Introduction: The “Clash of Civilizations” and Relations between the West and the Muslim World

Abstract:

The spring 2019 issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs brings together nine scholars to examine various issues contained within a general research question: does Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm help explain current Western governments’ responses to Muslim migration and related security issues? The contributors seek to explicate both theoretical and empirical examinations of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis in relation to the West. Our initial premise is that in the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational ‘clash’ and ‘dialogue’ have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries’ domestic concerns.

Keywords:

• Samuel Huntington
• Donald Trump
• clash of civilizations
• the West
• Muslims
• migration
• security

This special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs brings together nine scholars to examine various issues contained within a general research question: does Samuel Huntington’s (1993, 1996) “clash of civilizations” “paradigm” help explain current Western governments” responses to Muslim migration and related security issues? The initial premise of the special issue is that understanding relations between the West/Westerners and Muslim-majority societies/Muslims is impossible without being aware that right-wing populist politicians in the West, as well as some policy makers and commentators, seem to view all Muslims in a malign way. This indicates a lack of willingness to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of “moderate,” “ordinary,” and “peaceful” Muslims and, on the other hand, a small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists.

The special issue seeks to explicate both theoretical and empirical examinations of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis in relation to the West. Our initial premise is that in the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational “clash” and “dialogue” have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries' domestic concerns.

Huntington was fundamentally concerned with the impact of inter-civilizational conflicts in both international and national contexts. The special issue examines how, as a result of “glocalization,” the clash of civilizations paradigm is today helpful in explaining and accounting for electoral successes of right-wing populist politicians in various Western countries, including the USA, Sweden, Czech Republic, Italy, and Germany.

Three key events from the early 2000s have served to keep Huntington’s paradigm topical, controversial, and significant. They are: (1) the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, which focused global attention on Huntington’s claim of a clash of civilizations (2) Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign which employed anti-Muslim rhetoric to acquire votes, a tactic which he has continued to employ as president; and (3) recent electoral gains of right-wing populists in many European countries, who, like Trump, use anti-Muslim rhetoric as a key electoral tactic to win voters' support.

The Clash of Civilizations: Theory and Practice

Surprisingly, given the substantial scholarly and policy impact of Huntington’s paradigm, there is very little substantive analysis of the overall impact on international and national relations. There have been few sustained or wide-ranging attempts to understand the cross-border impact of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument, and no explicit or wide-ranging analysis of how and why the concept has recently been adopted, implicitly or explicitly, by right-wing populists in the USA and Europe to help explain and respond to migration and security issues.

Huntington’s thesis on the “clash of civilizations” is very well known and is frequently cited in analyses of international relations, sociology, and political science.¹ In the quarter century since he first presented his paradigm, which significantly built on the work of Bernard Lewis (1990), Huntington’s claims have been critiqued (by many scholars) and, often implicitly, praised (by many right-wing populist politicians).

Huntington’s paradigm was critiqued by most scholars who examined his claims; many found it fundamentally incorrect, both reductive and erroneous (Marsden 2018). Huntington claimed that

The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future (Huntington 1993, 22).

In the preface to his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington (1996, 13) stated that,

[t]his book is not intended to be a work of social science. It is instead meant to be an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War. It aspires to present a framework, a paradigm, for viewing global politics that will be meaningful to scholars and useful to policymakers.²

The “new world” that Huntington was referring to in the quotation above was the brief, but highly eventful, period immediately after the Cold War when the Soviet Union fell apart and the West—led by the government of the United States—sought more rapidly to export its interpretation of democracy and human rights to much of the rest of the world.³ This attempt to build a “new world order” was flawed, not least because it involved Western, mainly American, attempts to spread American/Western values—such as democracy, individualistic human rights, the rule of law; in short, Western-style modernization. The flaw in the Western approach was that policy makers believed that all “rational” people would agree on their values; when they did not, the naysayers were branded as “uncivilized” and, in some cases, barbarians.

