CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST HISTORY

Contemporary Middle East History

Contemporary Middle East History

Introduction

Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is really a unique piece of collection. According to Huntington's point of view, the West is the most modernalized and powerful society. The main reason is because the West not only knows how to invent but also learn from other civilizations and make changes to become better. However, the non - Western countries, especially the Islamic and Chinese societies are catching up. As they are growing in a fast pace and have more control to the world, they both wanted to be the dominant nations in the world in order to spread and introduce their cultures to other countries. Huntington (1996) also states that the non - Western countries have resented the rise of the West and reacted against it as they gain power. Thus I agree with Huntington that a new clash with global conflict will break out as the non - Western cultures appear and start to counter the Western civilization because they want to preserve their own culture.

People from non - Western countries feel their traditional cultures are being invaded by the Western civilization, so they have to fight back. For example, the reaction of the Muslim terrorist attacks on 9-11 was a response of how they deal with the Western civilization. “Huntington's 'clash' thesis has been used to interpret the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as a reaction by Muslim fundamentalists against Western culture itself.” (Inglehart & Norris, 2004, p.341) The reason why the Muslim reacted in this way is because they feel their culture values are in danger. As the West keeps on impose its value to the Muslim world, they eventually would lose their traditional culture and replaced by the West. This is what Huntington (1996) states that the crisis between the West and the rest will easily explode if the West insists on promoting Western civilization among the non - Western nation. As a result they have to fight in order to keep their culture survive.

Also, there is a small scale example showing how people's value is being influenced. As one group accepted the outside value and practice it, the fundamentalist of the same group of people would view them as being violating their own culture values, which is not acceptable. Inglehart and Norris (2004) mention that Muslim nations have remained the most traditional societies in the world. And the gap between the West and the Muslim world become wider as we moved from younger to older generation. Younger generations in the West are far more open to accept new ideas, while younger generations in Muslim are having the same traditional values as their older generations.

Barnard (2008) reports that a decision of cremation made by a Hindu - Muslim family who are living in the United States has resulted in anger from the Muslim fundamentalists. Shafayet Reji died in a car accident on ...