The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, stating that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
This theory was originally formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
The phrase itself was earlier used by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage". Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (p. 196).
This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.
Read more about The Clash Of Civilizations: Overview, Major Civilizations According To Huntington, Huntington's Thesis of Civilizational Clash, Modernization, Westernization, and "torn Countries", Criticism
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“Simile and Metaphor differ only in degree of stylistic refinement. The Simile, in which a comparison is made directly between two objects, belongs to an earlier stage of literary expression; it is the deliberate elaboration of a correspondence, often pursued for its own sake. But a Metaphor is the swift illumination of an equivalence. Two images, or an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite; clash together and respond significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)