The West and Its Monster: The Real Clash Behind the “Clash of Civilisations”

Radical Islam was not the expression of an inevitable war between cultures, but one of the most destructive afterlives of Cold War alliances, proxy wars and political abandonment.

Article by: Abrahem Laaraibi

When a former American soldier commits a violent crime, public discussion often begins with questions about trauma: Was he suffering from post-traumatic stress? Was he failed by mental-health services? What did war do to him? Yet when a civilian who has lived through bombardment, occupation, torture, dispossession or the killing of relatives commits violence, the explanation is often compressed into one word: terrorist.

This double standard does not excuse violence against civilians, whoever commits it. It does, however, reveal a serious moral and intellectual failure. One person’s violence is treated as a wound requiring explanation. Another person’s violence is treated as proof of a civilisation’s pathology. Between those two reactions lies the dangerous language of the “clash of civilisations”.

A seductive but misleading phrase

The phrase became globally influential through the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, first in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, and then in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington argued that, after the Cold War, the deepest conflicts would no longer be principally ideological or economic. They would emerge along cultural and civilisational lines, particularly between what he described as “the West” and “Islamic civilisation”.

The theory was welcomed by many politicians, commentators and strategic thinkers because it offered a clean map of a messy world. It turned history into a set of large blocs: the West, Islam, Confucian civilisation, Hindu civilisation, and others. It suggested that cultural identity, especially religious identity, would become the dominant source of future conflict.

But clean maps can be dangerously false.

Civilisations are not armies. Islam is not a political party. The West is not a single mind. Neither Muslims nor Westerners live in sealed cultural containers, obedient to an ancient instinct for conflict. Within every society are struggles over class, power, gender, democracy, wealth, religion, secularism, colonial memory and political representation.

Edward Said answered Huntington’s thesis with a memorable phrase: not a clash of civilisations, but a “clash of ignorance”. His point was not that cultural differences do not exist. They clearly do. His point was that turning billions of people into two hostile camps, “Islam” and “the West”, makes it easier to ignore the actual causes of war, violence and injustice. It replaces history with stereotype. Said warned that such labels “mislead and confuse the mind” when it tries to understand a reality far too complex to fit into civilisational boxes.

The problem with Huntington’s thesis is therefore not merely that it is pessimistic. It is that it gives culture the role that politics, empire, economics and military intervention often play in reality.

The Cold War’s unfinished war

The relationship between Western states and militant Islamist movements did not arise because two civilisations naturally discovered that they were enemies. It was shaped, in important part, by Cold War strategy.

During the Soviet-Afghan war, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supported Afghan resistance forces fighting the Soviet-backed government and, after 1979, Soviet troops. A United States presidential finding of 3 July 1979 authorised CIA assistance to Afghan insurgents. The aid was channelled principally through Pakistan, while Saudi Arabia became a major partner in funding the anti-Soviet effort.

This history requires precision. It would be inaccurate to say that the West single-handedly “created Islamism”, as though millions of Muslims had no agency, no political grievances and no local histories of their own. Political Islam had diverse intellectual, social and organisational roots long before the Afghan war. Nor were all Afghan fighters extremists, and not every recipient of foreign support later became part of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or similar movements.

Yet another error is equally serious: pretending that foreign powers had no role in cultivating the military, ideological and transnational infrastructure from which later forms of militant jihadism grew.

Washington’s strategic goal was not theological. It was geopolitical: weaken the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence services became central brokers of military aid. Saudi Arabia matched or supplemented financial support and helped give the anti-Soviet campaign religious legitimacy. In this setting, armed mobilisation, militant rhetoric and a transnational language of jihad acquired unprecedented resources, prestige and reach.

The Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman himself acknowledged an important part of that story. In 2018, he said that Saudi investments in mosques and religious schools abroad had their roots in the Cold War, when allies asked the kingdom to use its resources to prevent Soviet influence in Muslim-majority countries. He also said later governments had “lost track” of the effort.

