In 1993, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted that the next great global conflict would be waged not on economic and ideological lines as in the Cold War, but on cultural ones. “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future,” he wrote in his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” published in Foreign Affairs. Huntington‘s thesis, which argued that the main “clash” would be between the West and Islam, borrowed heavily from the work of Orientalist Bernard Lewis, specifically his 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” “We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies,” he stated in The Atlantic. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion…

---