Bernard Lewis Asks 'What Went Wrong?' Between Islam and the West

1 posted on 02/07/2002 5:00:13 AM PST by billorites

...anticapitalist, freethinking...

Man, what an oxymoron!

GREAT article, BTW. When folks post stuff like this it reminds me what I joined FR for in the first place.

2 posted on 02/07/2002 5:07:05 AM PST by Illbay

''For the time being, the choice is their own.''

unfortunately, they make the choice to interfere with the lives of the "infidels" and they will pay the price. Nice article, thanks for posting it.

3 posted on 02/07/2002 5:18:39 AM PST by teeman8r

Interesting- someone posted a link to another article discussing PKs writings- mentioned on article in which he described the US as a well meaning 500 lb gorilla, and the Euros as military midgets.

What was interesting was that he didn't seem to feel this was a bad thing, whereas his book "Rise and Fall of Great Powers" took the US to task for trying to maintain a preponderance of military force in the world, and suggested it would lead to our downfall.

4 posted on 02/07/2002 5:20:19 AM PST by fourdeuce82d

Indeed, you often have to weed through some of the worst Drudge-derived doggeral in order to come upon a fine article such as this.

5 posted on 02/07/2002 5:24:19 AM PST by Clemenza

To: billorites; Illbay

many Princeton students were outraged, since they were sure that the Iranian people, freed from the shah's yoke, would join the modern, anticapitalist, freethinking world.

Yet more proof that the liberal mind has no regard for logic. Nowhere has a country ruled by fanatical muslim clerics produced a modern, much less, freethinking nation. Insanity is sometimes defined as expecting a different result to occur when an identical situation repeats itself.

It must be kind of sad to be inflicted with this obvious mental disorder where nothing is predictable, or understandable, and therefore explained by mystical charges of bias, discrimination, and racism.

Nothing went wrong between the West and islam, just a very predictable development.

BTW- agree with Illbay, great article, thanks much!

Owl_Eagle

”Guns Before Butter.”

6 posted on 02/07/2002 5:35:35 AM PST by Owl_Eagle

I have a better understanding of the situation vis a vis the Muslim world from reading this review of a relatively obscure book written before 9/11, than from reading tens of thousands of words on that subject in the lamestream media. This keys to what what I knew of Muslim history when it was ascendant, since I was a scholar of the Middle Ages when I was in college.
I second the post that said this is the kind of article which inspired me to join FreeRepublic in the first place.

Congressman Billybob

Phil & Billybob in the mornings.

7 posted on 02/07/2002 5:36:45 AM PST by Congressman Billybob

I'm glad the Times picked someone with real intelligence to review Lewis's book. I take it that this book review appears in the newspaper itself, and not in the NYT Book Review. I hope a lot of influential people read it.

8 posted on 02/07/2002 5:39:44 AM PST by Cicero

9 posted on 02/07/2002 5:40:27 AM PST by Republic of Texas

So the Liberal scholars just KNEW that once the Shah was overthrown the people would join the modern, anticapitalist, freethinking world--i.e. the dilusionary world of Liberals. Contrary opinions were UNPOPULAR. The gloomy, skeptical--surely mistaken--scholar should feel ashamed of himself. I mean...I don't know ANYBODY who thinks like THAT! Yes, there is a lesson here--a very important lesson--however, unfortunately, Liberals will never learn it. It is incomprehensible to them, and anyone who confronts them with it is...that's right...mistaken and should feel ashamed of himself. Hey Paul, it didn't just happen that one time! It happens all the time! Liberals are just plain blind! No, it's worse than that! LIBERALS ARE IN DENIAL! And that's dangerous. If they were satisfied just to stick their heads in the sand, their self-destruction would be of little consequence, but unfortunately they are determined to drag all the rest of us with them down that well known, well paved Road to Hell.

10 posted on 02/07/2002 5:41:35 AM PST by Savage Beast

Bump! for a great article.

BTW, the comment:

''they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences and join their talents, energies and resources in a common creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the choice is their own.''

could easily be applied to the minorities in America who preach a culture of victimhood and perpetual grievance against America.

