by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris *

Foreign Policy
March/April 2003
Samuel Huntington was only half right. The cultural fault line that divides the West and the Mus
but sex. According to a new survey, Muslims and their Western counterparts want democracy,
comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality, and gay rightswhich may not bode
Middle East.
Democracy promotion in Islamic countries is now one of the Bush administration's most popu
condescending notion that freedom will not grow in the Middle East," Secretary of State Colin Powell de
the White House's new Middle East Partnership Initiative to encourage political and economic r
Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush's national security advisor, promised last September that t
march of freedom in the Muslim world."
But does the Muslim world march to the beat of a di!erent drummer? Despite Bush's optimistic prono
civilizations" when it comes to "the common rights and needs of men and women," others are
controversial 1993 thesis"that the cultural division between "Western Christianity" and "Orthodox Ch
line for conict"resonates more loudly than ever since September 11. Echoing Huntington, columnis
Guardian last November, "What binds together a globalized force of some extremists from many cont
values that seems to them to spring from Judeo-Christianity." Meanwhile, on the other side of the A
Shays of Connecticut, after sitting through hours of testimony on U.S.-Islamic relations on Capitol H
doesn't democracy grab hold in the Middle East? What is there about the culture and the people and
seem to be something they strive for and work for?"
Huntington's response would be that the Muslim world lacks the core political values that gave birth to
civilization: separation of religious and secular authority, rule of law and social pluralism, parliam
government, and protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the bu!er between citizens and
seems all too plausible given the failure of electoral democracy to take root throughout the Middle Eas
latest Freedom House rankings, almost two thirds of the 192 countries around the world are now elect
countries with a Muslim majority, only one fourth are electoral democracies"and none of the core Ara
category.
Yet this circumstantial evidence does little to prove Huntington correct, since it reveals nothing abo
publics. Indeed, there has been scant empirical evidence whether Western and Muslim societies exhib
until now. The cumulative results of the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), con
provide an extensive body of relevant evidence. Based on questionnaires that explore values and beliefs
is an investigation of sociocultural and political change that encompasses over 80 percent of the world's
A comparison of the data yielded by these surveys in Muslim and non-Muslim societies around th
Huntington's thesis: Culture does matter"indeed, it matters a lot. Historical religious traditions
contemporary values. However, Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the W
At this point in history, societies throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo-Christian alike) see democr
Instead, the real fault line between the West and Islam, which Huntington's theory completely overl
sexual liberalization. In other words, the values separating the two cultures have much more to do
generations in the West have gradually become more liberal on these issues, Muslim nations have rema
the world.
This gap in values mirrors the widening economic divide between the West and the Muslim world. Com
of women throughout the Middle East, the United Nations Development Programme observed last sum
desired state of well-being and human development, or compete in a globalizing world, if half i
disempowered." But this "sexual clash of civilizations" taps into far deeper issues than how Muslim
commitment to gender equality and sexual liberalization proves time and again to be the most reliable
The True Clash of Civilizations
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