Ajami on Huntington

Hat tip to Done with Mirrors for this New York Times essay by Fouad Ajami on Samuel P Huntington. If you don't know who Huntington is or why you should known him, go here, here, and here.

In the meantime, here's just one paragraph from Ajami's essay:

In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.

Read the entire essay here. Then email it to a friend.

Order the book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, here.