Niall Ferguson om Osama bin Laden, Samuel Huntington, 9/11

You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” had been published in 1993, 

as well as the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernize.

Yet nonviolent radicalization (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities. 

The critical point—as my wife explained in a book on the subject—is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread.

I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing organizations spread their network, through mosques, Islamic centers, schools, colleges, and local politics.

09.11.25  Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. 

He is the author of 16 books

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-osama-bin-laden-9-11-october-7-israel-hamas