways in which this tradition was filtered through Christian thinkers and institutions whose origin lay in the Middle East and in modern day Turkey.
The Christian tradition cannot be understood without reference to Christian thinkers and schools in Syria, Egypt and modern Turkey who helped shaped Christianity in Western Europe. Nor can the flowering in the western half of Christianity and culture in the 12th and 13th century be understood without taking account of the contribution of the Islamic thinkers in recovering lost sources and through their scientific and philosophical studies.
All this is to say that what is meant by western, by any definition, cannot be defined exclusively. It can be understood only through complex networks of interlocking relationships between people, schools of thought and centres of power and trade that in today's terms are not western. Those relationships were ones of interdependence, even when they were described by the participants as hostile.
Nor is civilisation easy to define. Its use is often evaluative rather than descriptive. It is normally a laudatory phrase — opposed to primitivity and barbarity, and normally associated with the development of towns and cities, with a literate culture, long