Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

9.Social context. Higher-status families are likely to live in communities where other families promote achievement and their children’s peers are committed to academic achievement.

10.Genetic advantage. Early IQ is related to SES, and intelligence is related to academic performance.

Individually, none of these factors seems to account for a large part of the overall relationship between SES and academic achievement, nor is the relative significance of these factors clear, yet the very length of the list suggests the complexity of the issue. Higher-status students are not all similarly advantaged by each of these factors, and lower-status students are not all similarly disadvantaged by each one. The substantial aggregate relationship between SES and achievement undoubtedly reflects complex interactions among the many home-related contributing causes. As is more thoroughly discussed below, the mediating impact of school resources and practices is much less consequential.

The Racial Gap. The black-white disparity in academic performance remains large despite some notable reductions in recent years, and it is economically significant. A number of researchers have shown that for younger cohorts, the racial disparity in earnings is accounted for very largely by differences in basic academic skills as measured by scores on tests such as Armed Forces Qualifications Test (Farkas 1996).

Why this gap persists is unclear, partly because until recently, sociologists and other social scientists were wary of addressing such a politically explosive issue. Most relevant for the discussion here is the fact this gap cannot be explained by blacks’ lesser school resources (see ‘‘School Effects,’’ below). Largely drawing on the work of scholars in related fields, the sociological consensus appears to be that the racial disparity does not reflect a group-based difference in genetic potential ( Jencks and Phillips 1998). (At the individual level, there is undoubtedly some genetic component to IQ among people of all races.) Moreover, this gap cannot be attributed largely to racial differences in economic advantage: Socioeconomic status explains only about a third of it. However, a broader index of family environment, including parental practices, may account for up to two-

thirds of the gap (Phillips et al. 1998). A complete explanation probably will involve many of the factors previously noted in the discussion of the relation between SES and achievement but also include the distinctive cultural barriers that ‘‘involuntary minorities’’ face in many societies (Ogbu 1978) as well as subtle interactional processes within schools.

Racial disparities in educational attainment have declined dramatically. High school graduation rates are now virtually the same, and the remaining disparity in college attendance reflects blacks’ lower economic resources, not a distinctive racial barrier.

School Effects. The governmental report Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman et al. 1966) strongly challenged conventional wisdom about the connections among economic status, schools, and achievement. In doing so, it fundamentally shaped the agenda for further research in this area.

Attempting to identify the characteristics of schools that improve learning, the so-called Coleman Report documented two key points. First, there is a weak relationship between social status and school quality as measured by indicators such as expenditure per pupil, teachers’ experience, and class size despite considerable racial segregation. Second, these measures of school quality have very little overall effect on school achievement (scores on standardized tests) independent of students’ family background. The Coleman Report also showed, however, that school effects were notably larger for black and Hispanic students than they were for whites and Asians. Among the school effects, the racial composition of schools was the most critical: Blacks did somewhat better in integrated schools.

Later research largely validated the main conclusions of the Coleman Report, but also modified them, often by considering more subtle aspects of school quality. For instance, some school resources, including expenditures, seem to enhance achievement, but the predominance of home factors on achievement remains undisputed. In regard to another between-schools effect, Coleman argued for the educational superiority of Catholic schools, an advantage he attributed to their communal caring spirit and high academic expectations for all students. The Coleman Report did not consider such cultural matters or specific educational prac-

tices. Much of the post–Coleman Report research focused on within-school effects because gross between-school effects appeared to be relatively minor.

Ability grouping in elementary schools and tracking in high schools have attracted attention, largely as a source of inequalities of academic performance. The premise of these practices is that students differ substantially in academic ability and will learn more if taught with students of similar ability. Although many different practices are grouped under the term ‘‘tracking,’’ students in the ‘‘top’’ groups generally receive a more demanding education, with higher expectations, more sophisticated content, and a quicker pace, and are disproportionately from advantaged families. The obvious but not fully settled issue is whether schools ‘‘discriminate’’ in favor of the socially advantaged in making placements. At the high school level, controlling for measures of prior achievement (themselves affected by family factors), higher SES seems to enhance one’s chances modestly, though achievement factors are predominant in placement. Blacks are somewhat favored in the process if one controls for prior achievement. At the elementary school level, research is less consistent, though one study indicates that neither test scores nor family background predicts early reading group placement (Pallas et al. 1994).

