THIS autumn marks the 20th anniversary of Samuel Huntington's
essay "The Clash of Civilisations". Arguing that in Europe the
"velvet curtain of culture has replaced the iron curtain of
ideology", Huntington went on to predict that the future driving
force for international conflict would be culture and religion
rather than geopolitics or economics.
For example, he said, the conflict along the fault line between
Western and Islamic civilisations was likely to become more
virulent, and we could expect continued battles between Muslims and
neighbours.
The essay, and the book that followed, were treated with
derision by many of the intellectual élite. The writer Fouad Ajami
was one of the first to insist that Huntington had "underestimated
the tenacity of modernity and secularism" in places where they had
previously been absent. This expanding mindset would act as a
preventative force against civilisational conflict. Yet, just eight
years later, the optimism of these critics was put to the test by
the carnage of 9/11.
There are problems, of course, with Huntington's thesis. Some
civilisations are vast - "Western civilisation" envelops countries
and whole continents. Some civilisations, such as the Islamic, are
religiously defined, with Arab, Malay, or Turkic subdivisions;
others, such as China, have old religious undertones. And although
civilisations have certainly clashed over the past 20 years, almost
as many clashes have occurred within them. The conflict between
Sunni and Shia shows that single religions may have their own fault
lines.
The Roman Catholic writer John L. Allen offered another
perspective ("The War on Christians", The Spectator, 5
October). He quotes the secular International Society for Human
Rights, which says that 80 per cent of all acts of religious
conflict have been directed at Christians. The Study of Global
Christianity at Wenham, Massachusetts, reports that this translates
to an average of 100,000 Christians killed each year for the past
decade.
Huntington was right, in that many of these are Christians who
have suffered at the hands of Muslim militia. But he was wrong in
identifying Christianity simply as a subset of Western
civilisation. Christianity is a global movement of 2.3 billion
adherents. The Christians who have been maimed or raped are not
those in North America or Europe, targeted by competing
"civilisations", but are indigenous in those civilisations
themselves, sometimes speaking the same language and eating the
same food.
Over the past 20 years, two-thirds of the Christian population
of Iraq has gone - exiled, or killed. A survey by the Pew Forum, in
the United States, suggests that, from 2006 to 2010, Christians
faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or
de facto, in 139 nations.
Mr Allen cites recent examples from Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria,
India, Burma, and Korea to reinforce this point. He insists,
however, that this is not "limited to a clash of civilisations
between Christianity and Islam". Hindu radicals were responsible
for 500 deaths and 50,000 made homeless among Christians in Orissa.
The 300,000 Christians who disappeared from North Korea, feared
dead, were persecuted for refusing to join the cult around its
founder, Kim Il Sung. Mr Allen's conclusion is: "In truth,
Christians face a bewildering variety of threats, with no single
enemy."
The debate over Huntington will continue, but a more urgent need
is to address the human-rights violations and anti-Christian
persecution across the world; vehement opposition to it has to be
on the agenda of all civilisations.