Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the “Clash” of Religions

Abstract

[G]reat devastation [was] inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance.… —World Islamic Front [T]here is a Zionist Crusader war on Islam. … I call on mujahedin and their supporters … to prepare for long war against the Crusader plunderers.… —Osama Bin Laden, “Bin Laden” This war is fundamentally religious. … the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad.… —Osama Bin Laden, “West” [T]his Crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take a while. —George W. Bush This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the … reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. —Bernard Lewis, “Roots” In a lead 1990 article for theatlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article forForeign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

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