Peace-loving people at the United Nations and everywhere had hoped that "inter-faith dialogue" would serve as a corrective and alternative to Samuel Huntington's famous thesis of the clash of civilizations. But here they were guilty of the kind of oversimplification of which Huntington is so often accused. If there is a fault to be found with Huntington's formulation, it is not with the "clash" but with the "civilizations," for civilizations cannot be parsed neatly along religious lines.
The world that the global jihadist movement seeks to undo is not Christendom as such, it is secular modernity itself--the world built of critical reason, science, and humanist values. From Iraq to Bangladesh to Indonesia, the contest of the culture of totalitarian faith with the culture of secularism is also a struggle within Islamic societies, and its warriors claims the highest number of innocent victims among fellow Muslims.
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