The brief period attempting unsuccessfully to build a new world order was followed by a longer period of new world disorder, which is still continuing. During this time, Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm has become a key component in the West of many right-wing populist politicians' worldviews. The “new world disorder” became increasingly evident in various global and regional emergencies, such as the global economic crisis (from 2008) and Europe’s refugee catastrophe (from 2015). In recent years, nearly 35,000 people have died trying to enter Europe from unsafe countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East.⁴

While many scholars were critical, some politicians and policy makers were favorably influenced—usually implicitly—by Huntington’s thesis, particularly as it related to hostility, competition, and conflict between the West and Muslims. These include: US President Donald Trump and key members of his administration (Haynes 2017); Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Civic Alliance government; the ruling Law and Justice regime of Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland; the Slovenian Democratic Party government led by Janez Janša, which achieved power via an election in June 2018; and, in Italy, Matteo Salvini’s League party which achieved power with the Five Star Movement in the summer of 2018. In addition, sundry non-state entities, such as: al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany”) and Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA) appear to see the world in “Huntingtonian” terms (Haynes 2018; Haynes 2019; Vorländer, Herold, and Schäller 2018).

Apart from widespread electoral gains by right-wing populists in the USA and Europe, who often implicitly drew on Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument for electoral gain, what, more generally, has become of Huntington’s prophesy of civilizational conflicts between blocs of culturally-defined states? In a chapter of his 1996 book, entitled “The Global Politics of Civilizations,” Huntington discussed two civilizational conflicts which he thought would be of great importance in post-Cold War international relations: fights between “Islam” and the West, and between China and the West. Huntington’s claim was not only that the West would be in conflict with “core” states of the Muslim world, such as, potentially, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, but would also be at loggerheads with China, the “Sinic” civilization “core” state. Working on the assumption that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Huntington also believed that governments of some Muslim countries and China would logically work together to confront and compete with the West. The resulting imbroglio would be underpinned and driven by their different value systems: the West lionized liberal democracy, human rights, and individualism, while China and the Muslim countries did not (Huntington 1996, 94).

Turning to a key source of inter-civilizational conflict as identified by Huntington, that between the West and the Muslim world, he claimed that post-Cold War disagreements would be caused by each “bloc’s” adherence to different values. According to Huntington (1996, 258), “Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards.” While the West’s values center on human rights, democracy, and individualism, those of the Muslim world are said by Huntington to be different: unconcerned with, or positively hostile to, (liberal) democracy and (individualistic) human rights. Why would this be the case? According to Inglehart and Norris (2003), Huntington would claim that the Muslim world⁵

lacks the core political values that gave birth to representative democracy in Western civilization: separation of religious and secular authority, rule of law and social pluralism, parliamentary institutions of representative government, and protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the buffer between citizens and the power of the state.

What of Huntington’s claim of serious post-Cold War conflicts between blocs of states from different civilizations? As I write these words, in early September 2018, the USA is engaged in a deepening trade war with China. This is not however rooted in a clash of values stemming from cultural, religious, or, more expansively, “civilizational” differences. Instead, the current trade war between the USA and China centers on a massive trade imbalance of some US$375 billion annually which the American government wants to see swiftly reduced by making Chinese goods entering the USA more expensive and that country’s trade to China enhanced by the latter’s lowering of tariffs. Yet, both sides adhere to the same international framework in this context: international trade organized along capitalist lines via the World Trade Organization, the successor to the post-World War II General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Simultaneously, the Trump administration in the USA is imposing significant tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from the European Union (EU), Canada, and Mexico. The fact that both Canada and EU countries “should” share Western civilizational characteristics with the USA is irrelevant in this context; what is (more) important is that the US government feels that it has lost out in what it decries as unfair trading relationships, which it now seeks to redress via unilateral action. In short, civilizational amity or enmity is completely irrelevant when seeking to identify causes of current trade wars involving the USA, China, the EU, Canada, and Mexico.

