Inter-civilizational Conflict between Value Systems and Concepts of Order: Exploring the Islamic Humanist Potential for a Peace of Ideas

The concept and the reality of a “War of Ideas” being waged within a new Cold War predate 9/11. The former bipolar East-West conflict between competing systems has been replaced by a new polarization. The new one relates not only to the rivalry between secular and religious value systems, but foremost to the political order both rest on. This cultural-religious rivalry is twenty-first-century inter-civilizational conflict in world politics over political order and the values that undergird it. This conflict is not between the religions of Islam and Christianity as such, but instead to the combination of these world religions with politics. I call this “return of the sacred” to the political sphere “religionized politics,” which means a combination of a constructed religion and real politics. Activists of “political religion” believe themselves to act in a war of ideas as the “defenders of God.” 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.