Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi reflects on the work of Lewis, who contends that he, and not Huntington, modeled the clash of civilizations theory. Dabashi observed, "As early as the 1950s he [Lewis] had envisioned the clash of civilizations, and to this day he remains incensed that the idea is credited to Samuel Huntington. Since the early 1960s, he has published books which repeatedly rattle on about the opposition of the two sides, including The Middle East and the West (1964), Islam and the West (1994), Cultures in Conflict (1996), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001), and What Went Wrong (2003), laying the groundwork for [Francis] Fukuyama and Huntington." So although he popularized the phrase "clash of civilizations" and gave it momentum in the public and political spheres, Huntington was not an isolated actor peddling the worldview that the United States was on a civilizational collision course with Islam. These scholars, Orientalists of the highest order, were simply dressing old Orientalist ideas and arguments in modern terms and catchy phrases.

XREF: Connects to the broader lineage of Orientalist scholarship informing post-9/11 'clash' narratives and the Huntington/Fukuyama discourse.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 234