11 posted on 02/07/2002 5:43:58 AM PST by CatoRenasci

To: Savage Beast

The above notwithstanding, this is a very good and well written article. Paul, you're an intelligent man. Try to recover from the disease of Liberalism. You can do it. Try thinking for yourself, and ignore the 'popular' opinions of those around you. C'mon man. We're pulling for you. You'll feel so much better. Truth is a great tonic--maybe the best!

12 posted on 02/07/2002 5:44:49 AM PST by Savage Beast

Unfortunately the dictionary definition of freethinking is atheist. For use for a pretty good sounding compound word if you ask me.

13 posted on 02/07/2002 5:51:02 AM PST by The Southern Right Winger

To: Congressman Billybob; Illbay

I agree with you. The main attraction of Free Republic is the intelligence of those who post here and of articles like this. Much truth comes out. That's why I keep coming back. I am not conservative; I'm highly skeptical of organied religion; and I don't agree with many of the opinions expressed here. But that's of no consequence. Lots of smart people post comments and articles here.

14 posted on 02/07/2002 6:00:35 AM PST by Savage Beast

15 posted on 02/07/2002 6:48:36 AM PST by dennisw

Great article. Smart and thought provoking.

16 posted on 02/07/2002 6:56:17 AM PST by NeoCaveman

To: Savage Beast

"And many Princeton students were outraged, since they were sure that the Iranian people, freed from the shah's yoke, would join the modern, anticapitalist, freethinking world. The gloomy, skeptical scholar was surely mistaken, and should feel ashamed of himself. No wonder he was a little rueful."

Actually both sides were right: (1)Iranian people joined modern anti-capitalist world, (2) and this world is a very gloomy place indeed.

"Sometime around 1760, Britain, then France and America took off to another world, one that was increasingly secular, democratic, industrial and tolerant in ways that left many of the other regions gasping at the combined implications of such changes."

Do not get me wrong these achievements are great on its own merit, however, there is an established custom to wildly exaggerate them: yes there is a tradition of tolerating minorities (first religious, then ethnic and after that racial), however, countries composed from several large religious/ethnic/racial groups are invariantly split (or are in the process of splitting) along the group borders with only few exclusions (US, Belgium, Switzerland).

So, when we are trying to analyze the real situation in the Muslim world it makes sense first to look at our own society without rose glasses. And surprise, surprise the solution would not be far away. First, we have to concede that we are not ready to lead active transformation of Muslim society, because we do not understand our own well enough. Second, we have to look at the positive examples of societal transformation achieved in the past:

1. Reagan policies toward FSU. Everybody knows about his tough stand against soviet expansion, however, practically nobody is paying any attention to the fact that in all cases he was very accurate of not starting any offence on its own - only counter offences. So, this way US forced FSU's public interest to be switched into its internal problems, forced to boil in its own kettle and result is very well known.

2. Transformation of MA politics - MA is a single party state and dems are left to themselves and I do not see many politicians here talking traditional liberal nonsense about clean elections, raising taxes, banning private business, closing churches etc etc.

3.Australia: society of criminals left alone and forced to solve its own internal problems transformed itself beautifully.

I suppose the same approach should be taken to Muslim world: let us leave them alone, let us stop buying oil from them, let us allow them to boil in their own kettle, solving their own problems. The policy should be somewhat reminiscent of Reagan policy toward FSU: severely restrict any attempt of expansion beyond their own universe, prod satellite states to fall off, advertise our values: music, movies, jeans and coca-cola.

Human nature is human nature, so the thing which worked wonders in such diverse places like FSU, MA and Australia, may solve these problems in practically no time.

17 posted on 02/07/2002 7:15:20 AM PST by alex

To: Congressman Billybob

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http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm

The Atlantic Monthly | January 2002

The Hard Questions

What Went Wrong?

