The Borders of Islam: Exploring Samuel Huntington’s Faultlines, from Al-Andalus to Virtual Ummah

Description

Hansen, Mesoy and Kardas take on Huntington’s main thesis with an aim to falsify it. The book stands out as one of the strongest counter-arguments to the main premises of the clash of civilizations thesis. It does so by arguing that the clash sometimes is constructed, as is the case of various internal and external conflicts taking place in and around Iraq, or it neglects the division within the Islamic civilization, as is the case with Lebanon where the Sunnis have a different agenda than the Shiite Muslims, or that the clash between Muslims and Christians is not necessarily religiously-driven in Nigeria, Ethiopia or Sudan. While laying out this argument, the book sets out to understand whether religion could be considered as the most tangible source of conflicts involving groups that hold different religious faiths. Rigby and Johansen argue that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often oversimplified and reduced to an Islam-Judaism duality. They contend that the core of the conflict lies with the fundamental nationalists from both sides. By analyzing approaches from fundamentalist Muslim, Jewish and Christian beliefs in Israel, they conclude that despite their differences in religious beliefs, fundamentalist are united in the same goal: boosting the potential for inter-communal conflict.