Globalization, Glocalization, and Securitization

Critical responses to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm highlighted that: civilizations are not autonomous entities; civilizations do not have clear-cut borders; interactions between civilizations have historically been ubiquitous; and civilizations do not have discrete sets of values separating them from other civilizations. In addition, the impact of post-Cold War globalization further undermines Huntington’s claims about civilizational autonomy and separateness. When, 25 years ago, Huntington averred that civilizations had unique characteristics, he was looking back to the Cold War to envisage the future. It is now clear, however, that the world was changing fundamentally just as Huntington advanced his clash of civilizations paradigm.

The early 1990s was notable for two epochal developments: the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the developing impact of globalization. Globalization is highly important because it has a profound effect on countries’ sovereignty and governments’ ability to rule autonomously, affecting cultural, religious, economic, and political outcomes (Haynes 2005). Surprisingly, Huntington is hardly concerned with the impact of globalization on civilizational interactions, even though by the time of his book, 1996, globalization was the hot topic in both international relations and comparative politics. His book mentions globalization briefly only twice: on page 68 he comments that “globalization theory” understands a consequence of globalization to be an “exacerbation of civilizational, societal, and ethnic self-consciousness,” and on page 90 he mentions “globalization of the defense industry” without further comment.

It is widely agreed that globalization interacts with local contexts, histories, and outcomes, leading to what the sociologist Roland Robertson calls “glocalization.” Glocalization refers to “the simultaneity—the co-presence—of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems.” It “represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales,” reflecting how the “growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels” (Robertson 1994, 33). In other words, globalization intermingles with local factors and actors and the result is glocalization, characterized by “the growth of local and regional identities and loyalties” (Richardson 2012, 8).

How does glocalization affect our understanding of the “clash of civilizations”? For Huntington, the clash of civilizations focused on both international and domestic conflicts between different civilizational entities. In particular, recent years have seen egregious civilizational frictions and conflicts mainly within countries, partly as a result of glocalization. For example, some European governments, political parties, and voters express great concern at the prospect of large-scale Muslim emigration, presuming it would lead to significant undermining of European cultural norms, whether religious (Hungary, Poland), secular (France, The Netherlands), or cultural (Austria, Switzerland, Italy). Add to this a post-9/11 European-wide fear of Islamist extremism and terrorism and the conditions are created for populist demagogues to exploit some people’s social, political, and economic fears for electoral gain. This is glocalization in action: (fears of) globally-orientated Islamist terrorism interact with (fears of) the effects of mass Muslim emigration on local communities.

Turning to the United States, Islamophobia⁶ has been growing since the early 1990s, exacerbated by 9/11 specifically and fears of Islamist terrorism generally. Islamophobia can be found across society but is increasingly evident in the right wing of the Republican Party, right-wing think tanks, and rabble-rousing websites and radio and television programs. In recent years, they seem to have grown bolder and more open in voicing what many see as extremist opinions openly and with greater candor. A key claim among such people is that Muslims, including American Muslims, do not share the same values as non-Muslim Americans. This is because they are allegedly spellbound by “Islam” and its values, especially “Islamic law” (sharia), which they want to see implemented in the USA. For example, David Yerushalmi, an American lawyer and Islamophobe, claimed in 2007 that “[o]n the so-called Global War on Terrorism, GWOT, we have been quite clear along with a few other resolute souls. This should be a WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all Muslim faithful” (capital letters in original) (Council on American-Islamic Relations 2010). In addition, during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump stated that “I think Islam hates us” (Johnson and Hauslohner 2017). In November 2017, as president, Trump retweeted links to “a series of anti-Muslim propaganda videos shared online by a high-ranking official in the ultra-nationalist UK political group Britain First” (Krieg 2017). Later, in 2018, Trump appointed several Islamophobes to senior posts in his administration, including: Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, John Bolton as White House National Security Advisor, and Fred Fleitz as National Security Council’s executive secretary and chief of staff. What these men have in common is a set of views which depict Muslims as dangerous terrorist sympathizers who wish to see sharia law implemented across the USA (Council on American-Islamic Relations 2018).

