Untying the Mystique of an Islamic Threat: Western Imageries, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Search for Ontological Security

Abstract

This article begins by arguing that a motivation to tarnish Islam as a religion has framed the foundations of Western imagery of the Muslim world. It consists of a negative cultural portrait that depicts Islam as a threat to the ontological security of the West. Such a representation is centered around an epistemic conviction that Islam and violence are inextricably intertwined with each other because the religion is still sedimented in medieval barbarism and as a civilization, it is yet to graduate out of the syndrome of dogmatic mono-cultural assertiveness and a retrograding sense of conservative obstinacy. In accordance to this, Islam emerges as an enemy of the modernized West that represents liberal cosmopolitanism and multicultural accommodation. Based on this, the article examines as to how such an epistemic conviction gets envisioned in the Islamophobic narratives of Samuel P. Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and their subsequent re-invocations that aim to problematize Islam as the ultimate nemesis of the West.