Part 1: Why Muslims Must Participate in the Political Process in the United States

Part 2: How do Muslims Participate in the American Political Landscape?

Part 3: Why a Third-party Choice is Relevant?

Part 4: How do Muslims Contribute to Generating Hope through their Role in US Elections?

Part 5: How do Muslims Interact with Non-Muslims in America?

Part 6: Are Our Mosques and Islamic Centers Doing Their Job Properly?

Part 7: Role of the Mosque in Madinah under the Prophet’s Leadership and Mosques Today

Part 8: American Muslims, the Role of Mosques and Common Civilizational Values

Part 9: Is there a Clash of Civilizations Today?

In continuation to our previous article “Is there a Clash of Civilizations?” we are now advancing more arguments on the defective charisma of the thesis. This is important because this thesis persists in creating barriers to building bridges among communities, nations, and religions, and we are committed to challenging those obstacles.

In the introduction of his book, Huntington argues:

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves!” (p. 20)

One should remember that Huntington was writing when the former Soviet Union had collapsed and his objective was to guide US policy-makers to formulate new policies for international relations. Although the argument seems naïve by scholarly standards, he wanted to cultivate the doctrine that “enemies are essential” for “people seeking identity.”

He echoed Bernard Lewis's attempt to identify Muslims as potential enemies of Western civilization. Are the sequence of events like the fall of the Soviet Union and the need for a new foreign policy for the United States, Lewis’s article on “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Huntington’s 1993 article raising the question if there was a clash of civilizations followed by his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC in September 2001, and the US declaration of War on Terror co-incidental?

This is a deep question, that demands serious investigation, and this is not within our scope, but we must raise such questions for the sake of conflict resolution and world peace.

We will continue discussing the falsity of the clash of civilizations thesis because the thesis still seems to dominate many mindsets even today many decades later.