Samuel Huntington'sThe Clash Of Civilizations?

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’s controversial article “The Clash of Civilizations?” was first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and was subsequently turned into a book in 1996 titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. As this paper will show Huntington’s work can be seen as a product of the post-Cold War context it was written in. Huntington’s article takes a new perspective on the new world order and outlines a different way a thinking about how future world conflicts will unfold. Since the initial journal article was published in 1993 there has been a great deal of response from academics and also from Huntington himself. A majority of the responses come in the form of critiques, with the authors offering their own insight into how the post-Cold War World will operate. Although the validity of Huntington’s arguments have been questioned, it did create a great deal of controversy in the academic world. As Huntington explained in the preface of his 1996 book, the original article published in Foreign Affairs created more discussion in three years than any other article published in the journal since the 1940s.

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

The civilizations, as identified by Huntington are Sinic [Chinese or Confusious], Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox [Russian], Western [Europe, North American, Australia, New Zealand], Latin American and possibly African. And it is among these groups that share a “common interest and common values” and have a “common culture or civilization” that will lead to more interdependence on members of the same civilization and less dependent on the West. Huntington’s theory is that the West has had [at one time or another] a negative impact on every other civilization, and this has led to a decline of power and influence around the world, especially the Islam civilization. Therefore he predicts, “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Is it possible that the religious friction between Muslims and American Christians was caused by a single historical event? If so, Thomas Kidd, the author of American Christians and Islam, points to the Barbary wars as a critical dispute that may explain the modern global religious conflict. In his book, Kidd addresses the global war between Christians and Muslims from the colonial period to the age of terrorism. By tracing the role of Islam in the minds of American Christians, intimidation combined with a lust for conversion is revealed. Kidd notes that during his research he found Western Christians writings from the 19th century that stands in continuity with contemporary themes of Islam.

Often people see or hear are false, is simply self-deception. The In this world, everyone has a sustenance, religion is the blind worship of supernatural and formed. With the feelings of people, they are willing to accept the world. On the contrary, because of many religious beliefs of their own problems caused by disputes, and even caused a war. The most famous should be jihad, according to the Christian point of view, the medieval Christian Church to recover the name of the Holy Land launched by the Crusades is a religious war. The main body of the "holy war" is Christianity, the warriors are both Christians and knights. War and religion are linked to the development of human society from the fetishism to the monotheism of the inevitable

These constitute a “Cosmic War”, which humanizes—including all human flaws—the everlasting larger-than-life conflict between bad and evil. The cosmic war can evidently find roots in the narratives of all religions, as this paper shows how analogous the idea behind Christian Crusades to Islamic Jihads.

Bin Laden openly perpetuates conflict between Islam and the West. “This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.,” the al-Qaeda leader said in October 2001, yet “this is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders.” From Bin Laden’s perspective, this “clash of civilizations” between Americans and the West has been under way for centuries and it is just the most recent incarnation of the Christian Crusaders. In October 2001, the Arabic satellite news channel aired an interview in which Bin Laden expressed his views on Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. The following is a summary of bin Laden’s points in this interview:

and Islam are both religions whose followers still are at war within the countries of the middleeast

Samuel Huntington thesis has lead to a lot of critique,this has to do with the attention and popularity it received because it deals with foreign politics.The thesis faced it first criticism with the sorting of the civilization, it included Islamic,Latin America, Hindu, Japanese,etc. This sorting of the races has been chronicle to be highly troublesome.Zlokhi states the categorization is exceedingly”arbitrary”, since Huntington did not make clear what factors construe a state under a peculiar civilization(Zlokhi,2013).

The debate between whether religion cause war or not based on their impression of religion; furthermore, it is unreasonably clear about what does and does not permit like a religion. Countries such as Islam are fated while certain others, like nationalism, are subjectively ignored. Authors used different theories such as absolutist, divisive, and absurd to explain why religion is so predisposed to violence. Sometimes authors combine these arguments to make their case.

Samuel Huntington has made famous his thesis "the clash of civilizations", which was developed in his article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and in the book that followed, in which the author expanded his thesis and reaffirmed the validity of his theory after the success and controversy that followed the publication of his article. In fact, the “civilizational” approach of conflicts today is now intrinsically linked to a comprehensive theory of international relations, which Samuel Huntington has developed by giving it an important value and a dominant paradigm

Lately there has been a thought that the difference in Civilizations is another issue that may cause a conflict. Starting from World War I the arguments raised by nations were over an ideology: fascism vs. communism, communism vs. democracy. Some people believe that the next step would be a war based on a cultural sense and religion. Such war would unite people with similar beliefs, views on the world, language, tradition and history. They believe the conflict of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations [1].

Samuel Huntington, the author of the clash of the civilisations believes that the World will eventually divide in accordance with cultural lines, and not political lines. According to Huntington, “the thriving East Asian and Muslim societies will soon challenge Western dominance, and the United States being the World leader will need to reevaluate its policies on foreign invention and domestic immigration to remain a major player.” During the Cold War, the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Huntington views these ties as insignificant now and states that the remaking of the World order will be based upon cultural similarity. The different thriving civilisations according to him today are the Western civilisation comprising of North America and Western Europe, the Muslim civilisation, the Orthodox Civilisation led by Russia, the Chinese civilisation, the Hindu civilisation, the Japanese civilisation, the Latin American civilisation and the African civilisation. Huntington’s proposition of the division of the World according to cultural lines has been backed by the use of various examples by him; examples of events that have taken place in the past.

In The Clash of civilizations Huntington argued that the future conflict would be different in the Post-Cold war era. In which different ideologies would not be the main reason for world problem but instead it would be because of the differences between cultures. The division of power would be placed in the civilizations that have the similar cultural norms. Huntington states that the “most dangerous enmities occur across fault lines between major civilizations” (20). This argued that foreign affairs cannot be peaceful or accommodating rather that these affairs go onto the basis of the influence of power based on different civilizations societal norms. The major societies that Huntington included were the western, Sinic, Islamic and Orthodox civilizations. The “ fault lines” between these societies