Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the West–Islam Conflict

Introduction: Huntington's Thesis and Its Relevance

Samuel P. Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order emerged from an essay he published in the journal Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, in which he set forth his central thesis — a thesis he would expand and develop in his later book:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future" (Huntington, 1993, p. 22).

Given the tensions of the time, Huntington's thesis was taken to be largely a reference to the clash in the Middle East, though Huntington also referred to various Asian states and spoke of the Confucian-Islamic countries. His thesis has remained most cogent in terms of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, with many seeing first the Gulf War, then the terrorist attacks, and later the Iraq War as direct evidence of a clash of civilizations of the sort he described. Specifically, the clash is not between the United States and one particular country, even though a war was being fought in Iraq. The real conflict is between ideologies — the West arrayed against Islamic countries. Even if the enemy is identified as Islamic fundamentalism or radicalism, at heart the clash is between the liberal, Christian West and the conservative, Islamic East. Huntington's framework provides a useful lens for analyzing this conflict and for understanding what is at stake.

The Language of Conflict: Crusade and Jihad

The West has tried from the outset to downplay the idea that this is a clash of civilizations as Huntington describes, though the White House made certain missteps that made it seem otherwise. The error came in using the term "crusade" in reference to the war — a term that evokes the conflict between West and East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a conflict clearly rooted in religious difference, and one that angers Muslims who believe the current conflict is yet another case of the West overstepping its bounds and attempting to impose a foreign ideology on the Middle East. Islam commits much the same rhetorical sin by invoking the term jihad, a word that also carries somewhat different meanings in different parts of the world.

The Quran is the chief foundation of Islam and stands as the highest authority on doctrine, ethics, and customs. The Five Pillars of Faith constitute the practical duties of the Muslim, while a secondary division involves the doctrines to be believed — those concerning God, the angels as servants of God, the books (the Quran, the Pentateuch, the Zabur, and the Injil), the prophets, and the resurrection on the last day (Soper, 1951, pp. 215–216).

The concept of jihad as explained by Muhammad refers to the importance of the holy struggle of Islam against that which opposes it. The jihad was not the kind of aggressive holy war envisioned by many of the faithful today; Muhammad expressly prohibited beginning hostilities, stating that "Allah loveth not aggressors" (Gumley & Redhead, 1992, p. 74). Once challenged, however, the Muslim is called upon to fight the enemy wherever they are found. This tenet has had long-term consequences for how the rest of the world perceives Islam:

"It is a fact of world politics that Islam is perceived not as a creed of peace-making compassion, but as an excuse for antique savagery and manic extremism. Muslims have to face the implications of the truth that for many non-Muslims the very word Islam conjures up images of contemporary horror. . . These images have more to do with the odd amalgam of fear and envy which have for so long characterized relations between the west and the Arab world than with the theology of Islam" (Gumley & Redhead, 1992, p. 75).

Islam, the West, and the History of Interference

The term jihad is often translated as "holy war" and has been called the unofficial sixth pillar of Islam. In truth, the term has only been half understood. In Islam, jihad is a highly sensitive technical term with two distinct branches: the lesser jihad and the greater jihad. The greater jihad is the struggle of the individual soul. According to the Quran, man was created primarily for the worship of God, and the individual must therefore strive to achieve this end. In Arabic, striving or struggle is jihad. Struggling to worship God is the greater jihad, meaning working to live a monotheistic life according to the moral principles in the Scriptures. The lesser jihad involves the use of arms or other forms of struggle, and where it is justified, it is to fight oppression. Where oppression exists, it is incumbent upon Muslims to remove it. How the jihad is conducted and how oppression is defined are both sources of considerable contention. Western concern about Islam has deep historical roots, and present Islamic anger toward the West has been developing for many years. The concept of jihad is one reason for this tension, much as the Christian use of the term "crusade" is another.

The Islamic experience with the West has been, from the Islamic point of view, a long history of interference and a refusal to recognize Islam's right to self-determination. In 1943, a popular election in the region was seen as a "renunciation of any continued French interference in the domestic affairs of Syria and Lebanon, [but] the French authorities refused to transfer power to the new local governments" (Cleveland, 2000, p. 224).

Khater (2004) offers a collection of primary documents tracing Middle Eastern history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. A survey of these materials reveals how often the West has misread regional events and how Islamic countries have, in turn, misunderstood the West. Of particular note are the diplomatic cables and correspondence concerning Iran before the revolution and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s, which demonstrate how badly the West misjudged the situation — and how that misreading would have lasting consequences. Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but recognizing how wrongly events were viewed at the time does not inspire confidence that the West has achieved a more accurate understanding of the present situation.

Challenging Huntington: Is the Clash Inevitable?

Gelvin (2008) disagrees with Huntington's vision of an inevitable clash of civilizations, though he acknowledges how widely held this view has become in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Huntington saw the clash as inevitable; Gelvin does not. Gelvin traces the issue back to the sixteenth century and the early history of Islam, seeing the conflict as one between tradition and modernity — though certainly the West represents modernity and Islam a long-standing and largely unchallenged tradition. He also emphasizes that the clash has never been predetermined, but that false steps and poor policies make it increasingly likely as time passes, implying at the same time that better policies could avert it.

Huntington himself says that war between the West and other civilizations may not be inevitable, and he identifies evidence of a steady decline of Western hegemony over the centuries (Huntington, 1996, p. 302). He is less outcome-oriented than many readers have taken him to be, stating: "The overriding lesson of the history of civilizations, however, is that many things are probable but nothing is inevitable. Civilizations can and have reformed and renewed themselves" (Huntington, 1996, p. 303). The current clash between East and West may be just one in a long line of such battles and could give way to a more peaceful long-term relationship, assuming some acceptable middle ground can be found. At the same time, one cannot read Huntington without sensing that he does not regard this as particularly likely.

Indeed, in the final section of his book, Huntington develops a scenario for global war that shows how the entire world could be drawn into the conflict, leading to widespread destruction and the potential end of civilization as it has developed to date. He does not present this as an inevitable outcome, but he clearly regards it as a real possibility. In the broadest sense, Huntington does see some form of conflict as inevitable simply because of a recurring feature of human nature he identifies early in his book: "For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enemies occur across the fault lines between the world's major civilizations" (Huntington, 1996, p. 20).

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

Given that both East and West are subject to many of the same internal forces, the impulse toward conflict can itself be embedded in the cultural make-up of various nation-states, crossing boundaries as peoples understand themselves as part of something larger — in this case, the idea of Western civilization — defined in opposition to the forces of unreason represented by a different cultural system. That other system responds in kind, viewing the West as a threat to the way of life its people have created and cherish.