“Clash of Civilizations” at Twenty-Five: Reappraising Huntington’s Legacy: View from the Arab World

This summer, American academia will celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Samuel Huntington’s most controversial article, later book, on the post-Cold War era. “Clash of Civilizations?” was published for the first time in the summer issue of the semi-scholarly journal Foreign Affairs, and was considered the manifesto of US foreign policy after the fall of the Soviet Union. With his publication, Huntington established the foundation of what would become the dominant and unchallenged narrative discourse in world politics during the 1990s and 2000s, especially after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Huntington created the discourse of “Islam is the enemy” and “Islam is the new bogeyman,” to use Stephen Walt’s analogy. Now, twenty-five years after its publication, this article evaluates whether Huntington’s assumption was correct. Does Islam really represent a global threat? And are Muslims the bogeymen of the twenty-first century? The answer, according to this article, is emphatically no!