Like Trump, Yerushalmi, and other Islamophobes, Huntington believes that

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West (1996, 217).

Like Huntington and Trump, right-wing populist politicians across Europe regard “Islam” tout court as a significant problem of culture/values and of security. A focus on Muslims and their allegedly different values, including alleged denial of democracy and human rights and being comfortable with terrorism while swamping countries with millions of Muslims migrants, is a key factor in their growing popularity. Typically, Europe’s right-wing populist politicians focus in election campaigns on Muslim-linked immigration and terrorism. Local factors interact with global issues to produce, as in the USA, glocalization with the effect of vilifying all Muslims in the context of a widespread rise of populism, securitization of Islam, and a sustained focus on “identity” and its social and political connotations.

Like their counterparts in the USA, Europe’s right-wing populists are keen to highlight what they regard as key differences in civilizational values between the “Judeo-Christian” West and the Muslim world. Whereas in the USA it is individualism and “Judeo-Christian values” (Haynes 2017), “European values” are today commonly pointed to in order both to support refugees and migrants and to attack them. Demagogues such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini put themselves forward as defenders of Christianized European civilization, claiming to want to pursue anti-migrant policies in order to protect Europe from being overrun by Muslim hordes. It is no coincidence that Orbán was able to acquire electoral leverage in the wake of the refugee influx from 2015, mainly from Syria to Europe, in the wake of the former’s civil war, while Salvini was adept at playing on many Italians” fears of an “African invasion.”

There is also a second dimension to the arguments of figures like Orbán and Salvini, which are taken up by far-right figures such as Gert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France. They claim that Europe’s Muslim immigrants pose a clear and persistent threat to “European” traditions of tolerance, freedom, and democracy. Wilders, for example, points to many Muslims’ alleged homophobia and views of females as subservient in order to highlight his own superior “secular” and “progressive” views (Brubaker 2017).

The issues raised above in relation to what some perceive as a Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” in the USA and Europe are explored in greater detail in the articles which comprise this special issue.

Structure of the Special Issue

Following the introductory article, the special issue is divided into two sections. The first section, comprising articles by Haynes and Cesari, looks at theoretical issues inherent in Huntington’s clash of civilizations paradigm. The second section, comprising contributions by Fox, Kaya and Tecmen, Ozzano, Kratochvil, Pasamonik, and Ringmar looks at various empirical issues in relation to the USA and Europe which emanate from Huntington’s clash of civilizations paradigm.

Jeffrey Haynes’ paper focuses on the explanatory value of the “clash of civilizations” paradigm or framework. He examines how Huntington’s paradigm has fared in the perceptions of scholars and policy makers, the two audiences on which Huntington focused. He argues that in the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational “clash” and “dialogue” have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries’ domestic concerns. Haynes avers that, as a result of glocalization, the clash of civilizations paradigm is today helpful in explaining and accounting for electoral gains of right-wing populist politicians in various Western countries, including the USA, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia.

In the article that follows, Jocelyne Cesari examines the civilizational perspective of Norbert Elias (2000). She claims that Elias’ analysis is useful in that it allows us to overcome what she calls the “fixism” of most investigations that bypass historical development to privilege decontextualized, variable-centered investigation. Elias’ approach, she contends, also avoids the teleological approach of irreversible processes of modernization or democratization, converging with recent anthropological work highlighting, for example, how democratization and de-democratization can operate simultaneously.

