The Arab Spring: A Reason to Reject Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations Sohail Jouya William Jewell College – Oxford University – Westminister College In the post-9/11 world, Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order attained an almost iconoclastic status and was presented almost as a prophetic text that described the nature of world politics. Huntington proposed that the globe was split into civilizational “zones” that demarked cultural identity, political ideology, and social understanding. In a modern world where these civilizations struggle for power, an inevitable “clash” would occur, mostly between the most powerful civilization’s national moniker and the challenging civilization’s counterpart. After 9/11, a new clash of civilization manifested, replacing the residual Cold War with a civilizational conflict between the Islamic world and the West – most specifically with the US, “Some argue that Islamist attacks represent a [new] transnational terrorism that differs in its timing, methods, lethality and underlying social origins from earlier Cold War-era leftist terrorism. Spurred by the Iranian revolution and post-Cold War international system in which the superpower rivalry was replaced by a new set of civilizational rivalries (Crenshaw & Robison).” Huntington’s work seemed to anticipate this apparent clash and described the Islamic world as one that harbored resentment and an anti-democratic ethos. This mythology was long circulated as unquestionable truth, an accurate portrayal of the Middle East, the Arab world,
The Arab Spring: A Reason to Reject Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations Sohail Jouya William Jewell College – Oxford University – Westminister College In the post-9/11 world, Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order attained an almost iconoclastic status and was presented almost as a prophetic text that described the nature of world politics. Huntington proposed that the globe was split into civilizational “zones” that demarked cultural identity, political ideology, and social understanding. In a modern world where these civilizations struggle for power, an inevitable “clash” would occur, mostly between the most powerful civilization’s national moniker and the challenging civilization’s counterpart. After 9/11, a new clash of civilization manifested, replacing the residual Cold War with a civilizational conflict between the Islamic world and the West – most specifically with the US, “Some argue that Islamist attacks represent a [new] transnational terrorism that differs in its timing, methods, lethality and underlying social origins from earlier Cold War-era leftist terrorism. Spurred by the Iranian revolution and post-Cold War international system in which the superpower rivalry was replaced by a new set of civilizational rivalries (Crenshaw & Robison).” Huntington’s work seemed to anticipate this apparent clash and described the Islamic world as one that harbored resentment and an anti-democratic ethos. This mythology was long circulated as unquestionable truth, an accurate portrayal of the Middle East, the Arab world,