This is not a confession that every mosque, madrasa or conservative Muslim was an instrument of violence. It is a reminder that ideas do not circulate in a vacuum. Money, state policy, war, intelligence networks and geopolitical alliances can make one interpretation of religion more powerful than another.

The global propagation of a rigid, Saudi-influenced Salafi-Wahhabi current was not simply a spontaneous civilisational revolt against modernity. It was linked to oil wealth, state power, transnational charity networks, religious publishing, schools, clerical authority and Cold War alliances. Where governments and outside powers rewarded the most militant actors, they helped shift the balance of power away from pluralist, reformist, nationalist, socialist, liberal and locally rooted religious traditions.

Afghanistan and the stolen future

Afghanistan provides perhaps the clearest symbol of this tragedy. Before the long decades of war, Afghan society was not an earthly paradise. It had deep inequalities, strong conservatism, rural poverty and political repression. Still, it also contained real social possibilities that later war would devastate.

By the 1970s, women made up more than 60 percent of the 10,000 students at Kabul University. Women worked in education, medicine, administration and public life. Literacy campaigns and legal reforms during the late 1970s also expanded women’s access to education, although these reforms were contested and sometimes imposed in ways that created further resistance.

The point is not to romanticise the past or to claim that Afghanistan had already achieved equality. The point is to reject the myth that the severe repression of women under the Taliban represented some timeless, unchanging Afghan or Islamic essence.

It did not.

The destruction of women’s freedoms was shaped by a catastrophic sequence of war: political turmoil, the Soviet intervention, the foreign-backed anti-Soviet jihad, civil war among rival factions after the Soviet withdrawal, the rise of the Taliban, the United States-led intervention after 2001, and then another Taliban takeover. Afghanistan became a battlefield not only for Afghans, but for regional states and global powers.

After the communist government fell in 1992, the country was divided among armed factions, many hostile to women’s education and public participation. Under Taliban rule in the 1990s, only around 3 percent of girls received some form of primary education, according to a PBS account of the period. A generation of Afghan women paid the price for wars designed in foreign capitals as well as for the brutality of Afghan factions themselves.

The lesson is not that Afghans were passive victims without responsibility. Afghan warlords, clerics, commanders and political leaders made choices and committed crimes. But it is equally impossible to understand Afghanistan honestly without acknowledging the enormous external forces that armed factions, rewarded extremism, prolonged war and then repeatedly abandoned the country to its ruins.

Frankenstein’s geopolitical creature

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein offers a powerful metaphor for this history, though it must be used carefully.

Victor Frankenstein’s failure is not only that he creates life. His deeper failure is that he refuses responsibility for what he has created. He brings a being into the world, recoils from it, abandons it and then behaves as though he has no obligation to confront the consequences. The creature is not born a murderer. It becomes violent through rejection, isolation, humiliation and despair. Shelley’s novel is not a simple story in which society is innocent and the creature is guilty. It is a story about creation without responsibility.

The Cold War comparison is not exact. Radical armed movements were not laboratory creatures. They were composed of human beings with beliefs, histories and agency. Their crimes belong to them. Their victims deserve no ambiguity about that.

But the comparison becomes illuminating when we consider the political pattern: states empower armed proxies for a short-term objective, treat ideology as a useful weapon, tolerate extremism because it serves a strategic purpose, and then withdraw when the immediate enemy has been defeated.

The monster is then declared alien to the civilisation that helped nourish its conditions of growth.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the international coalition that had poured money, weapons and attention into the conflict did not remain with equal seriousness to support a viable peace, disarm militias, rebuild institutions, educate a traumatised generation or contain the ideological networks that war had elevated. Afghanistan was left to civil war, factional violence and competing foreign interventions.

This was not simply abandonment in a humanitarian sense. It was a failure to take responsibility for the consequences of proxy warfare.

A more responsible approach would have required long-term investment in peace rather than weapons, support for Afghan civil society rather than armed clients, protection of women’s education, regional diplomacy, disarmament and a refusal to empower groups whose project was openly hostile to pluralism and human rights. It would have meant recognising that no country can be used as a chessboard without its people eventually paying the cost.

