Abstract
Before drawing together some of the main threads in this book, it will be as well to recall that the study group was formed out of concern with suggestions of a looming post-Cold War confrontation between Islam and the ‘Christian’ West:
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations — the perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both.1
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Notes
Bernard Lewis, ‘The roots of Muslim rage’, Atlantic Monthly, 266, September 1990, p. 60.
Samuel Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3) (Summer 1993), pp. 22–49. Huntington defines a civilization as the ‘highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species’.
Akbar Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 264.
Ahmet Davutoglu, Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Mahir Publications, 1994), pp. 103–4. Quoted in Richard Falk, ‘False universalism and the geopolitics of exclusion: The case of Islam’, unpublished conference paper. Falk eloquently endorses and expands Davutoglu’s theme.
For example, John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
and Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).
James Turner Johnson, ‘Threats, values, and defense: Does the defense of values by force remain a moral possibility?’, in William V. O’Brien and John Langan (eds), The Nuclear Dilemma and the Just War Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1986), pp. 31–48.
For an idea of the range of Islamic civilization see Marshall Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
John Kelsay, in the introduction to Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (co-edited with James Turner Johnson, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), notes how, despite differences, Islam shares with the West the central notion of ‘war as a rule-governed activity’, p. xv.
‘In connection with the Qur’anic presuppositions about the existence of universally objective moral values “ingrained in the human soul” (91: 18), one might say that Islamic revelation foreshadows the just war concepts conceived or grounded in natural law of modern Western theorists’; Abdulaziz Sachedina, ‘The development of jihad in Islamic revelation and history’, in James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay (eds), Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 35–50 at p. 47.
These and other points are summarized by David Smock in ‘The utility of just war criteria: A Christian perspective’, in his book Religious Perspectives on War: Christian, Muslim and Jewish Attitudes Toward Force After the Gulf War (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1992), pp. 5–14.
For further detail on mounting popular Muslim resentment against the anti-Iraq coalition in 1990–1, see James Piscatori (ed.), Islamic Fundamentalism and the Gulf Crisis (Chicago: The Fundamentalism Project/American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991).
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Haleem, H.A., Ramsbotham, O., Risaluddin, S., Wicker, B. (1998). Conclusion. In: Haleem, H.A., Ramsbotham, O., Risaluddin, S., Wicker, B. (eds) The Crescent and the Cross. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26440-7_8
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