The Clash of Civilizations Free Essay Example, 1750 words

Another controversial observation of Huntington (1998, pp. 66) is that the population of Muslims is increasing significantly and their proportion in the world population would ensure their domination of the world. The major clash that Huntington (1998, pp. 185) has foreseen is between the Eastern world led by China and the Muslim world for dominating the world. Further Islam is equated with orthodoxy and authoritarianism by Huntington (1998, pp. 126). The conclusions made by Huntington (1998) have invited both criticism and rave reviews. But his arguments have neglected the class equations and also the gender and sub-racial divides that exist within a race or a civilization. Overall his arguments can be called nothing but too deductive and one-sided. The making of a society or a civilization is a historical process and a complex interplay of multitudes of factors. The racial or religious aspect can counted as only one among the many. In particular, the notions of Huntington regarding the Muslim people have been reflective of a racial prejudice. The world’s Muslim population has never been a monolithic block as envisaged by Huntington (Gelvin, 2008, pp. 3). We will write a custom essay sample on The Clash of Civilizations or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now It has been aptly observed that â€Å"in the case of the Islamic civilization, †¦interests tied to particular states have repeatedly triumphed over Islamic or pan-Arabs segments† (as cited by Lubjuhn, 2010, pp. 7). And when Huntington says that â€Å"Islam has bloody borders†, what he means is that Muslims, as a civilization has been inherently violent in their nature because of certain characteristics of their religion. While making this comment, he is forgetting the blood that has been shed and lives been lost in the crusades, in the Vietnam war, in Hiroshima and recently in the war against terrorism by the West. Compared to that, the blood shed by Islam has been far more less (Little and Wickham-Jones, 2000, pp. 56). Huntington (1998, pp. 20) has used the terminology, â€Å"fault line conflicts†, to describe the so called inter-civilizational clashes happening between adjacent states belonging to two different civilizations and also inside states where populations from two different civilizations co-exist. He has termed these fault line conflicts as the most dangerous of all kinds of conflicts and has predicted that these fault lines would become â€Å"the central lines of conflict in global politics† (Huntington, 1998, pp. 125). The major fault line in the world as drawn by Huntington is between Islam and the West but this approach has been described as erratic by scholars like Milton-Edwards (2004, pp. 99).