The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage" and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his book "La première guerre civilisationnelle" published in 1992. 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.