ABSTRACT

In his account of Islam’s contemporary resurgence as a social and political force, Samuel Huntington claims the Muslim world—identifying monolithically as the umma, the transnational community of Islamic believers—comprises a civilization that is innately averse to the political-territorial ordering of modernity. “The idea of sovereign nation-states,” he asserts, “is incompatible with the belief in sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of the umma” (1996, 175). In short, Islam is cast as an all-embracing religion-asculture, encompassing Muslims wherever they might be, that rejects secular politics and the territorial division of its faithful. It is this centrality of religion to politics and identity, Huntington concludes, that explains the global upswing in Islamic fundamentalism, “fault line conflicts” between Muslims and non-Muslims within states, and “bloody borders” between Muslim and non-Muslim states. Such grand theorizing, tinged as it is with anti-Muslim sentiment, has provoked a wave of criticism in the social sciences that continues more than 15 years after the appearance of The Clash of Civilizations. Not least has been the backlash from Huntington’s own academic International Relations (IR) community, which challenged his arguments on Islam’s exceptionalism on at least two fronts. First, IR researchers responded with multiple empirical studies purporting to undermine notions of an undifferentiated, essentially unique Muslim world. For instance, Fox (2005) analyzed quantitative data from the Minorities at Risk Phase 3 2 dataset to show that state borders separating Islam from other civilizations are statistically no bloodier than other state borders, whereas a study by Gartzke and Gleditsch (2006) indicated that armed conflict within Islam is more prevalent than warfare between Islam and other civilizations. 3