Today, conflict is more widespread across the world than at any time in history. In 2016, 70 countries are caught up in 56 continuing conflicts. The West usually stands back and merely observes these conflicts, and does not make any real effort to bring them to an end. On occasion, dissenting voices to this objectionable political stance are heard. However, the ideology of political scientists, such as Samuel Huntington, silences these dissenting voices.
The articles written by Samuel Huntington since 1991 defined the history of the 20th Century by means of wars and anticipated those of the 21st Century. His work expounded the message that “the history of the world has reached the point where wars and destruction are inescapable.” According to Huntington, the wars of the 21st Century are the unavoidable result of the dialectics of history.
Therefore, if war is a scientific inevitability, then nations should not try to prevent them, but rather benefit from them as much as possible. This point of view has served to desensitize millions of people to deaths and the massacre of innocents.
Huntington has been part of the political establishment that has shaped the US policy since 1948. His first article that propounded his theories of war was “The Clash of Civilizations.”
The article argued that, with the end of the Cold War, the greatest threat to the West’s global rule was “Islam.” Naturally, the West’s next great war would inevitably be with the Islamic civilization.
The thesis of a clash of civilizations was followed up with an article entitled “The Age of Muslim Wars” in 2001. In this particular article, Huntington advanced his theory of a war between the West and the Islamic world still further. The main point of the article was that Muslims were more warlike than other civilizations and thus made the world more dangerous.
The 9/11 attacks were simply a reflection of the Muslim wars in the USA. Huntington’s article had the consequence of putting Muslims in the crosshairs of the West. In the 15 years following the article, Afghanistan and Iraq were occupied. There were revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Syria, Libya and Yemen dissolved into civil wars. As Huntington died in 2008, he did not live to see it, but millions of innocent Muslims have lost their lives in wars he ideologically supported.
Today, Huntington is no longer with us. However, other pens continue to write articles that legitimatize war and cruelty. These theoreticians are the products of a distorted educational system that teaches that war is essential for humanity’s development: They believe in an order in which the most powerful and egotistic survive. On the other hand, the morals of Islam has put at the center of development self-sacrifice, sharing, friendship, unity and solidarity. The Islamic world’s future lies in unification, acting together and intellectually struggling, in a common and rational manner, against such ruthless games. The climate of conflict can come to a halt only when the Islamic nations unite and act as a single body like well-built walls. The future age will not be, as Huntington claims, “The Age of Muslim Wars”; but it will be “A New Golden Age for Muslims, and therefore for the whole world.”
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