"Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal to Huntington's argument, Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond the ivory-tower American universities, writes in the September-October, 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs:'The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus ... are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interest of states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal ... to the wind ... in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia.'
"True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has misidentified which civilizational war is occurring there. Azeri Turks, perhaps the world's most secular Shi'ite Moslems, see their cultural identity not in terms of religion but in terms of their Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Moslems, but becaue they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages adopting a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by the Teheran clergy, and wed to an Arabic script) across Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans, the Iranians.
"Huntington may be correct to say that the Caucasus is a flash point of cultural and racial wars. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's terms are too simple. While Turks are growing deeply distrustful and coming to hate Moslem Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish political life, identifying themselves increasingly as Moslems, betrayed by a West that for several years did little to help besieged Moslems in Bosnia and which attacks Turkish Moslems in the streets of Germany.
"To go a step further, the Balkans, where nation-state wars flared at the beginning of the twentieth century, have been on the verge of culture conflict between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of somewhat-sympathetic Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the worldwide House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus, Islam is subdivided into a clash between Turks and Iranians. Ajami rightly asserts that this very subdividing, not to mention the many divisions within the Arab world, indicate that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West can still play one part of the House of Islam against another.
"The Clash of Civilizations' is a romantic term, conjuring up massive armies divided by race, language, and religion, advancing across battlefields thousands of miles long, wielding banners of the cross and of the cresent. The reality is different. The desecration of Greek and Russian Orthodox tombstones by a Moslem Uzbek mob in Tashkent was an isolated incident ignited by specific, local factors - like other isolated events, such as a war between Moslems and Orthodox Christians in Bosnia; a decades-long war of words, with occasional bloodshed, between a Greek Orthodox government in Athens and a Turkish Moslem government in Ankara; the forced exodus, earlier in the twentieth century Moslem-controlled Black Sea coast; and the tensions between various Russian Orthodox and Turkic Moslem communities in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. But these events, taken as a whole, have more to do with historically based religious and ethnic differences than with modern state loyalties. So for such events, Huntington's civilization clash is an approriate term - as a crude organizing principle.
"But the reality is uglier, more complex, and pathetic. Forget about medieval horsemen giving battle; expect instead a fistfight with smashed vodka bottles in a plywood bar. For the moment, a civilizational competition may exist between the Turkic and Iranian peoples for future trade routes in Central Asia - routes, that for the most part haven't yet been built, with the battle so far being fought with charts and anemic statements within bureaucrats' offices. It is a competition that the Russians are joining: The Russians want to upstage both Turkey's plan to transport Central Asian oil across Anatolia to the Mediterranean and Iran's plan to transport the oil to the Persian Gulf with their own plan to ship oil through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus straits. As some states here become increasingly identified with old caravan routes, this might lead to conflict"
Robert D. Kaplan. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia - A journey to the frontiers of anarchy (Vintage Books, Random House, NYC, 1997) pp 269-270.
For other analyses of conditions existing in the 1990s in various countries and civilizations of the world, see my: