Land-based Muslim expansion created intermingled populations while Western sea expansion did not

Evidence

Second, from its origin in Arabia, the spread of Islam across northern Africa and much of the middle East and later to central Asia, the Subcontinent, and the Balkans brought Muslims into direct contact with many different peoples, who were conquered and converted, and the legacy of this process remains. In the wake of the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans urban South Slavs often converted to Islam while rural peasants did not, and thus was born the distinction between Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs. Conversely the expansion of the Russian Empire to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia brought it into continuing conflict for several centuries with a variety of Muslim peoples. The West’s sponsorship, at the height of its power vis-a-vis Islam, of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East laid the basis for ongoing Arab-Israeli antagonism. Muslim and non-Muslim expansion by land thus resulted in Muslims and non-Muslims living in close physical proximity throughout Eurasia. In contrast, the expansion of the West by sea did not usually lead to Western peoples living in territorial proximity to non-Western peoples: these were either subjected to rule from Europe or, except in South Africa, were virtually decimated by Western settlers. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 732

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the geographic logic behind the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s and to why Muslim-Western friction zones differ structurally from colonial-era separations.