Middle East discontents are a clash of civilizations, not of states

Evidence

We shall be better able to understand this situation if we view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a clash between civilizations. The “great debate,” as Gibbon called it, between Islam and Christendom has been going on since the Arab Muslim conquerors first swept westward into Christian Syria, North Africa, and Spain. It continued with the Christian counter-offensive of the Crusades and its failure, the thrust of the Turks into Europe, and their hard-fought retreat and withdrawal. For the past century and a half Middle Eastern Islam has been subjected to the impact and domination of the West—political, economic, and cultural domination even where, as in most of the Middle East, there was no direct rule. This impact has shattered traditional patterns of thought and behavior, of political and social loyalty and organization, beyond repair, and has posed to the peoples of the Middle East an immense problem of readjustment, both in their dealings with the outside world and in their own internal affairs. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1192

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• SEED: The 1950s-60s framing of a civilizational clash between Islam and Christendom reads almost verbatim as the later ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis — an essay angle on how Huntington’s supposedly novel framework was already the mainstream view in mid-century Middle East studies.
• XREF: Pre-echoes Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ (1996) and the deeper ‘great debate’ framing; connects to readings on orientalism and how Western scholarship framed Islam.

Related

• Middle East hostility to the West is civilizational, predating specific grievances. (similarity 0.93)
• Islam-West conflict is a civilizational clash beyond policy or issues (similarity 0.84)
• Western intervention discredits its own proposed solutions in the Middle East (similarity 0.83)
• The Fatimid schism was untenable amid Islam’s unified front against Christendom (similarity 0.82)
• By the 1970s Arab states were politically diverging despite cultural affinity (similarity 0.81)
• The clash of civilizations thesis asserts Western values are alien to Islamic societies. (similarity 0.81)
• Middle East political conflict stems from clashing European and Islamic conceptions of sovereignty (similarity 0.81)
• Modern Western perspectives can enrich understanding of medieval Middle East (similarity 0.80)
• Islam’s spread clashed continuously with the ancient river-valley civilizations it conquered (similarity 0.80)
• The clash of civilizations theory rearticulated the Orientalist binary of Islam versus the West. (similarity 0.80)
• Intercivilization conflict divides into micro-level religious fault lines and a macro-level West-versus-rest division (similarity 0.80)
• Muslim intellectuals themselves framed tensions with the West as civilizational conflict. (similarity 0.80)
• Islamophobia descends directly from Orientalism’s civilizational divide between Islam and the West (similarity 0.80)
• Islam’s egalitarian message has been continuously contested by older river-valley social orders (similarity 0.79)
• Middle Eastern leaders misread the US as a reincarnated British Empire. (similarity 0.79)