Islam and the West will play a critical part in national and international conflicts of the future While Huntington's thesis attracted enormous interest it was also heavily criticised. His portrayal of Islam is too schematic and lacks historical specificity. It reifies a particular kind of Islamic fundamentalism as typifying the whole of the Muslim world. It fails to recognise the enormous range of cultural and political forms within the Muslim world, including the extent of religious and political division both within and between Muslim nations. Huntington's concept of civilisation is also problematic and lacks conceptual clarity. Most importantly, his emphasis on cultural differences ignores the economic issues that are implicated in many of the political conflicts between Muslim and Western nations. Muslim countries have been the object of Western imperialism for centuries and in the 19th and 20th centuries man were subject to Western political and economic domination. Explaining conflicts in the Middle East and other regions of the Islamic world in terms of culture is quite inadequate (Encel 2002, p. 225). This last is emphasised by Karen Armstrong in her exploration of the relationship between the Muslim and Western worlds.