Another important but not fully settled issue is whether students in certain ability groups or tracks learn more because of their placement. Gamoran (1992) shows that the effects of tracking are conditioned substantially by the characteristics of the tracking system (for example, how much mobility between tracks is allowed) and subject matter. However, by way of gross summary, higher track placement per se generally seems to have a modestly beneficial impact on achievement and also seems to increase students’ educational aspirations and self-esteem. However, to exemplify the important exceptions to this generalization, it appears that within-class grouping for elementary school mathematics may help both low and high groups.

Teacher Expectations. It is commonly supposed that differences in teachers’ expectations explain at least some of the racial and socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement. The

claim is that a self-fulfilling prophecy is at work: Teachers expect less from socially disadvantaged students and treat them accordingly, and therefore these students perform less well in school. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) small-scale experimental study provided the initial impetus for this argument, but follow-up studies in real classrooms suggest that teachers’ expectations have little or no effects on later performance.

If the standard for fairness is race neutrality in light of past academic performance, there is little evidence of racial bias in teachers’ expectations, but some limited evidence suggests that teachers’ beliefs are more consequential for blacks than for whites (Ferguson 1998). More generally, research has not established that socially discriminatory practices in schools significantly explain the link between family and/or racial status and achievement.

Contextual Effects. Not only do students come to school with different backgrounds that affect learning, schools provide students with different social environments that are importantly shaped by the economic and racial composition of the student body. Because peers are so influential in children’s and adolescents’ lives, the obvious question is whether the social composition of a school affects individual learning beyond the effects attributable to an individual’s status characteristics. This issue has had practical significance in light of ongoing public debates about the impact of racial desegregation initiatives.

Evidence about the impact of social context on learning is mixed, but in any case the impact is not large. To the extent that the SES of a student body is consequential, this appears to result from the connection between SES and a positive academic climate in a school. Greater racial integration generally seems to promote black student achievement slightly, but the benefits are more pronounced for black students when they actually have classroom contact with white students rather than just attending a formerly integrated school.

More recent research suggests an important cautionary note about whether integration ‘‘works.’’ Entwistle and Alexander (1992), for example, show that on a yearlong basis, in the early grades black students in integrated schools had better reading comprehension than did black students in segregated schools. However, the apparent advantage of integrated schools totally reflects the fact that

black students at integrated schools improved more during the summer than did black students at segregated schools. During the school year black students did slightly better in segregated schools. This analysis exemplifies the increasing recognition that a simple conclusion about integration— works versus does not work—is inadequate.

Learning through the Year. As should be evident, a major issue in the sociology of education is separating the effects of the home from the effects of the school. The perplexing finding is that racial and class disparities in achievement in the early grades become substantially greater as students progress through school. Critics have seized on this finding to indict schools for discriminatory practices that exacerbate social inequality.

However, so-called summer learning research suggests a different interpretation (Alexander and Entwistle 1995; Gamoran 1995). Examining the same students’ test scores at the beginning and ending of each of several school years, researchers have shown that (1) despite initial disparities, advantaged and disadvantaged groups have roughly similar gains in achievement during the school year but that (2) advantaged students continue to improve during the summer while disadvantaged students stagnate or decline. As the effects of this process accumulate over the years, initial disparities become ever larger. The important implication is that schools neither reduce nor add to the inequalities that are rooted in homes. Schools in effect passively reproduce existing inequalities.

Enhancing Performance. Although crude measures of school resources (e.g., teacher certification levels) appear at most to be weakly related to school achievement, a burgeoning and increasingly sophisticated line of research finds that effective schools can be identified. These schools are marked by strong leadership committed to academically focused goals and order, high academic demands, and frequent practice of academic skills. This research also directs attention to the benefits of an overall communal culture and classroom interactions that stress cooperative efforts between students and teachers (Lee and Croninger 1994). What appears critical is how resources are organizationally applied.

Macro-Level Effects. This article has focused on the experiences of individuals: how education affects life chances and how personal character-

istics and school experiences affect learning. The unit of analysis, in other words, is the individual. Research in the field much less commonly takes the society as the unit of analysis: How do societal features shape the nature of the educational system? How do the features of this system affect other societal arrangements? An important example of macroanalysis is the generally limited impact of increasing educational access on equality of opportunity (see ‘‘Schooling and Life Chances,’’ above). Perhaps the most studied macro-level topic is the relationship between educational expansion and economic growth.