By all standards of the modern world—economic development, literacy, scientific achievement—Muslim civilization, once a mighty enterprise, has fallen low. Many in the Middle East blame a variety of outside forces. But underlying much of the Muslim world's travail may be a simple lack of freedom

by Bernard Lewis

.....

n the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East—and, indeed, in all the lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. The primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading every aspect of the Muslim's public and even—more painfully—his private life.

Muslim modernizers—by reform or revolution—concentrated their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political. The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest for victory by updated armies brought a series of humiliating defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought in some countries impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource—oil. And even this was discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity and industry, and is doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more probably, superseded, as the international community grows weary of a fuel that pollutes the land, the sea, and the air wherever it is used or transported, and that puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique of capricious autocrats. Worst of all are the political results: the long quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to dictatorships that are modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.

Many remedies were tried—weapons and factories, schools and parliaments—but none achieved the desired result. Here and there they brought some alleviation and, to limited elements of the population, some benefit. But they failed to remedy or even to halt the increasing imbalance between Islam and the Western world.

There was worse to come. It was bad enough for Muslims to feel poor and weak after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose the position of leadership that they had come to regard as their right, and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. But the twentieth century, particularly the second half, brought further humiliation—the awareness that they were no longer even the first among followers but were falling back in a lengthening line of eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The rise of Japan had been an encouragement but also a reproach. The later rise of other Asian economic powers brought only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had gotten used to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks of which their own contractors and technicians were apparently incapable. Now Middle Eastern rulers and businessmen found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from Korea—only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule—to perform these tasks. Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is far worse. By all the standards that matter in the modern world—economic development and job creation, literacy, educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low.

"Who did this to us?" is of course a common human response when things are going badly, and many in the Middle East, past and present, have asked this question. They have found several different answers. It is usually easier and always more satisfying to blame others for one's misfortunes. For a long time the Mongols were the favorite villains. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were blamed for the destruction of both Muslim power and Islamic civilization, and for what was seen as the ensuing weakness and stagnation. But after a while historians, Muslims and others, pointed to two flaws in this argument. The first was that some of the greatest cultural achievements of Islam, notably in Iran, came after, not before, the Mongol invasions. The second, more difficult to accept but nevertheless undeniable, was that the Mongols overthrew an empire that was already fatally weakened; indeed, it is hard to see how the once mighty empire of the caliphs would otherwise have succumbed to a horde of nomadic horsemen riding across the steppes from East Asia.

The rise of nationalism—itself an import from Europe—produced new perceptions. Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on the Turks, who had ruled them for many centuries. Turks could lay the blame for the stagnation of their civilization on the dead weight of the Arab past, in which the creative energies of the Turkish people were caught and immobilized. Persians could lay the blame for the loss of their ancient glories on Arabs, Turks, and Mongols impartially.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British and French paramountcy in much of the Arab world produced a new and more plausible scapegoat—Western imperialism. In the Middle East there have been good reasons for such blame. Western political domination, economic penetration, and—longest, deepest, and most insidious of all—cultural influence changed the face of the region and transformed the lives of its people, turning them in new directions, arousing new hopes and fears, creating new dangers and new expectations without precedent in their cultural past.

But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief, and ended half a century ago; Islam's change for the worse began long before and continued unabated afterward. Inevitably, the role of the British and the French as villains was taken over by the United States, along with other aspects of Western leadership. The attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable support but, for similar reasons, remains unconvincing. Anglo-French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle Eastern states and societies. Some observers, both inside and outside the region, have pointed to differences in the post-colonial development of former British possessions—for example, between Aden, in the Middle East, and Singapore or Hong Kong; or between the various lands that once made up the British Empire in India.

Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism, and blaming "the Jews" for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic societies experienced the normal constraints and occasional hazards of minority status. Until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule in most significant respects. With rare exceptions, where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, Islamic societies tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948—the failure to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel—all the more of a shock. As some writers observed at the time, it was humiliating enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was intolerable. Anti-Semitism and its image of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing antidote.

