Samuel Huntington Religion

During the course of this analytical paper, we will look at the impact of warfare on world societies and people's consciousness, during the period of the 1500s in world history, called the Early Modern Period; also, we will discuss the consequences of the Great War. Additionally, apart from studying the altering methods of warfare and their magnitude, we will look up to different motivations of statesmen and peoples who declare wars or engage in several types of violent actions towards certain societies. Throughout the paper, we will stretch any pertinent evidence at appropriate points of what war leaders, intellectuals and common citizens view war and violence, which they experience during their life. Some of the examples include the Arabs that vastly expanded the world of Islam, yet were traditionally predatory in nature, which benefited more from the taxation of the conquered than from their conversion. There are also examples like the Mongol Empire, which was too, predatory, but differently from the Arab

When a larger culture meets a smaller culture, the larger culture decides how to react to the smaller culture. The larger culture can leave the smaller culture alone, it can co-exist, or it can force the assimilation of the smaller culture trying to destroy it. The leader of a culture whether the smaller or larger, can abuse their power even though they mean to strengthen or simply maintain their people and culture. A smaller culture’s leader can misuse their power accidentally by trying to maintain the survival of their people, at the expense of their culture. In addition, a larger culture’s leaders can abuse their power over the smaller culture by forcing assimilation, and justifying their abuse of power. The article “From Rez Life” authored

This direct linkage between modernization and westernization is, in fact, historically inaccurate. The history of technology development has actually indicated that the ideology or culture doesn’t really influence the modernization. When adopting modernisation, countries, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, doesn’t necessarily need to change its own culture. While most Muslim-majority countries are still undeveloped countries, the driving force is not their culture, but instead the clash of civilization itself. The fault line wars characterised by Huntington in fact have majorly taken place in the Middle East, including the war on terror and the Arab–Israeli War. This clash of civilisation characterised by fault line wars, in fact, leads to the chaos and poverty there. The appearance of this pre-modern image of those Muslim Countries is not the justification for the westernisation but the result of the clash of civilizations. Therefore, the inverted causality is inaccurate, and shall be corrected, as the clash of civilization can, in fact, hardly help those

When analyzing the current relationship between eastern and western cultures, it seems as if tensions and conflict arise from a complex and layered set of problems. These issues range from political, economic and military stances to opposing cultural beliefs. The genesis of these

Huntington that hypothesised a new post-Cold War world order. Prior to the end of the Cold War, societies were divided by ideological differences such as the struggle between democracy and communism. Huntington’s primary thesis argues, “The most important distinctions among peoples are [no longer] ideological, political or economic. They are cultural.” Huntington makes a very persuasive argument as to how new patterns of conflict will occur along the boundaries of different cultures and patterns of cohesion will be found within the cultural boundaries. The book goes into extensive detail of how world systems between civilizations, which he divides by culture into 7 main global civilizations, are impacted on an international relations scale by this changing nature of conflict. He focuses a great deal on the West’s ability to maintain military superiority through the nonproliferation of emerging powers. In particular relation to 9/11 he focuses on the emerging influence of Islamic culture (which he classifies as it’s own civilization) being quintessential in the emerging new global conflict arisen out of hundreds of years of conflict, military and cultural, between Western civilization and Islamic civilization. The clear limitation of this work is that it is based on his own perception of history and is purely a hypothesis, however it clearly has a great degree of validity to it as we have already seen through the last decade in the rise of terrorism as the new global conflict. This book will assist my essay writing particularly in analysing how 9/11 marked the beginning of a new era of global conflict between powers larger than nation states alone, and thus how this has created increasingly complex paradigms of unprecedented effects on international

Huntington introduced a very controversial and debatable theory of clash of civilizations seems to prove itself correct, with the Western Christianity on one hand and the Orthodox Christianity and Islam on the other. He states that clash of civilization is unavoidable and is predicted in the near future. Today, we can already see those tensions and conflicts between civilizations, due to differences in cultures and traditions. While West is becoming more modern, the Islamic world is going back to its roots. Traditions, language and religion separate two civilizations causing conflicts that lead to violence (Huntigton, 25). This clash was mostly highlighted in 9/11 terroristic attack, which separated the West from the East.

Samuel Huntington sees an emerging world organized on the basis of "civilizations". Societies that share cultural affinities cooperate with each other and the efforts to force a society into another civilization will fail; countries gather around the leading States of their civilization. This description of the process of new structures of international relations that Huntington sees developing, leads him to consider that the greatest risks of violence and confrontation lie in the Westerns’ claims to universality, which are leading them to increasingly get into conflict with other civilizations, particularly Islam and China; local conflicts, especially between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate new alliances and lead to an escalation of violence, which will usually lead the dominant states to make an attempt to stop them.

