John L. Esposito analyzes the misapplication of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations in Book Forum:
An irony of the rhetoric Huntington helped to legitimize is that as Western strategists range themselves against a one-note caricature of Islam, most Muslims are gravitating toward a position that does not see the West as monolithic. Moreover, anti-American sentiment among Islamic societies is primarily motivated not by religion and culture but by opposition to American foreign policy—a trend driven home most recently by the Gallup World Poll of 2005–2007. Muslim respondents took dim views of how Tony Blair and George Bush had shaped their respective diplomatic agendas but took far more benign views of Western powers such as France and Germany that dissented from those policies. For example, while 74 percent of Egyptians had unfavorable views of the United States and 69 percent said the same about Britain, only 21 percent felt unfavorably toward France. These policy disagreements become especially sharp when we compare Muslims’ perceptions of the United States with their views of its neighbor to the north, Canada—i.e., America without the foreign policy. Sixty-six percent of Kuwaitis in the 2006 survey reported unfavorable views of the United States, while just 3 percent assented to unfavorable descriptions of Canada.
Such sentiments stand in vivid contrast to Huntington’s conclusion that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.” That view explicitly and simplistically attributes bloodshed to the religion of Islam—rather than to the actions of a minority of Muslim terrorists whose primary grievances are political.
Read the full article here.