Five structural forces amplified late-twentieth-century Islam-West conflict

Evidence

A comparable mix of factors has increased the conflict between Islam and the West in the late twentieth century. First, Muslim population growth has generated large numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people who become recruits to Islamist causes, exert pressure on neighboring societies, and migrate to the West. Second, the Islamic Resurgence has given Muslims renewed confidence in the distinctive character and worth of their civilization and values compared to those of the West. Third, the West’s simultaneous efforts to universalize its values and institutions, to maintain its military and economic superiority, and to intervene in conflicts in the Muslim world generate intense resentment among Muslims. Fourth, the collapse of communism removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each the perceived major threat to the other. Fifth, the increasing contact between and intermingling of Muslims and Westerners stimulate in each a new sense of their own identity and how it differs from that of the other. Interaction and intermingling also exacerbate differences over the rights of the members of one civilization in a country dominated by members of the other civilization. Within both Muslim and Christian societies, tolerance for the other declined sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 566

Categorization

• XREF: The list of five causes — demographics, resurgence, Western universalism, Cold War’s end, intermingling — is a tidy analytical framework resembling the multi-factor explanations in Huntington’s own earlier civilizational arguments, and ‘contact breeds identity difference’ echoes Herodotus’s observation that custom is king.
• SEED: The claim that contact and intermingling exacerbate, not reduce, conflict (a ‘contact hypothesis’ inversion) is a strong essay angle on why proximity breeds friction rather than tolerance.