Cesari argues that, away from normative claims, civilization is better seen as a series of processes of adjustment to what is the then dominant international culture and its consequences. Cesari allows that such an approach is surely less “glamorous” than what she calls the “common sense” understanding of civilization, yet it is maybe more efficient in helping to decipher the clash of norms and beliefs at the international level. In particular, she focuses upon the impact of Western-style modernization in the Muslim world, especially in relation to state-“church” relations, to explain the West’s civilizational impact over time, notably in the countries of the former Ottoman Empire.

Following Haynes’ and Cesari’s articles, an article by Jonathan Fox explains that Huntington predicted that conflict, including domestic conflict, would be more common between civilizations than within them, that “the” Islamic civilization is especially violent, with bloody borders and innards, and that post-Cold War, Muslim-Western conflict would be particularly intense. Fox’s study seeks to test these propositions by focusing on societal and governmental religious discrimination against 156 religious minorities in 36 European and Western Christian-majority democracies using data from the Religion and State-Minorities round 3 (RASM3) dataset. Fox contrasts Huntington’s predictions with predictions from three other bodies of literature: the securitization of Islam, anti-cult policies, and anti-Semitism. Fox’s findings show that these three literatures are a better fit for explaining religious discrimination in the countries he is focusing on than Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory.

In their article, Ayhan Kaya and Ayse Tecmen examine the manifestos of European right-wing populist parties and their highly “mediatized” statements on culture, heritage, and national identity. Kaya and Tecmen’s article reveals how five European right-wing populist parties—that is, Alternative for Germany, National Front in France, the Netherlands” Party for Freedom, Five Star Movement in Italy, and, in Greece, Golden Dawn—all employ fear of Islam as a political instrument to mobilize their supporters, attract new ones and, overall, to mainstream their parties. Their study is conducted through a discourse analysis of the speeches and manifestos of the aforementioned parties. Following the depiction of each political party, the article displays some of the quotations from Kaya and Tecmen’s fieldwork in order to identify common tropes of the right-wing populist parties’ Islamophobic, migrant-phobic, and diversity-phobic discourses. The main premise of their paper is to claim that these parties have recently generated a civilizational discourse in order to expand their appeal to the electorate.

The remaining papers in this section focus upon individual European countries. They seek to explicate how the “clash of civilizations” paradigm affects both politics and society, expressly in the context of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim members of these societies.

The issue of “acceptable” behavior by Muslim immigrants is the topic of Luca Ozzano’s article, which focuses on Italy. Ozzano contends that the political science literature analyzing the profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in past European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some contentions about new party types that were developed 30 years ago after the end of the Cold War have hypothesized the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist/post materialist sets of values and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. Ozzano’s contribution works from the latter hypothesis: that is, highlighting how some European parties, previously secular or focused on the “traditional” religious cleavage, are increasingly using religion-related arguments in the context of a “civilizational” stance focused, on the one hand, on anti-globalization and anti-EU discourses and, on the other and most importantly, on the idea of migrants and especially Muslims as a threatening other. The second section of Ozzano’s paper focuses on Italy and the recent development of the right-wing populist League’s anti-Islam discourse.

Following Ozzano’s focus on Italy, Petr Kratochvil’s article focuses on Islam and Muslims in the Czech Republic. His paper is based on a research project which explores the ways in which religion is invoked as a political weapon in Europe’s highly secularised societies, such as the Czech Republic. Kratochvil argues that no matter how pronounced the religious language, such a political strategy usually has very little to do with religious beliefs or religious practices. Instead, it is almost entirely an act of identity construction, and of creating communities of belonging and exclusion. Secularization is thus no obstacle to the use of divisive religious language with both “Christianity” and “Islam” serving as floating signifiers: In the Czech Republic the generally low level of knowledge about Islam (in the case of the perceived other) and the low incidence of engaged Christian religious practice (in the case of the perceived self) do not constitute any substantial barrier to the successful employment of religiously tinged rhetoric; to the contrary they make sweeping generalizations all the more believable and rhetorically all the more effective. The new European right-wing populism has thus succeeded in rhetorically reconciling Christianity and secularism as markers of a claimed “civilized” identity, while simultaneously merging Islam and specific “Oriental” ethnic features as key signs of barbarism. As a result, Kratochvil argues, the new cleavage does not run along the classic dichotomy of religious versus secular. Instead, it resurrects the colonial division between the civilized and the barbaric, both of which contain religious and non-religious elements.

