Muslim intellectuals themselves framed tensions with the West as civilizational conflict.

Evidence

Similar observations came from the Islamic community. “There are unmistakable signs,” argued a leading Egyptian journalist, Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, in 1994, “of a growing clash between the Judeo-Christian Western ethic and the Islamic revival movement, which is now stretching from the Atlantic in the west to China in the east.” A prominent Indian Muslim predicted in 1992 that the West’s “next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin.” For a leading Tunisian lawyer, the struggle was already underway: “Colonialism tried to deform all the cultural traditions of Islam. I am not an Islamist. I don’t think there is a conflict between religions. There is a conflict between civilizations.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 573

Categorization

• SEED: The Indian Muslim prediction that the ‘next confrontation’ comes from the Maghreb-to-Pakistan sweep is a testable historical claim — an essay could grade these 1992 predictions against actual post-9/11 events.
• QUESTION: Huntington selects quotations confirming his thesis from the Muslim world; worth asking how representative or cherry-picked these voices were.
• XREF: connects to: Prominent Muslim exiles were absorbed into neoconservative institutions to lend authority to clash-of-civilizations narratives.