Ansary says thats its like two parallel universes, the West and the heartland of Islam existed alongside each other for centuries – and ignored each other. For a long time, writes Ansary, each regarded itself as the centre of world history. He comments that it was only in the 17th century that the two perspectives began to overlap. “And because the West was more powerful, its narrative prevailed and suppressed the other.”

His idea that conflict, no longer stemming from economic ideological differences, would now stem from differences in tradition and culture was in part correct. In broad terms, this is where much conflict comes from. Cultural differences lead to clashes of nations. Where traditions are rubbing together in adjoining nations, this is a fault line for conflict. Much like an earthquake fault line, there is constant tension, and while there may not be an earthquake, there is a threat of it erupting. However, Huntington was also incorrect. In his effort to group people together to show where conflict would truly happen, he was much too broad. He addresses a source of conflict, but not the only source of conflict. He puts much broader groups together that also hold different opinions, such as grouping the West together and grouping the Islamic world together. According to Huntington “the West versus the Rest” (39), although there are many more worlds and many more conflicts than just the West and everyone else. The Islamic world is too large to group together as a singular group, especially when there is such great conflict of Shia’s and

The region of the Middle East and its inhabitants have always been a wonder to the Europeans, dating back to the years before the advent of Islam and the years following the Arab conquest. Today, the Islamic world spreads from the corners of the Philippines to the far edges of Spain and Central Africa. Various cultures have adopted the Islamic faith, and this blending of many different cultures has strengthened the universal Islamic culture. The religion of Islam has provided a new meaning to the lives of many people around the world. In the Islamic world, the religion defines and enriches culture and as a result the culture gives meaning to the individual. Islam is not only a religion, it is in its own way a culture. It may be this very

In his final scholarly work, Huntington reflects on American identity and its threats. In many ways, it is similar to his influential work The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) in which he suggests that neither ideological nor economic issues would be the causes of conflicts in the post-Cold War world order; rather, he suggests that different values, such as language and religion would divide the world. Who Are We? is a reprise of this theory on a micro level as Huntington turns his focus to the internal structures of American society. Although the book was published twelve years ago, its theme is of greater relevance than ever in the modern, globalised world. It is a survey of American identity in which Hun-tington

In 1993, Samuel Huntington, a teacher of political sciences at the University of Harvard, composed an article in the diary "Outside Affairs", which was very nearly happening to conspicuous significance for the field of International Relations. Huntington's article displayed a yearning target: the point was to give a hypothetical system to decipher the majority of the contentions that had broken out subsequent to the end of the twentieth century notwithstanding figure the presence of future clashes. Huntington asserts that the world has been in a non-ideological period since the end of the Cold War and that the part of the country state has been less and less critical. Thus, Huntington's expresses that, from now on, human advancements are to

The last aspect to point out in more recent times compared to the crusades and colonialism is the cold war, and how that has and will continue to impact the opposing views of western and Islamic societies. According to Samuel Huntington, the cold war the world was separated into the First, Second and Third Worlds, and he sees divisions are no longer relevant and it being “…far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.” Distinguishing people in the correct way can help further people understanding of the cultural and educate people enough to not fall into such prejudices and stereotypes. Huntington believed that there will be more conflict between the two societies in time to come. One way he expresses this is by the post-cold war conflict in the Persian Gulf, and Caucasus and Bosnia, now although these were not full-scale war between the civilizations, it still involved many “…elements of civilizational rallying, which seemed to become more important as the conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.” With that, it is notable to see all the differences that has risen recently between China and the United States in such areas

Since many religions have started in the Middle East, it has become the center for erupting conflicts. For instance, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been in the news for many reasons. Both groups want control of the God given land that they both claim is theirs, according to God, and what had happened in the past. The result of the conflict is religious terrorism (PBS, 1). Continuing, some Middle Eastern politics have been in conflict, even dividing communities of the

In the history of the world, times of war have always outnumbered times of peace. Numerous causes, both known and unknown, have fueled this need for war between groups of people. As ‘civilizations’ or religions, there is no inherent ethic reason to declare full, complete, and unwavering wars on one another. Instead, non-religious or cultural reasons such as the gathering or growth of wealth and land lead to wars. Statements suggesting otherwise, such as Samuel Huntington’s article "The Clash of Civilizations?” should be treated as at best, a large misunderstanding, and at worse deliberate fearmongering. As stated by Edward W. Said on the article, The Clash of Ignorance, “In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.”. Clearly put, the concept of a “Clash of Civilizations” does nothing to explain the historical times of war and peace between Islam and Christianity.