ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom has it that, despite the demise of the USSR, there is still a confrontation of the West against the rest. The chief spokesman for this viewpoint has been Samuel Huntington whose provocative article “The Clash of Civilizations” became a widely read book. His thesis, based on a superficial and tendentious reading of history, claimed that there are a given number of civilizations (up to eight, in theory) that will inevitably clash until one emerges triumphant. After eliminating the least important of these civilizations, he concludes by postulating an eventual death struggle between the progressive West and the retrograde Islamic world.
