With the escalation of current events, the new attempt at revolution, and the growth of demonstrations in American universities, some have tried and are trying to incite hatred and revive talk of a clash of civilizations and their clash, in the manner of Samuel Huntington, who wrote his thesis “A Clash of Civilizations?” Its origin is a long article that he published inquisitively in “Foreign Affairs” in 1993. In the second line of the article, he mentioned the phrase “The End of History,” the title of an article by Francis Fukuyama published in 1989 in the magazine “National Interest” before developing it into a book in 1992.
I have repeatedly said that Samuel Huntington did not retreat from the clash theory until his death on December 24, 2008. By recalling some of its contents, it is possible to identify eloquent contents, including: “I assume that the main cause of the conflict in this new world will not be ideological in the first place, or economic in the first place, as the major divisions Among human beings, the overwhelming causes of conflicts will be cultural… Civilizational identity will gain increasing importance in the future, and the world will be shaped, to a large extent, through the ongoing interactions between seven or eight civilizations, namely the Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, and Slavic-Orthodox civilizations. The most important conflicts of the future will take place along the fault lines separating civilizations, one from the other… The world becomes smaller, interactions between members of different civilizations increase, and these increasing interactions lead to an intensification of cultural awareness and a sense of the differences between civilizations and groups… There is a result with the progress of the West, which is a kind of phenomenon of returning to the roots among the people of Western civilizations… It is unlikely that the centuries-old interaction between the West and Islam will diminish, and the clash between the two parties may become more fierce.”
With globalization reaching its peak in the economic and technical fields, media machines have continued to describe the world as a small village, in order to indulge in optimism and joy with the knowledge societies have reached, and because of the increase in free economic exchanges, the flooding of space with satellites, and the explosion of the Internet revolution, leading to the breaking of the boundaries between Nations, but what Huntington clearly pointed out is that the smallness of the world may cause a blow to coexistence between civilizations, considering proximity and friction as a catalyst for realizing differences, and then searching for one’s own identity, the characteristics of the self, and the shortcomings of other civilizations.
*Saudi writer
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