‘Question Every Assumption.’
Author and climate change scholar, Habiba Ahut Daggash, is producing African scholarship in a field otherwise dominated by Western scientists. ‘A Eurocentric perspective of what is possible and acceptable,’ she explains, ‘has dominated the discourse and this has led to many books proclaiming “global solutions” to climate change.’
By Habiba Daggash
June 3, 2020
Habiba Ahut Daggash. OJIMA ABALAKA
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
My daily schedule growing up in Maiduguri, in north-eastern Nigeria included attending school in the daytime, Islamiyya (as Islamic schools are called in the north of the country) in the late afternoon, and extra lessons at home for either or both in the evenings. As you might expect, there wasn’t much time to develop a reading habit outside my textbooks. Ideal weekend afternoons that weren’t spent in lessons or playing with friends were spent flicking through the publications I could find around the house. My dad is an architect and was a public servant for many years. He often returned from work or travel with troves of newspapers, architecture and lifestyle magazines—Conde Nast publications, The Economist, GQ and the like—and stacked them in his sitting room or private study.
My parents also invested in a lot of general knowledge books (encyclopaedias, factbooks, National Geographic) that filled the shelves of our playroom. My mum’s library consisted mostly of biographies, world history and Islamic theology volumes which looked clunky and boring; only the most uninspiring of Maiduguri days compelled me to skim through them. Unfortunately, it took the completion of my Master’s degree—my final departure from the world of engineering textbooks—to begin to read for pleasure. Despite my younger self not being an avid reader, the stacks of books that now litter my bedroom—from Gai Eaton to William Dalrymple to Lang Leav—show that the few moments that I had with books in my childhood may have instilled a latent curiosity that is finally being satisfied.
If you could rewrite a classic book/text, which would it be and why?
Somewhat ashamedly, the closest I have come to reading the books often considered to be classics are brief skims of
The Great Gatsby and
Brave New World. I found the writing arcane and unrelatable, so I stopped. Granted I tried to read them early in my literary journey and for the wrong reasons, so perhaps another try is due. That being said, Daniel Kahnemahn’s
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a book that I consider to be a classic. Not a change per se, but I would like to see the experiments that he conducted on optimism and loss aversion replicated somewhere like Nigeria.
What’s the last book/article you disagreed with, and why?
A Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel Huntington. In his 1993
Foreign Affairs article that was sufficiently well-received to be expanded into this book, Huntington, then one of America’s eminent political scientists, proclaimed that in the post-Cold War world, conflict will be driven not by ideology or economics, but cultural differences. I disagreed with the book for several reasons. Firstly, his treatment of civilizations—which he defined as the broadest cultural grouping of humans—as homogenous failed to consider the diversity of beliefs and practices present within them, which have been sources of conflict historically. Since the book was published, the most volatile conflicts—sectarian wars in the Middle East, Kurdish-Turkish clashes, insurgency in the Maghreb—have been intra-civilizational.
Secondly, Huntington betrayed his ignorance of non-Western cultures with generalizations that weren’t supported by any empirical evidence. Amongst them were the inherent anti-pluralism/liberalism of Islamic and Sinic civilizations, and the militarism and anti-nationalism of the former. The suggestion that a single ‘Muslim culture’ alone exists is at best misinformed, and at worst dubious to fit a narrative. David Brooks’
review echoed my sentiments when he wrote that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error of ascribing to traits ‘qualities that are actually determined by context’.
Finally, a healthy dose of Americophilia is expected from such reads but it was nauseating in this one. One might think that the rapid economic growth of Asia in the absence of Western-style liberal democracy would urge the author to rethink his belief in it as a prerequisite for development. Instead, Huntington doubles down on the need for the US to expand its political and economic alliances by exporting its political system and fending off an increasingly assertive Asia.
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