Let's start with the Atlantic article, since it came first, all the way back in 1990.
The gist of the article is that there is a profound cultural tension between Christian and Muslim cultures, and that this tension---rising even to hatred---underlies many of the conflicts between Middle Eastern and Western countries, especially the US.
It goes through a list of proposed alternative explanations for the conflict---economic exploitation, racism, imperialism---and finds them all to be lacking. Historical comparisons with Asia and Latin America are particularly relevant here, since the US has been if anything more imperialist against these regions, yet doesn't seem to inspire the same level of hatred.
Instead, Lewis argues that something more fundamental is going on here, "a clash of civilizations". In particular, he argues that one of the central points of contention is the role of religion in government, such that Christians are willing to accept secular government while Muslims demand a government controlled by their religion.
Of course any such claim will require generalizations, and the article works quite hard to clarify that they do not mean all Muslims or even necessarily most Muslims, but rather enough Muslims---a sufficiently large minority as to have a significant impact on global policy.
Let's turn to the other work you mentioned, which is actually a research paper for the U.S. Army War College. Written in 2013, it has the benefit of hindsight in reflecting in what went right and (mostly) what went wrong in the so-called "War on Terror". It argues that the narrative created by this idea of "a clash of civilizations" exacerbated prejudice against Muslims and led to very harmful decisions in US policy.
It argues that the "clash of civilizations" narrative is a false one, and worse has caused a great deal of damage.
Yet to be honest I think it presents a strawman of that argument. Comparing the original 1990 article with the 2013 paper shows this rather clearly: On page 10, van der Zee writes: "The third and last myth that needs to be invalidated is the widespread belief that Islam and western concepts such as democracy, freedom of speech and women’s rights are incompatible."
Yet right there in the original Atlantic article, we see: "Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or native Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been accepted by even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, usually without acknowledgment of source, and suffering a sea change into something rarely rich but often strange. One such was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices of representation, election, and constitutional government."
That is, the people arguing for the "clash of civilizations" simply did not say that Islam and democracy were inherently incompatible---so van der Zee is "refuting" a claim his opponents never made, the essence of a strawman.
If we focus on popular perceptions of Islam, van der Zee's critique makes more sense; a large number of people in the US and Europe have very distorted and often prejudiced views of Muslims. But his criticisms largely fail as an argument against the "clash of civilizations" thesis as historians originally articulated it.
In my mind, the reality must be somewhere in between; plainly Islam is not the only cause of these conflicts---and in many cases it may not be the most important. Yet it seems equally clear that it does contribute to them, exacerbate them---that if nothing else the sense of religious identity and us/them mentality created by a conflict between Christians and Muslims can only make that conflict worse. Perhaps it is too strong to say that it's "a clash of civilizations"; but I do think things would be playing out quite differently if both sides in these Middle Eastern conflicts had the same religion or no religion.
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