Huntington popularized a clash-of-civilizations thesis built on Lewis’s earlier Orientalist work.

Evidence

Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi reflects on the work of Lewis, who contends that he, and not Huntington, modeled the clash of civilizations theory. Dabashi observed, “As early as the 1950s he [Lewis] had envisioned the clash of civilizations, and to this day he remains incensed that the idea is credited to Samuel Huntington. Since the early 1960s, he has published books which repeatedly rattle on about the opposition of the two sides, including The Middle East and the West (1964), Islam and the West (1994), Cultures in Conflict (1996), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001), and What Went Wrong (2003), laying the groundwork for [Francis] Fukuyama and Huntington.” So although he popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations” and gave it momentum in the public and political spheres, Huntington was not an isolated actor peddling the worldview that the United States was on a civilizational collision course with Islam. These scholars, Orientalists of the highest order, were simply dressing old Orientalist ideas and arguments in modern terms and catchy phrases. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism genealogy — Lewis and Huntington as its policy-facing descendants. — connects to: Bernard Lewis supplied the clash of civilizations thesis to American foreign policy — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 213; The Middle East itself is a product of Orientalist construction. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 161; The clash of civilizations theory rearticulated the Orientalist binary of Islam versus the West. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 217 (+6 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 234

Broader Connections

• Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis came to frame the entire War on Terror. #expands (0.70)
• Bernard Lewis reduced fourteen centuries of East-West to unchanging conflict. #expands (0.60) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 27
• Bernard Lewis justified the essentialist category of Islamic terrorism #expands (0.60) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 398
• The War on Terror weaponizes an invented Orientalist past to victimize Muslims today #expands (0.50)