الكاتب: Naveed Sheikh

In his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington reinvented Arnold Toynbee’s understanding of history as driven not only by impersonal material structures—territory, capital, population, and natural resources—but equally by interpersonal ideational structures. This perception seemed supported by empirical observation, and soon filled the intellectual and political lacunae which had attained particular salience in the wake of the implosion of Soviet-backed communism. Oftentimes, the reinstatement of religion—as the single most stable ideational structure in human history—was referred to as ‘the revenge of God’, but for social scientists and historians alike it became impossible to scientifically isolate the divine variable from terrestrial imperatives in the muddled socio-political praxes of earthlings. A casual observation, nonetheless, would suggest that discursive constructions about God (in politics, a short-hand for absolute truth) have been a necessary corollary to nearly all conflictual formations, from the substate to the transstate levels. The intensity of this linkage, and its constancy, is tested in this study.