When it was first speculatively advanced in a 1993 article in 'Foreign Affairs', Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis was roundly and at times roughly criticized by Western scholars ('Foreign Affairs' 1993; 'ASAA Review' 1994). Not only was his key argument, that future conflict would acquire a cultural dimension and be conducted between different civilizations, derided as advancing a totally fanciful model of international relations, but also his core prediction, that as historically colliding civilizations the West and a resurgent Islam were poised to launch this new kind of global war, was condemned as intrinsically flawed. Underlying this generally unfavourable reception was the apprehension that a madcap thesis - a 'gimmick' on a parallel with the 'War of the Worlds', as Edward Said categorized it in a 1998 lecture (Said 2001, 1998) - might progressively acquire paradigmatic status through repeated exposure and begin in a 'self-fulfilling' way to inform the West's policies towards Islam and Muslims in general ('ASAA Review' 1994; Decker 2002; Bilgrami 2003). Certainly the Huntington thesis struck a 'market' chord almost at once (Esposito 2002: 126). Expanded into a best-selling and widely translated book in 1996 - 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order' - his 'bright idea', as Huntington had called it earlier in a rejoinder to his critics (Huntington 1993b: 134-38), served to spark a string of international conferences and to inspire a substantial production of articles and papers. A decade into the twenty-first century this output has shown little sign of diminishing.

A fundamental problem in the analysis of the 'war on terror' is a general predisposition in the West towards reflecting on violence as cause and violence as solution. In other words, a militant version of political Islam is treated as the problem, and a war to eliminate it is viewed as the appropriate response. My approach, which suggests a different way, breaks down the problem into two parts. Firstly, I investigate the history of West-Islam relations in order to gauge the impact of Western discourses on the development of political Islam and its causal impact on the 'war on terror'. Secondly, I extend this approach to examine the conflict in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan for an indepth analysis of the intractable and protracted nature of this conflict in that setting and a new way to deal with it. The thesis argues that the construction of 'otherness' in the Christian-Western discourses played a critical part in the defining of Muslim identity, and resulted in a dehumanising and demonising tradition of viewing Muslims down the ages and reacting to them. It further argues that Muslim responses to these discourses produced movements and organisations whose worldviews were influenced by the West itself. The emergence of reformists, revivalists, fundamentalists, Islamists, radicals, extremists and Jihadists all, in varying degrees, took note not only of the long history of encounter between the West and Islam but also the way that those encounters were framed.