If the individual economic benefits of education are clear, the impact of educational expansion on economic growth is less certain. The orthodox view in economics is that educational expansion promotes growth. This view follows from human capital theory: People with more schooling get higher pay because they are more productive, and if more people get more schooling, they will produce more and get paid more, with the aggregate effect being economic growth. Many sociologists are at least partially skeptical of this idea. Undoubtedly, more educated workers get paid more, but the positive (private) rate of return they enjoy reflects greater productivity only if it is assumed that the labor market is perfectly competitive and in equilibrium. This assumption is at least partly problematic given socially discriminatory employment practices, internal labor markets with seniority rules and restricted job mobility, professional and union restrictions of labor supply, and public sector employment with politically determined pay structures.

Allocation theory—which also is called the credentialing perspective—offers an alternative explanation of the link between education and economic rewards. In brief, employers assume that the more educated, as a group, are relatively desirable people to hire (for reasons that may or may not reflect their individual productive capacities); and in turn, how people are ranked in the educational hierarchy becomes linked to how they are ranked in the hierarchy of the existing job structure. Educational expansion, then, does not necessarily promote economic growth; it only affects who gets which of the already existing jobs. To the extent that credentialing processes are operative, it is impossible to infer aggregate effects on growth from individual-level data on income.

Given the ambiguous implications of individual income data, the best way to examine the issue is through aggregate, national-level studies of how education affects economic growth. The accumulated weight of this research undercuts claims about the large universal benefits of more education of all types. Benavot (1992), for example, establishes the following for a large sample of developed and poor countries in the period 1913– 1985: Throughout the period, the expansion of primary education promoted growth; the expansion of secondary education had more modest impact, and only during times of worldwide prosperity; and tertiary education tended to retard growth at all times. In the United States, moreover, tertiary enrollments have never stimulated growth (Walters and Rubinson, 1983).

However, even if more education is not a universal economic ‘‘fix,’’ in certain circumstances particular types of education may stimulate growth in specific sectors. Reviewing single-country times series studies that use an aggregate production function model, Rubinson and Fuller (1992) conclude that education had the greatest beneficial impact when it created the kinds of skills that were suited to an economy’s sectoral mix and technological demands. However, a good fit between the educational system and the economy is by no means certain because educational expansion and the actual educational content of schools are so often driven by political processes, not technological demands.

Even if the actual economic impact of education is often less than is commonly supposed, the widespread belief in the general modernizing benefits of education is central to an ideology that permeates the entire world. Indeed, in Meyer’s institutionalist perspective (Meyer and Hannan 1979; Meyer 1977), the quest to appear modern has induced later-developing societies to mimic the educational practices of the early modernizers so that many school structures, rituals, and formal curricular contents are remarkably similar throughout the world. In turn, this institutionalized similarity means that on a global basis, certain types of knowledge become defined as relatively significant, the elite and mass positions become defined and legitimated by educational certification, and assumptions about a national culture rest on the existence of mass education. Nevertheless, if education is associated at the individual level with

certain democratic values, educational expansion per se does not appear to contribute to the emergence of democratic regimes or state power.

THE REFORMIST PROJECT

Policy debates about education have often been contentious, fueled by larger ideological and political struggles. In conservative times, schools have been pressed to emphasize discipline and social and/or intellectual sorting; conversely, in more liberal times, issues of equality and inclusion have come to the fore. The apparent result is cyclical, pendulum-like swings in policy between, say, an emphasis on common core requirements and highly differentiated curricula.

While differences at the rhetorical level have sometimes been sharp, actual changes in practice in much of the twentieth century have been relatively minor. This reflects the institutionalization of the school, meaning that there is a widespread collective sense of what a ‘‘real’’ school is like (Tyack and Cuban 1995). This institutionalization rests on popular legitimization and the recurrent practices of school administrators and teachers. Concrete practices such as the division of knowledge into particular subject areas, the spatial organization of classrooms, and the separation of students into age-based grades are all part of the ‘‘real’’ school. Educational practices that depart from this pattern have had limited acceptance, for example, open classrooms in the 1970s. The lesson for current reformers is that policies that modify institutionalized practices, not fundamentally challenge them, are more likely to be successful and that the political support of in-the-school educators is critical for success.

