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"Civilizations" are the focus of world tensions and the emerging pattern for the 21st century. This book turns out to be much better than I anticipated. Given all of the noise around it's politically incorrect thesis, one would have expected some kind of poorly supported polemic. This meant that it created a huge firestorm of controversy when he published it, but the predictive power of this thesis - first advanced in 1993 has been remarkable. I found significant insights on every page. On the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of scholarship and the lucidity of argument.
Of course it does not explain all conflicts and in some eras culture plays a lesser role, but Huntington has called out the "elephant in the room" and he should be commended for letting the chips fall where they may. Although I've had it on my shelf for a long time, I had not gotten around to reading it until I had a long flight to India. Huntington limits his claims to the current phase of history, but I find it applicable to all of history at some level -- culture is the first "fault line," which helps us understand many conflicts. Written in a way that laymen could understand, but that scholars respect, Huntington builds not just a comprehensive case for his perspective, but he builds an entire worldview of state interactions. Huntington thesis is that culture is the most important feature in the current geo-political moment - was out of vogue during the 20th century during which Marxist class/economic models prevailed. I recommend this book as an introduction to International Relations for anyone who is reasonably comfortable with current events and basic history.
At a certain point, it was even hard to put down.
There are already many good reviews so I will only suggest reading the following books (whose scope is amazingly global) instead of, or in addition to, Huntington's peculiar work: 1) Economy: 1.1 "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. Finer; 4) Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5) Political Thought: 5.1. O'Rourke; 1.2 and 1.3: "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); 2) Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 3) Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. and 5.2: "The West and Islam. Religion and Political Thought in World History" plus "A World History of Ancient Political Thought" by Antony Black; 6) Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 7) War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.
I bought this book without checking what year it was written. It's all pre-911 and quite outdated I thought. The book was written before the Japanese economy imploded in the 1990s and when it was thought the Japanese would overcome America.I did like the perspectives on civilizations and some interesting points are made about China and the "Orthodox culture."It was also quite a dull read.
The book makes some very simplistic judgments about the historical nature of conflicts and adds huge amount of weights towards some abstract "civilizational" construct of human life. This book is a bad read. Book does show that the author has vast knowledge of world history and geography but at the same time brings out his strong biases towards racial and religious make-up of the world. Humans are way more complicated and driven a lot by nationalistic and regional concerns than depicted in this book. I found reading this book quite a waste of time.
Sam Huntington subscribed to when writing this book. Huntington's imagination.There are almost 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet. As an Arab-Canadian, I'm pretty much at the forefront of this so-called "clash of civilizations", and the way I see things as it stands, it seems as though there is indeed a 'clash' materializing. In the afterword, he mentioned how there is almost no overlap between these movements, that these were truly independent movements spawned by the circumstantial political and socioeconomic currents in the region in question. The very fact that he didn't go through the trouble of trying to analyze the Muslim World in a greater depth left me uneasy going through the last couple of pages of the book.In the end, this is just racist propaganda by a Xenophobe, not more. My interest in this issue started when I read John Esposito's book, Political Islam - truly a masterpiece - which picked stripped the religion of Islam bare, down to its origins, and described its evolution over time, spanning the Muhammedian era up till 9/11. Indeed, it's a figment of Dr.
There is absolutely no common political denominator between the Muslims in, say, Morocco and the Muslims in China, because there is a massive cultural cleft within the Islamic world (and even within the Western bloc - something Tom Freidman also missed).I won't go into the details, refuting every claim this book makes, but my impression of this book is that it's trash. However, that is only a superficial gut feeling, the same feeling the respect Dr. The Islamic world stretches from West Africa all the way down to Southeast Asia. He also dedicated chapters to specific issues such as the Jamaat-e-Islami group in Pakistan, the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt - all these were discussed in a political and religious context. From there, he concluded that the idea of a 'clash of civilizations' is preposterous. I was even slightly offended by how much generalizing and statistical abuse this Harvard graduate has managed to cram in his book. It shouldn't deserve that much attention, and indeed should be pulled of the shelves of all libraries for being more of a hate speech inciter than even the holy books.
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