The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the euphoria about “peace in our time” that followed is now a tattered memory.
But following the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, with UN approval, the relatively peaceful demise of the Communist superpower appeared to herald a “new world order” of peace and co-operation in an increasingly interdependent world.
Prof. Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, who died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81, broke this reverie with his now famous 1993 Foreign Affairs essay, The Clash of Civilizations? before the reality of failed state (Somalia), genocide (Rwanda) and ethnic cleansing (the Balkans) put the lie to the rosy expectations at the end of the Cold War.
The 1993 essay was published as a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and it became one of the most widely read, discussed and contested studies on the nature and direction of international politics at the beginning of a new century.
Huntington was, as the journal Foreign Affairs noted on his death, the pre-eminent political scientist of the second half of the 20th century, and one of the most widely read public intellectuals of our time. In his writings (17 books and innumerable essays) he tackled big themes, as was his 1993 essay and book, and similarly in the last book he published in 2004 about Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
Huntington did not accept the easy consensus of recent years that the big questions in politics were mostly settled, and the world was moving positively in the direction of secular democracy. He instead argued that beneath the surface of globalization, identity politics based on religion and culture had sharpened and the world was entering another dark and turbulent period of conflicts among civilizations.
In his 1993 work Huntington drew the scenario of “The West and the Rest” – the civilization that invented the modern world and the other eight (Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese) in various stages of modernization or resisting it – in an uneasy relationship or hostile confrontation.
The civilization most resistant and least adaptive to the modern world, Huntington discussed, remains Islamic and the borders of the Muslim world with the non-Muslim are most volatile, hence “bloody.”
I recall recoiling on first reading Huntington’s assessment of the Muslim world and where it is headed. But the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and later dissolved my hesitations and inner doubts about Muslim history.
Huntington was instrumental for me as a Muslim to critically re-examine Islamic history, and recognize the principal conflict within Islam is between the forces of tyranny and the desire for freedom. Islamist terrorism is the ill-begotten offspring of this history of tyranny.
Huntington was a lifelong Democrat of the old school, liberal in domestic matters and realist in international affairs. He had read well Muslim history and anticipated, ahead of everyone else, how the oldest existing conflict between Islam and Judeo-Christianity would emerge in our time as one between Islam and the West.
A Cassandra in any age is rarely celebrated and so it was with Huntington.
He was a seer who warned, and the West is poorer without him.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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