Indeed, much policy-oriented research has had a mildly reformist bent, primarily concerned with making existing schools ‘‘work better.’’ That has largely — and narrowly—meant producing students with higher scores on standardized tests in the basic academic subject areas. Critics have questioned both the validity of these tests and the desirability of evaluating school ‘‘success’’ in these limited terms alone. Proponents contend that scores on these tests have considerable predictive validity for later school and occupational performance and that their standardized results permit rigorous comparisons across groups and school settings.

The welter of policy-related studies is impossible to summarize here (and the distinction between sociological research and educational research is hardly sharp), but two general types of contributions from sociologists stand out. The first is essentially a debunking contribution: Sociologists have shown what does not work despite fervent beliefs to the contrary. The previously discussed Coleman Report is the most prominent example, undercutting the liberal faith of the 1960s that differences in school resources substantially account for racial and socioeconomic differences in academic achievement.

The second contribution is essentially methodological, alerting policymakers to the fact that many apparent school effects may largely or even totally reflect selection biases. That is, if groups of students are subject to different educational practices, are any differences in their performance attributable to the educational practices per se, or are different sorts of students subject to different practices, thus accounting for the association between practice and performance? In recent years, controversies about the efficacy of private and Catholic schools, related to larger debates about school choice plans, have centrally involved the issue of selection bias. In the most sophisticated study, Bryk et al. (1993) demonstrate net positive effects of Catholic schools on academic achievement and show that the gap in achievement between white and minority students is reduced in Catholic schools.

Even with the most sophisticated multilevel, multivariate statistical models, however, sociologists cannot make firm causal claims by analyzing survey data. However, by ruling out many potential sources of spuriousness, these analyses can suggest interventions that are likely to have a positive effect. True experiments, which involve the actual manipulation of the treatment and/or practice, are rare. In a state-sponsored experiment in Tennessee, starting in kindergarten, students were randomly assigned to varyingly sized classes (with and without a teacher’s aide). The results showed that students, especially minority students, benefited academically from small classes (thirteen to seventeen students) and that the benefits persisted even when the students later moved to larger classes (Finn and Achilles 1990). Prior nonexperimental analyses had shown, across the

range of class size in existing schools, that class size had very little or no effect.

Now that it is accepted that schools can make a difference in learning despite the great significance of family-based factors, the research agenda probably will focus on specifying the conditions in which particular school practices are most effective. This will involve analyzing inside-school practices as well as the links between families and schools and between schools and the workplace.

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PAUL W. KINGSTON

in Muslim societies; and, Muslim minorities in the West.

SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE ORIGINS

OF ISLAM

Social science scholarship in the twentieth century has been influenced by three dominant intellectual traditions: Marxism, Weberian , and functionalism. Their influence has shaped the analytic approach to historical events, resulting in an increasing focus on the relationship between social and economic factors and historical events. The study of Islam and Muslim societies often reflects these influences.

SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM

Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is an Abrahamic religion based on prophecy, prophethood, and the revealed text. It began in sixth-century Arabia and spread rapidly to regions outside the Arabian peninsula. A hundred years after Mohammed had declared it a prophetic religion, Islam had spread to almost all the regions of the known civilized world. This early political success and the idea that the divine message for the proper ordering of society is complete and final account for the social pervasiveness of this religion. The first factor inhibits the handing over of spheres of life to nonreligious authority, and the second makes it difficult to offer rival versions of the blueprint. This social pervasiveness makes Islam especially interesting in the sociology of religion (Gellner 1983, p.2).

Islam is the second largest religion, with an estimated 1.2 billion adherents, constituting about 20 percent of the world population in 1998. Approximately 900 million Muslims live in forty-five Muslim-majority countries. Table 1 provides a sociodemographic profile of Muslim countries included in the World Development Report published annually by the World Bank. In terms of size, the Islamic world constitutes a significant part of humanity and therefore warrants a sociologically informed understanding and analysis of its religious, social, and political trends. The following topics will be covered in this article: social, ideological, and economic factors in the origins of Islam; Islam and the rise of the modern West; Islam, Muslim society, and social theory; Islam and fundamentalism; the Islamic state; gender issues

One strand of scholarship has focused on the analysis of various factors in the origins and early development of Islam. A discussion of the economic and social aspects of the origins of Islam provides a test case for a closer investigation of the wider issues raised by the dominant paradigms in sociology. A number of historical studies have dealt with this issue primarily in terms of the diffusion of Jewish and Christian teaching in preIslamic Arabia that laid the foundation for the rise of Islam (Torrey 1933; Bell 1926; Kroeber 1948). The aim of these and similar studies has been to identify and understand how certain ideas and cultural elements utilized by Islam derived from preexisting religions or to point to the existence of elements analogous to Islam in other religious traditions in the same general area.

