"Contrary to what some assert, Islam is fully compatible with modernization," is how former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers put it in a Foreign Affairs article challenging Samuel Huntington. His piece was entitled "The Fusion of Civilizations: The Case for Global Optimism." Summers bolstered his thesis by highlighting globalization accomplishments in Muslimmajority nations like Malaysia, where women now outnumber men 65 percent to 35 percent in national colleges and universities. He also noted that Gulf States like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) now feature satellite campuses of major Western universities. Finally, he noted that the fifty-million-plus-member Nahdlatul Ulama—the largest religious organization in Indonesia (the most-populous Muslim country in the world)—has repeatedly condemned extremist groups like ISIS. All of these facts further chip away at Huntington's archaic clash of civilizations theory.

XREF: Directly engages Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis, contrasting with it via Summers' empirical rebuttal.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 691