A lot of times we hear about “the Muslim world” and how Muslims are fundamentally at conflict with Christians and Western values. This type of argument is roughly correct in a theological sense, but not in a practical sense.
There’s no doubt that the worlds’ religions and sects preach very different things, and almost all of them can find or grasp onto some verse or text to support the necessity of conflict. The Jewish commandments to slaughter people to take the Holy Land, the Christians invoking Romans 13, the Verse of the Sword in the Quran, and a pile of other things in Eastern religions and belief systems can all lead to war. Even Buddhism could be considered as hostile to certain others, as living the tenets of Buddhism necessarily prevents you from going along with National Socialism, any holy war concept, or crimes in general, which puts you into direct conflict with any number of people.
However, people don’t actually follow these tenets. People with differing religions, such as the Moors and the Christians in Spain, the Shinto and Buddhists in Japan, and a giant pile of cults in South Asia, all managed to get along for decades or centuries – longer than the lifetimes of individual human beings, who must individually choose the path of conflict. If individuals can live their whole lives without engaging in conflict or the direct preparation for that conflict, then such a conflict must not be inherent to the practice of the believers.
The recent developments in religious freedom of Western civilizations, on top of the extreme cultural mingling of the Age of Discovery and the colonial era, further reinforce that these conflicts are not actually predicted by the stated religious beliefs of the people. For sure, the majority of believers are heretics in this matter, as they are in others, by selectively embracing tenets of their chosen religion without coherent reasoning.
When we then return to the question of a clash of civilizations, and the bulk of the people don’t know or care, the will of strong leaders who would guide their people to those wars, determines the outcome. But, those strong leaders do not usually control entire civilizations based on religion, or indeed most beliefs or practices of any sort; they usually achieve this control by force, cowing/awe, killing the dissidents, and the prevalence of custom.
Certainly there is no question about the existence and recurrence of blasphemy laws and holy wars. However, the tendency for these differing societies to clash in this way is fairly weak, especially in comparison to conventionally attributed motives such as greed and land grabbing.