Post-imperial Islam-West conflicts center on issues beyond territory

Evidence

These relations are further roiled by a number of substantive issues on which their positions differ or conflict. Historically one major issue was the control of territory, but that is now relatively insignificant. Nineteen of twenty-eight fault line conflicts in the mid-1990s between Muslims and non-Muslims were between Muslims and Christians. Eleven were with Orthodox Christians and seven with adherents of Western Christianity in Africa and Southeast Asia. Only one of these violent or potentially violent conflicts, that between Croats and Bosnians, occurred directly along the fault line between the West and Islam. The effective end of Western territorial imperialism and the absence so far of renewed Muslim territorial expansion have produced a geographical segregation so that only in a few places in the Balkans do Western and Muslim communities directly border on each other. Conflicts between the West and Islam thus focus less on territory than on broader intercivilizational issues such as weapons proliferation, human rights and democracy, control of oil, migration, Islamist terrorism, and Western intervention. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 568

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that only Croats-Bosnians sit directly on the West-Islam fault line is debatable; worth checking whether Huntington’s geography of who counts as ‘Western’ quietly excludes conflicts he doesn’t want in that category.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”