Against the Clash: Deconstructing Huntington's Clash of Civilizations Through the Islamo-Christian Civilizational Framework and Sadrian Philosophy

Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis (1993, expanded 1996) argued that the post-Cold War world would be defined by civilizational conflict, with Islam and the West as the primary antagonists. This paper delivers a four-level demolition: empirical (the data does not support the thesis), methodological (the civilizational units are constructed artifacts, not analytical objects), ontological (the model of sealed civilizational containers is philosophically incoherent), and political (the thesis functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy that manufactured the conflict it claimed to predict). Against Huntington, the paper advances two counter-frameworks. First, Richard Bulliet's Islamo-Christian Civilization thesis (Columbia University Press, 2004): the structural claim that Islam and the West are not alien traditions but sibling civilisations sharing the same intellectual inheritance — demonstrated through the Sassanid-Syriac-Toledo transmission chain. Second, the Sadrian philosophical framework: Mullah Sadra's doctrine of Asalat al-Wujud (primacy of existence) and Tashkik al-Wujud (gradation of being) renders the concept of sealed civilizational containers ontologically impossible — not merely empirically unsupported. Drawing on Huntington (1993, 1996), Bulliet (2004), Said (2001), Sen (2006), Henderson and Tucker (2001), and Nasr (1997), the paper establishes a comprehensive alternative to the Clash framework grounded in both the historical record and Islamic philosophical tradition.