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Posted on 09/20/2001 10:03:24 PM PDT by gcruse

There could hardly have been a more indelicate gaffe. President Bush vowed on Sunday to "rid the world of evil-doers," then cautioned: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."

Crusade? In strict usage, the word describes the Christian military expeditions a millennium ago to capture the Holy Land from Muslims. But in much of the Islamic world, where history and religion suffuse daily life in ways unfathomable to most Americans, it is shorthand for something else: a cultural and economic Western invasion that, Muslims fear, could subjugate them and desecrate Islam.

A White House spokesman later said Mr. Bush meant crusade only in "the traditional English sense of the word, a broad cause." And, in an address to a joint session of Congress Thursday night, Mr. Bush said, "The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them."

But the president's reference to a crusade had already reinforced the anxiety of some Muslims that the war on terrorism is really a war on them. It also pointed up the vast gulf between two world views. In Washington, the violent attack spawned ringing vows to defend American values. In much of the Muslim world, it was viewed as a desperate call to America to rethink its support of Israel and, more subliminally, of authoritarian Mideast rulers who deny democracy to ordinary Muslims.

If this gulf isn't bridged quickly, say some experts on the region, the U.S. risks losing the crucial Muslim middle ground. "We're at a turning point," says Muqtedar Khan, director of international studies at Adrian College in Michigan. "If the American assault on terrorism is perceived as an all-out attack on Islam, then even moderate Muslims will be radicalized and turn anti-American."

Moderation vs. Zeal

Thus, the way the U.S. responds to the attack is certain to affect the fundamental struggle within Muslim societies between zealotry and moderation. The struggle has simmered off and on since the early Middle Ages. It reached a new intensity as Christian countries began to conquer large swaths of Islamic territory 200 years ago. Some Muslims became modernists who urged an embrace of Western technology in order to catch up with their Christian rivals. But they always faced a strong Islamist countercurrent. Reactionary clerics delayed the introduction of the printing press to core areas of the Muslim world for nearly three centuries.

This countercurrent preached that tradition and unity were the way to defeat the external threat. This is the movement that bred more-recent zealots such as Osama bin Laden, who has focused on repelling all non-Muslim influences, particularly the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's most sacred cities.

"The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations," wrote Mr. bin Laden in a 1998 declaration that he tried to present as a fatwa, or religious decree. In it he commanded Muslims to kill Americans.

Sense of Emasculation

This brand of Islam -- dubbed jihadi culture, after the Arabic word meaning "struggle" and sometimes translated as "holy war" -- has garnered support even from some more-affluent segments of Muslim societies. The basis of its appeal is complex, involving a collective sense in the Muslim world that Israel and the West have emasculated Islam, and undermined its greatness.

Ever since colonial powers weakened the great Islamic empires of Turkey's Ottomans, Iran's Qajars and India's Moguls over the past two centuries, Muslims have seen themselves as tossed around by outsiders, culminating in the creation of whole new territories and dynasties in the 20th century at the stroke of European pens.

Oddly, among the most fervent foes of Western influences today are the people who know them best: young folks who return from studies in Europe or the U.S. with a sudden Islamic zeal. "It's amazing to see these young people coming back from abroad with beards, long dress and extreme fundamentalist ideas," says Khaled al-Khater, a 52-year-old civil engineer in Qatar. "They get involved with groups overseas that teach Islamic extremism, then come home thinking that path will solve our country's problems. Most don't go to the extremism of bin Laden. But some say it's fine he hit the Pentagon."

Indeed, interviews with Muslim professionals and intellectuals across a wide swath of countries suggest that calls by Mr. bin Laden and others for holy war against Americans have so far gone largely unheeded. Not only is the killing of innocents forbidden in Islam, they say, but most Muslims still revere the U.S. for its democratic ideals and economic and technological prowess. Few support an East-West war of cultures.

"This is not a clash of civilizations but a clash over American foreign policy," says John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "Political grievances feed anti-Americanism. A war on terrorism that doesn't address those grievances won't change people's minds about America."