The next article in the special issue is by Barbara Pasamonik. She is interested in the mass sexual assaults on women on the streets of Köln and elsewhere on New Year’s Eve 2015, said to be committed by mainly Muslim migrants which caused a media panic. It focused on the specific issue of the safety of German women and on the more general issue of the safety of Western women in the context of what many Germans—and not only right-wing populists—saw as a migration “crisis,” with its roots in the tragic Syrian civil war and the associated influx of one million refugees into Germany from 2015. Following this incident, the issue of social and cultural integration of mainly Muslim minorities in Germany and other Western countries became prominent in public debate.

Pasamonik explains that two conflicting theories contextualized the moral panic. One theory, advanced in left-liberal circles, sought to undermine or understate the role of cultural differences in mass sexual assaults. That is, they weren’t Muslim men per se but men tout court—who took the opportunity provided by out of control celebrations to sexually assault women on the streets of Köln and elsewhere in Germany, a situation exacerbated by social and economic factors.

A second theory, promoted by the right wing in Germany, saw the main cause of the events in intercultural differences: that is, a “clash of civilizations” à la Huntington and an “inevitable clash” between the Western and Muslim worlds. Muslim immigrants, according to the right-wing narrative, were potential—or actual—rapists and terrorists and Germans needed to “wise up” and defend their homeland against them (“Keep the barbarian hordes away at the gates of Europe”). The overall aim of Pasamonik’s paper is to diagnose the role of social and cultural factors in the mass sexual assaults on German women on New Year’s Eve 2015, perceived by some as a manifestation of “Muslim barbarism.” The contentious issue was whether it was barbarism motivated by social circumstances or barbarism motivated by Islam and its allegedly patriarchal culture.

The final contribution in this special issue is an essay by Erik Ringmar which focuses on Sweden. In the spring of 2018 a major debate erupted regarding the right of Muslim mosques to issue adhan—that is, public calls to prayer—by means of loudspeakers. The background and context were that an imam in a congregation in the southern town of Växsjö had applied for permission from the local authorities to make a weekly, 3 minutes and 45 second long, call to prayer. Some non-Muslim neighbors were worried that the ritual would be excessively noisy and possibly disturbing. The issue was picked up by both the traditional and social media and quickly became the subject of intense public debate. Was a Muslim call to prayer a welcome addition to the life of the community or a threat to it? Should Islam be given a recognized voice, and Muslims a recognized place, in Swedish society?

The question was eventually settled in a pragmatic fashion. Islamic calls to prayer could be publicly broadcast, but they could not be so loud that they disturbed the neighbors. This decision allowed the government to sidestep the issue, but did nothing to allay the fears of the growing number of people who intended to vote for the (very) right-wing Sweden Democrats. According to them, the issue was not a matter of freedom of expression or religion since Muslims in Sweden, they declared, have no such rights. The adhan, they were convinced, is an alien practice with no legitimate place in Swedish society.

If we want to understand why support for anti-immigrant policies is on the increase in Sweden, we cannot do what the country’s government did. Instead, it is necessary, Ringmar contends, to take the ontological question seriously. Adhan, he argues, is indeed best understood as a practice, not merely as an expression, and as all practices it forms a part of a certain way of life. The real question is: should other, “non-Swedish,” forms of life be allowed in the country’s society. To this question all Swedish politicians, not only the Sweden Democrats, give a negative answer. Foreigners should not form “a parallel society” but must be “integrated” into the Swedish mainstream. And yet, this conclusion can itself be questioned. Otherness, Ringmar argues, is not a choice but instead a feature of the human condition—the irrevocable otherness of others but also the otherness of oneself. The choice is only whether or not to acknowledge this fact. By reminding us of who we are, the adhan reminds us of what it means to be human. In this sense, Ringmar contends, the Muslim call to prayer must be answered by all Swedes.

