In the early 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington propounded his thesis on the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The American political scientist argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. Predictably, the West’s liberal-democratic-secular templates denounced his thesis as biased and Islamophobic.

Less than a decade later, this cultural conflict surfaced in bold relief when, on September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorists flew hijacked civilian aircraft into landmarks in the USA. In four coordinated attacks, they killed nearly 3,000 people. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had denounced the United States as the “Great Satan" during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, to characterise America as a powerful enemy of Iran and Islam. Initially, therefore, some suspected that Shia terrorists had carried out the 9/11 attacks.

It dawned soon, however, that these terror attacks were planned and executed by al-Qaeda, a terror outfit with roots in Saudi Arabia. Its chief, Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi engineer, and his deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician, were not illiterate or poor Muslims nursing grievances against non-Muslims, especially the Jews or Christians. They were rich and trained in the West’s “secular" education system. Why did they turn anti-West?

Cut to November 2025.

Several Muslim doctors in India have been found to be involved in terror attacks carried out by their “white-collar terror modules". Some 200 students and doctors of a controversial Islamic trust-run ‘university’ came under a cloud, most of them from Kashmir, where a significant section of the pious Muslim population has been trying to secede from an ‘infidel’ India since 1947, and join Pakistan, the Abode of Islam.

Why can’t Muslims live in peace and harmony with non-Muslims the world over? Because modernity has triggered a veritable internal turmoil and belief-dislocation in their minds.

To use a cliché, we can say Islam is at the crossroads, the way Christianity was after the Crusades. Many Muslims, trapped in the past, are struggling to find their identity in a rapidly changing world which is entirely........

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