Religion and Politics in the Muslim World

Abstract

in seeking to understand the role of religion in the Muslim world, many popular commentators have turned to Samuel P. Huntington's provocative and controversial thesis of a “clash of civilizations.” This account emphasized that the end of the Cold War brought new dangers. Huntington argued: In the new world ,…the most pervasive, important and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between people belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations…And the most dangerous cultural conflicts are those along the fault lines between civilizations…For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other. For Huntington, Marxist class warfare, and even the disparities between rich and poor nations, have been overshadowed in the twenty-first century by Weberian culture. This influential account appeared to offer insights into the causes of violent ethno-religious conflicts exemplified by Bosnia, the Caucuses, the Middle East, and Kashmir. It seemed to explain the failure of political reform to take root in many Islamic states, despite the worldwide resurgence of electoral democracies around the globe. The framework seemed to provide a powerful lens that the American media used to interpret the underlying reasons for the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and subsequent developments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Commentators often saw 9/11 as a full-scale assault on the global hegemony of America, in particular, and a reaction by Islamic fundamentalists against Western culture, in general. Nevertheless, the Huntington thesis has been highly controversial. The claim of rising ethnic conflict in the post–Cold War era has come under repeated and sustained attack. Many scholars have challenged the existence of a single Islamic culture stretching all the way from Jakarta to Lagos, let alone one that held values deeply incompatible with democracy. What has been less widely examined, however, is systematic empirical evidence of whether the publics in Western and Islamic societies share similar or deeply divergent values, and, in particular, whether any important differences between these cultures rest on democratic values (as Huntington claims) or on social values (as modernization theories suggest).