What galls many in the Islamic world is what they perceive -- rightly or wrongly -- as the hypocrisy of American foreign policy that preaches democracy and human rights, while seeming to undermine those values in Muslim countries. In addition to the Palestinians' problems with Israel, resentment runs high toward the U.S. and its colonial forbears in Europe for maintaining authoritarian political systems across the Mideast that have resisted all efforts at liberalization.

"We don't have anything against the Americans as Americans," says Mr. Khater, the Qatari engineer, "but these rulers are supported by the Americans. ... People want to decide their own destiny. They see their resources being abused. There is no accountability, no transparency. We really can't find what we think without a free press. Even in family councils, people can't say what they really think. They can speak about Palestine, that's all."

This sense of betrayal by an America perceived as touting democracy but propagating authoritarianism is echoed in all corners of the Muslim world. It is heard in Morocco, Syria and Jordan, where long-ruling strongmen have died in recent years, only to have their sons elevated to power in sumptuous coronations with full American support. It is heard in Algeria, Egypt and Turkey, where secular, American-backed regimes dominated by the military thwart Islamic activists from winning seats in parliament. And it is heard in the oil-rich Persian Gulf countries, where even wealthy businesspeople are growing tired of what they see as a U.S. double standard.

"Americans want an odorless empire; that's fundamentally problematic," says a Saudi Arabian professional who, like many Gulf Arabs, brings his family to the U.S. every summer for several weeks. He counts himself a moderate, but says the Saudi kingdom is filled with resentful people who harbor a sneaking admiration for the hijackers' success.

"Why is it that if a Palestinian kills an Israeli, he's a terrorist, but if an Israeli kills a Palestinian, it's a legitimate use of U.S. weapons?" asks this man, who requested anonymity, saying he feared angering Saudi officials. "The fact that there are men ready to do these desperate deeds is not surprising; what's surprising is their audacity."

Israel maintains it uses American weapons in self-defense against Palestinian attackers with whom it technically has a peace agreement. And because its use is self-defense, Israel says, it doesn't break U.S. laws restricting the use of exported weaponry.

U.S. policy makers, for their part, have long been wary of unsettling friendly regimes in the Mideast with talk about democracy or human rights. "They come from a very different cultural tradition," says Robert H. Pelletreau Jr., assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs during the first Clinton administration and now a lawyer in Washington.

For Laith Shubeilat, an intellectual and Islamic opposition figure in Jordan, his own path toward a more pious, Muslim identity was forged by the prejudice he believes he encountered in the West.

"I was in Rome," he says, "going out with girls, in my sports car. I made it into their society, and they are quite snobbish, you know. Then they'd ask me, 'Where are you from?' I'd say Jordan. They'd say, 'So you're a Muslim? So you have four wives?' I started defending myself."

Mr. Shubeilat, the son of Jordan's ambassador to Washington in the 1960s, fell in love with America as a student at George Washington University. He admired "the values of the U.S. that we learned, the protection of the personal liberties." Then the disappointment: "In Europe, you want democracies. But for Muslims, Arabs or Latinos, dictators are fine," he says.

Mr. Shubeilat has been imprisoned three times for slandering the Jordanian king, charges stemming in part from his long campaign to change the structure of the Jordanian state. "I want a constitutional monarchy. Is that bad?" he asks. "I'm not anti-American -- I'm a harsh critic of policies of the U.S. administration. The question is, do you want to market the cowboy image, 'dead or alive,' or the principles of Washington and Hamilton?"

"In the crusades," he continues, "they said it was for Christ, when it was in reality for trade, or for Venice. Today, [American] people would not fight if you told them it was for Texaco. But people will fight for an idea."

In the Mideast, that idea, increasingly, seems to be Islam, whose history and teachings speak of a bygone glory that many Muslims long to recreate, scholars say. The cry of Muslim ideologues -- "Islam is the answer!" -- is now a common refrain on bumper stickers in some Arab states.

"When you emasculate a people for 200 years and consistently deny them a say in their own history -- most recently in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq -- they will target your own sacred symbols," says Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University in New York.

In hitting back, Mr. Dabashi warns, the U.S. had better be sure it doesn't give its extremist enemies more fodder with which to spread hatred. "What's needed is a public, civic debate on U.S. policies in the region," he contends, adding: "It's the height of arrogance and hubris to assume that if the oil flows and the market is open, everything in the region is OK. It isn't."
 

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