In the summer of 1993 Samuel P. Huntington wrote an incredible article predicting that the source of conflicts in the near future will be cultural, and the main conflicts in the world will be between civilizations (and he later wrote a book on the same subject), and what happened in the world in the two decades that followed this article with 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq proved that he was right. But after twelve uninterrupted years of the “War on Terror” according to the American government or the “War on Islam” according to the majority of Muslims is this Clash of Civilizations still alive?.

Huntington defined civilizations as the broadest level of cultural identity, and he said that the most important conflicts will occur between civilizations. He made this prediction in the early 1990’s, and at the beginning of the new millennium a major conflict between Islam and the west started. Of course recently the escalation of violence happened 2001, but the roots of the conflicts are very ancient, Islam vs. the west started with the crusade wars when the church announced a campaign to conquer Palestine from the Muslims. That was the ancient roots of the conflict but the modern roots started with the western colonization of the Muslim world, and the establishment of the state of Israel.

The call for the crusade begun at 1095 and from that time until now the conflict never ended, it goes through some times of peace but it was limited, so Islam vs. the west is probably the main and longest conflict in the human history. And also the “rise of the rest” as some western thinkers put it, which means that the world is transforming into a multi-polar world with more than one superpower, will lead to more balanced powers militarily and economically, and that will increase the competitiveness of countries and civilizations and possibly the scale of violence.

Despite that the scale of violence is currently less than what it was 2001 and the few years that followed, there is a lot of unresolved issues that will guarantee it will not end soon, conflicts in general (specially if it were violent) are dynamic and it goes through ups and downs, for example the period between WWI and WWII was calm but beneath that obvious calmness tension was building up and it broke into a terrible war in 1939, violent generates hate and that hate will be passed to the next generations, unless the problem is fully discussed and solved, which is a very difficult task of course.

But in the modern day with globalization and advances in technology the interactions between people of different civilizations increased tremendously and that increase of interactions instead of promote understanding and tolerance it promoted identity awareness, which is ironically the opposite of what globalization supposed to do, and that can be proved with a quick look at the social media. Also technology provided extremists of both sides new methods to spread their massage, for example you can always find pages in Facebook that is Anti-Islam or Anti-western.

I know I sounded very pessimistic but it is my intention to answer the first question which is, is the clash of civilization still alive?, and the answer is obviously yes, but if we tried to discuss the main reasons of the problem and try solve it we may be able to put an end to the longest conflict in the history and to prevent the possible bloodshed, that’s of course not easy and it requires a lot of patience and wisdom, but there’s still hope.