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02/26/2004
The Roots of Muslim Rage
About three weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Waldman
had a story referring to a series of articles that the great scholar
Bernard Lewis wrote for the Atlantic Monthly back in September
1990. Thanks to the beauty of the Internet it is readily accessible
and the next two weeks I’ll post excerpts from his extensive two-
part piece in that publication. The ideas are as fresh today as
they were over 13 years ago.
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Bernard Lewis:
Islam is one of the world’s great religions Islam has brought
comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and
women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and
impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live
in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side
in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which
others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which,
by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like
other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some
of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our
misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the
Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that
much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us
In Islam the struggle of good and evil very soon acquired
political and even military dimensions. Muhammad, it will be
recalled, was not only a prophet and a teacher, like the founders
of other religions; he was also the head of a polity and of a
community, a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle involved a
state and its armed forces. If the fighters in the war for Islam, the
holy war “in the path of God,” are fighting for God, it follows
that their opponents are fighting against God. And since God is
in principle the sovereign, the supreme head of the Islamic state
– and the Prophet and, after the Prophet, the caliphs are his
vicegerents (ed. ‘deputies’) – then God as sovereign commands
the army. The army is God’s army and the enemy is God’s
enemy. The duty of God’s soldiers is to dispatch God’s enemies
as quickly as possible to the place where God will chastise them
– that is to say, the afterlife
The struggle between (Christendom and Islam) has now lasted
for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in
the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present
day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and
counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.
For the first thousand years Islam was advancing, Christendom
in retreat and under threat. The new faith conquered the old
Christian lands of the Levant and North Africa, and invaded
Europe, ruling for a while in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and even
parts of France. The attempt by the Crusaders to recover the lost
lands of Christendom in the east was held and thrown back, and
even the Muslims’ loss of southwestern Europe to the
Reconquista was amply compensated by the Islamic advance into
southeastern Europe, which twice reached as far as Vienna. For
the past three hundred years, since the failure of the second
Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European
colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on the
defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of
Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world, including
Islam, within its orbit
In the lands of Islam remarkably little was known about (Early)
America. At first the voyages of discovery aroused some
interest .But thereafter interest seems to have waned .The
American Revolution and the American republic to which it gave
birth long remained unnoticed and unknown. Even the small but
growing American presence in Muslim lands in the nineteenth
century – merchants, consuls, missionaries, and teachers –
aroused little or no curiosity, and is almost unmentioned in the
Muslim literature and newspapers of the time.
The Second World War, the oil industry, and postwar
developments brought many Americans to the Islamic lands;
increasing numbers of Muslims also came to America, first as
students, then as teachers or businessmen or other visitors, and
eventually as immigrants .A wide range of American products,
particularly in the immediate postwar years, when European
competition was virtually eliminated and Japanese competition
had not yet arisen, reached into the remotest markets of the
Muslim world, winning new customers and, perhaps more
important, creating new tastes and ambitions. For some,
America represented freedom and justice and opportunity. For
many more, it represented wealth and power and success, at a
time when these qualities were not regarded as sins or crimes.
And then came the great change, when the leaders of a
widespread and widening religious revival sought out and
identified their enemies as the enemies of God, and gave them “a
local habitation and a name” in the Western Hemisphere.
Suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy,
the incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good,
and specifically, for Muslims, of Islam. Why?...
After the collapse of the Third Reich and the temporary ending
of German influence, another philosophy, even more anti-
American, took its place – the Soviet version of Marxism, with a
denunciation of Western capitalism and of America as its most
advanced and dangerous embodiment. And when Soviet
influence began to fade, there was yet another to take its place, or
at least to supplement its working – the new mystique of Third
Worldism, emanating from Western Europe, particularly France,
and later also from the United States, and drawing at times on
both these earlier philosophies. This mystique was helped by the
universal human tendency to invent a golden age in the past, and
the specifically European propensity to locate it elsewhere. A
new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third
World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve
was ruined by the Western serpent. This view took as axiomatic
the goodness and purity of the East and the wickedness of the
West, expanding in an exponential curve of evil from Western
Europe to the United States. These ideas, too, fell on fertile
ground, and won widespread support .
But why the hostility (toward the West) in the first place? If we
turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of
individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual
Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of
Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples. Yet all too often,
when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved,
there is only a local and temporary alleviation. The French have
left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil
companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing Shah has left
Iran – yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and
other extremists against the West and its friends remains and
grows and is not appeased.
The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling
among Muslims today is American support for Israel. This
support is certainly a factor of importance, increasing with
nearness and involvement. But here again there are some
oddities, difficult to explain in terms of a single, simple cause. In
the early days of the foundation of Israel, while the United States
maintained a certain distance, the Soviet Union granted
immediate de jure recognition and support, and arms sent from a
Soviet satellite, Czechoslovakia, saved the infant state of Israel
from defeat and death in its first weeks of life. Yet there seems
to have been no great ill will toward the Soviets for these
policies, and no corresponding good will toward the United
States. In 1956 it was the United States that intervened,
forcefully and decisively, to secure the withdrawal of Israeli,
British, and French forces from Egypt – yet in the late fifties and
sixties it was to the Soviets, not America, that the rulers of
Egypt, Syria, Iraq and other states turned for arms; it was with
the Soviet bloc that they formed bonds of solidarity at the United
Nations and in the world generally. More recently, the rulers of
the Islamic Republic of Iran have offered the most principled and
uncompromising denunciation of Israel and Zionism. Yet even
these leaders, before as well as after the death of Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, when they decided for reasons of their own
to enter into a dialogue of sorts, found it easier to talk to
Jerusalem than to Washington. At the same time, Western
hostages in Lebanon, many of them devoted to Arab causes and
some of them converts to Islam, are seen and treated by their
captors as limbs of the Great Satan.
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Part II, March 4.
Brian Trumbore
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