In 1993, Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed a "new phase" of American geopolitical tension and rivalry. Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Huntington would formally declare Islam, and the billions of people it encompassed, to be the existential threat that threatened American harmony and hegemony. In a widely read essay published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, Huntington wrote, "The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power."

XREF: Connects to the clash-of-civilizations thesis and post-Cold War geopolitical framing. The reader may already know Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and how this framing shaped subsequent discourse.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 226