What more evidence do we need for historian Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis? In his 1996 book, Huntington argued that the old Cold War fault lines between democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism were giving way to a new global struggle between civilizations. "The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," he asserted. "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." More specifically, Huntington predicted that the main civilizational conflict in the 2lst century would be between the West and Islam.
Assuming that Huntington is correct, the ultimate result of the clash is a foregone conclusion: Reactionary Islam will lose. This point was forcefully made by Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul in his masterful 1981 tour of radical Islam, Among the Believers. In that book, Naipaul described his meetings with prominent Islamic intellectuals and ordinary citizens in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He found they were bewildered by what he called the "encircling universal civilization." They were deeply ashamed of the comparative poverty and incapacity of Islamic societies. If Allah is on our side, they wondered, why does the West have jetliners, antibiotics, computers, hospitals, automobiles, and honest bureaucracies, not to mention tanks, aircraft carriers, and laser-guided missiles? Worse, the Islamic societies were completely dependent on that universal civilization to produce all these goods for them.
