A Peaceful Jihad in a Globalizing World

Abstract

I was chatting with a few students at the Malang branch campus of the State Islamic Institute (IAIN). I was a bit surprised when one of them challenged me, “What do you think of the Huntington Hypothesis?” My surprise did not come from being challenged but from being asked about a hypothesis about which I had not heard. Somehow, in the year that I spent preparing to depart for Indonesia, I had missed Samuel Huntington’s Foreign Affairs article (1993), which elucidated a theory that since the end of the Cold War we have been moving toward a Clash of Civilizations in which the major poles were the West and Islam. What is telling is that they had not missed it; they had been carefully considering these issues and been following the intellectual developments. And not only these students, but also most Indonesian Muslims that I met, were concerned about the relationship between their nation, their faith and the West, modernization, and globalization.