The first victims were Muslims

One of the cruellest effects of the “clash of civilisations” narrative is that it implies Islamic radicalism is directed principally against “the West”. The record shows otherwise.

For decades, Muslims have been among the principal victims of jihadist violence. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Yemen, Mali, Algeria and Egypt have borne a far greater share of the killing, displacement, intimidation and social destruction. One long-term database records Afghanistan as the country most affected by Islamist terrorism between 1979 and April 2024, with 17,075 attacks and 70,038 victims. It lists Algeria and Egypt among the countries heavily affected as well.

In Algeria, the civil conflict of the 1990s was a national catastrophe. Estimates of those killed range from about 100,000 to 250,000. Civilians were massacred, intellectuals and journalists were threatened or murdered, villages were terrorised, and the state’s own repressive violence deepened the tragedy.

In Egypt, Islamist militant groups such as al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya carried out attacks that killed Egyptian civilians, police, officials and visitors. In Afghanistan, armed factions turned on one another after the anti-Soviet war, transforming Kabul and other parts of the country into spaces of devastating internal conflict. In Iraq and Syria, sectarian militias and the so-called Islamic State murdered Muslims in mosques, markets, schools and homes, alongside Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and many others.

These were not wars between a unified “Islamic civilisation” and a unified “Western civilisation”. They were conflicts within Muslim-majority societies, often intensified by authoritarianism, foreign intervention, regional rivalries, economic exclusion, state collapse and the weaponisation of religious identity.

The first and most enduring victims of radical Islamist violence were very often Muslims themselves: women whose education was denied, writers silenced by threats, families displaced from their homes, worshippers killed in their mosques, and ordinary citizens trapped between armed groups and authoritarian states.

To say this is not to minimise atrocities committed in New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Bali or elsewhere. The victims of 11 September 2001 were innocent civilians, and their deaths deserve unequivocal mourning. But 9/11 should not erase the larger geography of suffering. It should lead us to ask how a conflict rooted in Cold War strategy, regional authoritarianism and wars in Muslim-majority countries became internationalised, until violence reached the United States with horrifying force.

Beyond the manufactured clash

The language of a civilisational clash is politically useful because it turns complex histories into a permanent emergency. It encourages Western publics to see Muslim populations through suspicion. It allows authoritarian rulers in Muslim-majority countries to portray dissent as extremism. It allows extremist groups to recruit by claiming that all Western societies are united in a war against Islam.

Both sides need the myth.

Extremists need it because it makes recruitment easier. They can tell wounded, angry or alienated young people that they belong to a humiliated civilisation under permanent attack. Western militarists and demagogues need it because it makes endless intervention, surveillance, arms sales and exceptional security measures appear necessary. Authoritarian governments need it because fear can eclipse questions about corruption, unemployment, inequality and political repression.

The clash, then, is not only between armed men. It is also between ordinary people and the systems that convert human suffering into strategy.

The former soldier who returns home psychologically shattered by war and the civilian who survives that war only to be pushed towards rage are not identical. One may hold institutional power that the other does not. One may have participated in an invading force while the other has endured its violence. Moral responsibility must never be blurred.

Yet both can be damaged by the same machinery: militarised policy, political hypocrisy, economic exploitation, propaganda and the cultivation of enemies.

One is invited to be understood as traumatised. The other is condemned as inherently violent.

A more honest politics would refuse both simplifications. It would condemn attacks on civilians without hesitation. It would also ask who armed whom, who financed whom, who benefited from the war, whose freedoms were sacrificed, and why the same societies that speak so readily of human rights so often abandon those rights when geopolitical interests intervene.

There is no inevitable war between the West and Islam. There are wars made by governments, intelligence services, militias, arms dealers, authoritarian regimes and ideologues. There are also people, in every culture, who resist those wars: intellectuals, educators, writers, women’s-rights activists, trade unionists, journalists, students, religious reformers and families who want no more than dignity and peace. The real task is not to choose a civilisation in a supposed eternal conflict. It is to reject the creators of conflict, and to refuse the false stories that make their creations seem inevitable