"Islam has bloody borders." So wrote Samuel Huntington in "The
Clash of Civilizations?," his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later
expanded (minus the question mark) into a best-selling book.
Huntington argued that, eclipsing past eras of national and
ideological conflict, "the battle lines of the future" would be
drawn along the "fault lines between civilizations." Here,
according to Huntington, was where current and coming
generations would define the all-important "us" versus "them."
At the time of its writing, "The Clash of Civilizations?" had,
beyond the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something
to recommend it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed
especially plausible as applied to the "crescent-shaped Islamic
bloc" from the Maghreb to the East Indies. In the Balkans, for
example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats of Bosnian and later
Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were either skirmishing or
at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the
Caucasus, there was all-out war bet