Here is a trenchant criticism of the basic themes of the "Clash of Civilizations" thinkers. The author of this article, Vinoth Ramachandra, is a Sri Lankan and a leader of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) in the South Asian region. He was a featured plenary speaker at the Urbana 2000 student missions convention.

Clash-of-civilization types of thinkers tend to simplify and generalize by, say, pitting Islam against Christianity and believing this clash to be the major clash of the coming century, (just as Marxism-Atheism and Western-Humanism have been opposed in some sense to all "religions"... or as totalitarianism has clashed with democracy in the past century).

This author dislikes the presumptions of their being "good guy" civilizations and "bad guy" civilizations and makes great efforts to point out the holes in any such presumptions, particularly by Western thinkers such as Samuel P. Huntington in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Downloads:

This file is of type Word and needs Microsoft Word to read.
"The World After 9/11: Myths and Realities"