Islamic and Western Civilizations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Islamic and Western Civilizations - Essay Example However, there is a section of the academic community that has opposed the clash theory from the start and continues to attack it as having proceeded on the wrong premise. This paper assessed the rationale and validity of Huntington's thesis and evaluated the logic of the arguments lined up by critics against it. The new world order seen by Huntington (1996) after the Cold War, in which the bloodiest clashes will occur between Islam and the West, is actually prefigured by events in early history that included the European forays of Islamic forces in Europe. Troops carrying the Islamic flag supposedly attacked the Ottoman Turks in Vienna and parts of Eastern Europe and conquered but were later repulsed from Iberia. In effect, there had always been an ideological conflict between Islam and Christianity, on which Western civilization is based, because of the universal belief that one's religion is always better than the others. For this reason, followers of one religion seek to convert others and this becomes the source of conflicts. Huntington in his book Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order indicated that through the years, as Western countries prospered and outpaced other regions that practice non-Christian religions, the concept of universalism acquired more than religious meaning in the West, which began to believe that all civilizations should adopt Western values. This is perceived to be the underlying reason behind the US invasion of Iraq and its continued presence in that Muslim country. This becomes a source of great resentment for Muslims, especially the Islamic fundamentalists. All these historical and modern factors combined have led and would farther lead to bloody clashes between the Islamic and Western civilizations. Among the more recent expressions of such anti-Western resentment were 9/11, the Afghanistan-Iraq conflict, and the Israeli-Hizbollah-Lebanese wars in 2006. Fault Line Wars In Huntington's view, conflicts between different civilizations manifest itself in two forms - fault line conflicts and core state conflicts. Fault line conflicts are those that occur between neighboring states belonging to different civilizations or within states that are home to populations from different civiliz