Another scholarly tradition has approached the analysis of the early development of Islam in terms of sociological and anthropological concepts and traces the origins of Islam primarily to the change in social organization in pre-Islamic Meccan society caused by the spread of trade. Wolf (1951) provides an overview of these studies and shows that the tendencies Mohammed brought to fruition were prominent in pre-Islamic Arabia. The spread of commerce and rapid urban development had caused the emergence of classlike groupings from the preceding network of kin relations. This also contributed to the emergence of a divine being specifically linked to the regulation of nonkin relations as the chief deity. These changes created a disjunction between the ideological basis of social organization and the functional social reality and thus spawned disruption and conflict. Islam arose as a moderating religious-

ethical social movement under these social conditions. According to Wolf:

The religious revolution associated with the name of Mohammed permitted the establishment of an incipient state structure. It replaced allegiance to the kinship unit with allegiance to a state structure, an allegiance phrased in religious terms. It limited the disruptive exercise of kin-based mechanisms of blood feud. It put an end to the extension of ritual kin ties to serve as links between tribes. It based itself instead on the armed force of the faithful as the core of a social order which included both believers and unbelievers. It evolved a rudimentary judicial authority, patterned after the role of the pre-Islamic soothsayer, but possessed of new significance. The limitation of the blood feud permitted war to emerge as a special prerogative of the state power. The state taxed both Muslims and non-Muslims, in ways patterned after pre-Islamic models but to new ends. Finally, it located the center of the state in urban settlements, surrounding the town with a set of religious symbols that served functionally to increase its prestige and role.

(1951, pp. 352–353)

In his historical studies of early Islam, Watt (1954, 1955, 1962a, 1962b) also analyzed the economic, social, and ideological aspects of the origins of Islam. His analysis of the economic situation in pre-Islamic Arabia shows that the economic transition from a nomadic to a mercantile economy had resulted in social upheaval and general malaise. He also found a close affinity between the ideology of Islam and the situation that prevailed in early seventh-century Mecca. However, his analysis led him to question the nature and direction of the relationship between Islamic doctrines and the social and economic conditions of pre-Islamic Meccan society. Are doctrines causally dependent on the social order in such a way that they can be deduced from it? Or is the ideology of Islam a creative factor that made a contribution to the course of events? Watt argues that there was nothing inevitable about the development of a world religion from the economic and social circumstances of early seventh-century Mecca. The malaise of the times might have been alleviated without achieving anything of more than transient and local importance. He argues that the formulation of Islamic ideology was a creative response to the

situation, not an automatic result of interacting factors.

According to Watt, the creative response of Islamic ideology is reflected in key foundational Koranic ideas such as Ummah and Rasul. Like other Koranic ideas, these ideas can be connected to earlier Jewish and Christian conceptions as well as to pre-Islamic Arabian ideas, but the Koranic conceptions had a unique new and creative dimension that made them especially relevant to the contemporary Arabian situation. Mere repetitions of current ideas in the Koran would have rendered those ideas devoid of creative novelty, whereas sheer novelty would have made them unintelligible. What the Koran does is take the familiar conceptions and transmute them into something new and original (Watt 1954, p. 172). In this synthesis, the old images are to some extent transformed but retain their power to release the energy of the human psyche. From this perspective, the Koranic conceptions and images of Ummah and Rasul took on new meanings that were a combination of the old conceptions and additional meanings conferred by the Koran, which was thus able to release the energies of the older images and inaugurate a vigorous new religion. This energy was directed, among other things, toward the establishment of the Islamic state and the unification of Arabia (Watt 1954, pp. 173–4).

Debate about the social factors in the origins of Islam continues (Engineer 1990; Crone 1996). However, it is evident that under the influence of dominant theoretical paradigms in sociology, this debate has provided new insights into the role of social, economic, and cultural factors in shaping the ideology of Islam and the early development of Islamic social formations.

