There have been dozens of articles printed during the last few days to explain why the recent Miss World competition in Nigeria sparked violence in which at least 200 people died.

English feminists blame attitudes about women. American feminists blame fundamentalist preachers and anti-abortionists. Conservatives blame Islamic fundamentalism. Liberals blame Western decadence. The President of Nigeria and the organiser of the Miss World Contest blame the press.

The event certainly was a bouillabaisse of interesting ethical dilemmas:

Should Muslims have declared open season on a journalist for suggesting that Mohammed might have been so taken with the Miss World contestants that he'd have chosen another wife from among them?

Should Muslims have set about killing as many Christians as they could lay their hands on because of what was, to a Westerner, a trifling insult to Mohammed's honour?

Was the press to blame for the whole mess?

Do beauty contests have a place, any longer, in a world in which they are deeply offensive to significant numbers of people?

All the articles I came across attempted to answer questions like these as if the whole miserable business had occurred somewhere in the West, albeit a part of the West unfashionable to the schmoozeoisie, and made little or no attempt to consider the significance of its Nigerian context.

Bermudians and others elsewhere in the world, no doubt, know Nigeria best for its scams – those e-mails/mails, faxes and letters promising huge sums of money in exchange for your help getting money out of Nigeria. According to a web page dedicated to fighting them, the scams are a $5 billion industry, making a significant contribution to the country's economy. The website makes this accusation: "The elites from which successive Governments of Nigeria have been drawn ARE the Scammers," warning that no one has ever recovered money lost to these criminals.

We know Nigeria next best, perhaps, because no fewer than four women have recently been sentenced to death there by stoning, for committing adultery. These sentences have been passed by regional courts according to the Muslim system of sharia, or religious law. In this system, a thief can be punished by having his right hand cut off. If he offends again, his left foot is on the block. Other offences, which seem minor to outsiders, attract public whippings.

Until recently, the application of sharia has been confined to civil law, and that only in Muslim states in the north of the country. But since October, those states have been unilaterally extending sharia to criminal law as well, apparently in response to erosion of the government's power and influence in the north.

The elected president of the country, the ex-military dictator General Olusegun Obasanjo, who leads a Christian government, says that no woman will ever be stoned to death for adultery, because such a punishment would be contrary to Nigeria's constitution. It is true that no one has yet been stoned to death, but whether General Obasanjo's government is strong enough to make the pre-eminence of the constitution stick in the north is a good question, one whose answer I have a feeling the world is going to learn before long.

Nigeria is the kind of country that Timothy Leary might have constructed after a bad night. According to the CIA Factbook, Muslims are the majority, claiming 50 percent of the population of 130 million people. Christianity is the second strongest religious group, claiming 40 percent of the population.

Blistered on top of the religious divisions are a large variety of ethnic divisions. Of the three major tribes, the northern Hausa are solidly Muslim, the eastern Igbo (also known as Ibos) are Christian, and the Yoruba are equally divided between the two faiths. There are also Fulani, Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio and Tiv in significant numbers. One Nigerian website I visited claimed there were 250 different languages spoken in the country.

Muslim-Christian rivalries have often led to violence. In 1966, tens of thousands of Christian Igbos were massacred in the north, forcing survivors to flee to safe areas. These events strengthened Muslim influence in the north, and reduced the status of the remaining Christians to that of a weak minority.

Nigeria is an oil-producing country, and it should be rich because of that. During the 1970s, when oil prices rocketed, it looked set to become the shining example of a prosperous and democratic West African republic. You might say that it managed, with great effort, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Its history is littered with tin-pot dictators, massacres, bloody civil wars, human rights abuses and horrific famines. It is now a country saddled with a soaring crime rate, massive unemployment, overpopulation and a giant hangover from many years of rule by a military government drunk on bribery and corruption.

Lawlessness, widespread corruption and the watering down of military control in Nigeria have allowed a plague of score-settling between tribes, religious groups and even rival cities. There is, quite literally, a risk that chaos and violence might engulf the country at any time.

Lagos and the Niger River delta in Nigeria's south are particularly unstable, with carjackings, kidnappings, piracy, riots and murderous ethnic clashes commonplace. Street crimes like robberies and muggings occur throughout the country, often in broad daylight.

Why on earth the Miss World competition organisers would try to stage their event in such a place is beyond me – it seems about as responsible as playing with matches in a crowded refinery.

Against that background, then, the rioting and the attacks on Christians by Muslims in the north seem simply to be a little more of the same, and the pious talk about Mohammed's honour a bit hollow – perhaps little more than a convenient excuse.

If you haven't heard it put this way before, let me be the first to tell you about an idea that was first advanced in an influential essay (now a book), about a decade ago, by Samuel P. Huntington, a distinguished Harvard University professor and perhaps the leading political scientist in the United States. He suggests that the surrender of communism to capitalism has cleared the way for what is now in progress – a Clash of Civilisations.

Most academics hate the notion, because it assumes that people are grouped by religion and culture, not … or perhaps not now … by politics and economics. It spoils their favourite story – that the world is defined by, and that history is shaped exclusively by, issues of class, race, and gender.

Although the United Nations has denied there is or ever will be such a thing, even His Holiness the Pope warned a few days ago that terrorism could provoke a Clash of Civilisations. At very least, Mr. Huntington's proposition provides an interesting and timely framework for understanding what the world is now going through.

If it is correct, then it can be said that this Nigerian Miss World incident was a skirmish in the development of the Clash, and that 9/11 and all that has happened in its wake are a part of the same struggle.

That puts those questions I posed earlier in rather a different light.

Examined purely within the context of Western culture, they are perfectly easy to answer.

Do beauty contests have a place in modern society? Of course they do, and they will as long as people want them to.

Did the press cause the whole affair? Of course they did not, the press is and should be free to comment on public affairs. Although the suggestion the writer made might not have been terribly insightful, it was perfectly fair comment in the circumstances – a few miles west of Abuja, it wouldn't have had the power to raise so much as an eyebrow, forget about a riot.

Was there any justification, in the circumstances, for Nigerian Muslims to attack Christians and to pass a death sentence on the unfortunate journalist whose article is blamed for setting off the slaughter? There was none.

But taken out of such a context, the difficulty people have in answering questions like these seems to point up an important underlying issue: Do some in the West try to appease radical Islam because of a subconscious understanding that Islam cannot peacefully coexist with the culture of the West?

The idea that there are people who want to prevent the development of the human race is anathema to someone embedded in Western culture. The idea that there are people who consider themselves free to hunt down and kill those who fail to agree with them really is impossible for the West to accept.

Yet these are among the tenets of radical Islamic faith. They see the West as innately evil, and they believe their raison d'?tre is its destruction.

Read a few of what are supposedly Mr bin Laden's words:

"We – with Allah's help – call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema (clergy), leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's US troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

"These events have divided the whole world into two sides, the side of believers and the side of infidels, may God keep you away from them. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come…"

gshorto@ibl.bm