الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

T HE C LASH OF C IVILIZATIONS : A C ONFLICTOLOGY P ERSPECTIVE

Abbas Aroua The “Clash of Civilizations” thesis prompted a wide debate when Samuel P. Huntington publicised it with his 1993 controversial paper in Foreign Affairs (1) , followed by his essay on “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” published in 1996 (2) . This thesis gained a renewed interest in the aftermath of the 9/11 event. The thesis can be summarized by the idea that: “In the post-Cold War world the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural”. It predicts that “conflict between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization”. Huntington divides the world into nine “major civilizations”: African, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Japanese, Latin American, Orthodox, Sinic, and Western. According to Huntington “the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future,” and “a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic- Confucian states,” with an emphasis on the Muslim world which displays “bloody borders”. Based on this thesis the author issued a set of recommendations that should be followed in the interest of the West among which: a) “to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components”;

(1) Samuel P. Huntington. “The Clash of Civilizations ?” Foreign Affairs 72 (3):22-49, 1993. (2) Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . New York : Simon & Schuster, 1996.

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