THE ‘‘SOCIAL PROJECT’’ OF ISLAM

Another recent development has been a revival of interest in the ‘‘social project’’ of Islam. The most significant contributions have come from the work of Rahman (1982, 1989), who claims, ‘‘A central aim of the Koran is to establish a viable social order on earth that will be just and ethically based’’ (1989, p. 37). This aim was declared against the backdrop of an Arabian society characterized by polytheism, exploitation of the poor, general neglect of social responsibility, degradation of morals,

injustice toward women and the less powerful, and tribalism. The Koran and the genesis of the Muslim community occurred in the light of history and against the social historical background. The Koranic response to specific conditions is the product of a ‘‘coherent philosophy’’ and ‘‘attitude toward life’’ that Rahman calls ‘‘the intellectual tradition’’ of Islam. This tradition was subverted and undermined by an emphasis on literalist interpretations of the Koran by Ulema Islamic scholars. The Islamic scholarship molded by Ulema came to emphasize ‘‘minimal Islam’’, focusing on the ‘‘five pillars,’’ and negative and punitive Islam. Islamic scholarship thus became rigid, fossilized, and largely removed from the intellectual tradition of the Koran. Rahman argues that the intellectual tradition of the Koran requires that Koranic thought be dependent on a factual and proper study of social conditions in order to develop Islamic social norms for reforming society (Rahman 1982).

ISLAM AND THE RISE OF THE

MODERN WEST

An important strand of historical scholarship has focused on the relationship between Islam and the rise of the modern West. This question was the focus of Mohammed and Charlemagne (Pirenne 1939). According to Pirenne, for centuries after the political collapse of the Roman Empire, the economic and social life of western Europe continued to move exclusively to the rhythm of the ancient world. The civilization of Romania had long outlived the Roman Empire in the West. It survived because the economic life based on the Mediterranean had continued to thrive. It was only after the Arab-Muslim conquests of the eastern and southern Mediterranean in the seventh century A.D. that this Mediterranean-wide economy was disrupted by the Islamic conquest. The Arab-Muslim war fleets closed the Mediterranean to shipping in the later seventh century.

Deprived of its Mediterranean-wide horizons, civilized western Europe closed in on itself, and the under-Romanized world of northern Gaul and Germany gained prominence. The Mediterranean Roman Empire in the West was replaced by a western Europe dominated by a northern Frankish aristocracy that gave rise to a society in which wealth was restricted to land. Its rulers, deprived of the wealth generated by trade, had to reward

their followers with grants of land, and thus feudalism was born. The empire of Charlemagne, a northern Germanic empire inconceivable in any previous century, marked the beginning of the Middle Ages. Pirenne shows that by breaking the unity of the Mediterranean, the conquest made by the Arab-Muslim war fleets ruptured RomanoByzantine economic and cultural domination over western Europe, which was forced to rely on its own material and cultural resources. From this analysis Pirenne draws his famous observation: ‘‘It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable’’ (Pirenne 1939, p. 234).

The Pirenne thesis linked great historical events that have occupied the attention of historians for a long time: the demise of the classical world centered on the Mediterranean and the rise of the empire of Charlemagne. Pirenne demonstrated that these two events, which are central to the rise of the modern West, are linked to the rise of Islam and its expansion to the Mediterranean. Pirenne’s well-documented generalizations have attracted praise as well as criticism from historians who are often wary of broad generalizations (see Hodges and Whitehouse 1983).

While Pirenne’s thesis attempts to link the rise and development of Islam to the rise of the modern West, paradoxically, equally influential hypothesis postulates instead a ‘‘clash of civilizations.’’ This hypothesis, advanced by Samuel Huntington (1993), holds that whereas in the pre– Cold War era military and political conflicts occurred within the Western civilizations, after the end of the Cold War the conflict moved out of its Western phase and its centerpiece became the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. According to Huntington, future conflicts will occur along the fault lines that separate those civilizations. Globalization tends to heighten civilizational identity, and as a result, civilizational differences are difficult to reconcile and override political and economic factors.

Huntington (1993) postulates that the greatest threat of conflict for the West comes from religious fundamentalism, especially Islamic fundamentalism. He sees Islamic fundamentalism as arising from the failures of Muslim countries to achieve political and economic development of