Conclusion

The special issue comprises an introductory article and eight papers which collectively seek to examine the explanatory value today of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm. The contributions jointly seek to explain how and why Huntington’s paradigm is still influential for scholars, policy makers, and commentators some three decades since it was first articulated.

Overall, the papers shed light on how the Huntingtonian paradigm encourages some Western politicians and policy makers to view all Muslims in a malign way, without making a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of “moderate’, “ordinary” Muslims and, on the other hand, the small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists. This encourages Islamophobia in both Europe and the USA. It is characterized by a pronounced focus on “all-Muslims-as-threat”— whether via terrorism, by the spectre of sharia law, by “high” population growth rates, or by an alleged propensity of Muslim men sexually to molest and even rape Western women. However, whatever the main cause of concern, the outcome is said by influential right-wing populists and commentators to be the same. The outcome is irrevocably to change host cultures for the worse. This points to the overall conclusion of the special issue: today, relations between the West and the Muslim world build on Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm, highlighting two linked but separate issues, whereby Islam and Muslims are said to represent both a serious security concern and a threat to the survival of Western culture and values.

Acknowledgements

The guest editor would like to give his sincere thanks to the Berlin office of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (DOCRI), which in June 2018 generously funded travel, accommodation, and catering costs of a symposium bringing together the contributors to present initial versions of their papers in this issue.

ORCID

Jeffrey Haynes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8434-6951

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Haynes

Jeffrey Haynes is emeritus professor of politics at London Metropolitan University. He is the author or editor of 45 books. The most recent are: The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and the Pursuit of Global Justice: Overcoming Western versus Muslim Conflict and the Creation of a Just World Order (New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2018) and The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics, 2nd. ed. (London: Routledge, 2016).

Notes

1 The editors of Foreign Affairs, where Huntington’s initial 1993 article appeared, stated in 2006 that it “was one of the most influential pieces in the magazine’s illustrious history” (http://www.pewforum.org/2006/08/18/five-years-after-911-the-clash-of-civilizations-revisited/). The scholarly significance of Huntington’s article and book is reflected in the fact that as of September 2018, the 1993 article had received 13,879 citations and the 1996 book had received 22,416 citations recorded in Google Scholar, totalling 36,295 citations. To put this in perspective, it would be regarded as “good” by many international relations scholars to receive 1,000 citations for an article or book. Huntington’s two main contributions to the “clash of civilizations” argument has 36 times that number.

2 A paradigm is a belief system (or theory) that “guides the way we do things, or more formally establishes a set of practices. This can range from thought patterns to action” (http://www.erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/theme2/what_is_your_paradigm.html), This indicates that a paradigm doesn’t have to be “correct” to be believed, at least by some.

3 During the Cold War, both the U.S.A and the Soviet Union were exporting their values. Had the Soviet Union prevailed in the conflict, it certainly would have taken the opportunity to increase its efforts in this regard.

4 The British newspaper, The Guardian, published data in June 2018 indicating that since 1993, 34,261 refugees and migrants from outside the region had died trying to reach Europe, that is, over 1,300 a year, or more than 25 a week. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount)

5 Islam is followed by c.1.8 billion people, about one-quarter of the global population (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/). In his 1996 book, he focused on several major Muslim-majority countries, including: Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan. Although none were unequivocally the core country of Islam, he did believe that they were major Muslim-majority countries exhibiting values fundamentally different from those characterising the West.

6 Also referred to as anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-Muslim racism, and intolerance against Muslims (http://www.insted.co.uk/anti-muslim-racism.pdf).