The West Faces Two Islams

Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirty years later, however, and a quarter-century after 9/11, the principal fault line runs through Islam itself, separating two ideological worlds. Within Western diaspora communities, Islam has become intertwined with Third-Worldism and postcolonial theory, both of which see Western imperialism as the great evil of the modern era.

Meantime, much of the Middle East and Asia has turned toward pragmatism, normalization, and acceptance of Western predominance as a geopolitical reality. The gap between these rival outlooks now exceeds the divide between Islam and the West that Huntington anticipated when his book first appeared.