The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals. They had limited impact; during the Dreyfus trial in France, for example, when a Jewish officer was unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread, and starting in 1933, Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on the whole remarkably successful effort to promote European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-Semitic interpretation of history, and led some to attribute all evil in the Middle East—and, indeed, in the world—to secret Jewish plots. This interpretation has pervaded much of the public discourse in the region, including that seen in education, the media, and even entertainment.

An argument sometimes adduced is that the cause of the changed relationship between East and West is not a Middle Eastern decline but a Western upsurge—the discoveries and the scientific, technological, industrial, and political revolutions that transformed the West and vastly increased its wealth and power. But this is merely to restate the question: Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain rather than from a Muslim Atlantic port, out of which such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times? Why did the great scientific breakthrough occur in Europe and not, as one might reasonably have expected, in the richer, more advanced, and in most respects more enlightened realm of Islam?

more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside, rather than outside, Islamic society. One such target is religion—for some, specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous and not often attempted. Nor is it very plausible. For most of the Middle Ages it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization and progress but the world of Islam. There old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences were created; there new industries were born and manufactures and commerce were expanded to a level without precedent. There, too, governments and societies achieved a freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee Christendom for refuge in Islam. In comparison with modern ideals, and even with modern practice in the more advanced democracies, the medieval Islamic world offered only limited freedom, but that was vastly more than was offered by any of its predecessors, its contemporaries, or most of its successors.

The point has often been made: If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"—and have answered by laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.

For those known nowadays as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures and shortcomings of modern Islamic lands afflict those lands because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell away from authentic Islam and thus lost their former greatness. Those known as modernists or reformers take the opposite view, seeing the cause of this loss not in the abandonment but in the retention of old ways, and especially in the inflexibility and ubiquity of the Islamic clergy, who, they say, are responsible for the persistence of beliefs and practices that might have been creative and progressive a thousand years ago but are neither today. The modernists' usual tactic is not to denounce religion as such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism—and more particularly to fanatical religious authorities—that they attribute the stifling of the once great Islamic scientific movement and, more generally, of the freedom of thought and expression.

A more common approach to this theme has been to discuss a specific problem: the place of religion and of its professional exponents in the political order. In this view a principal cause of Western progress is the separation of Church and State and the creation of a civil society governed by secular laws. Another approach has been to view the main culprit as the relegation of women to an inferior position in Muslim society, which deprives the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people and entrusts the other half's crucial early years of upbringing to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education, it has been said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society. However one evaluates the views of secularists and feminists, their success or failure will be a major factor in shaping the Middle Eastern future.

Some solutions that once commanded passionate support have been discarded. The two dominant movements in the twentieth century were socialism and nationalism. Both have been discredited—the first by its failure, the second by its success and consequent exposure as ineffective. Freedom, interpreted to mean national independence, was seen as the great talisman that would bring all other benefits. The overwhelming majority of Muslims now live in independent states, but this has brought no solutions to their problems. National socialism, the bastard offspring of both ideologies, persists in a few states that have preserved the Nazi-Fascist style of dictatorial government and indoctrination through a vast security apparatus and a single all-powerful party. These regimes have failed every test except survival, and have brought none of the promised benefits. If anything, their infrastructures are even more antiquated than those of other Muslim states, their armed forces designed primarily for terror and repression.

At present two answers to the question of what went wrong command widespread support in the Middle East, each with its own diagnosis and corresponding prescription. One attributes all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam and advocates return to a real or imagined past. That is the way of the Iranian revolution and of the so-called fundamentalist movements and regimes in various Muslim countries. The other condemns the past and advocates secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk.

For the oppressive but ineffectual governments that rule much of the Middle East, finding targets to blame serves a useful, indeed an essential, purpose—to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have introduced. They seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects toward other, outside targets.

But growing numbers of Middle Easterners are adopting a more self-critical approach. The question "Who did this to us?" has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. And the question "What did we do wrong?" has led naturally to a second question: "How do we put it right?" In that question, and in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the future. [Where are these people, do they exist? Are they real or only Bernard Lewis' hope?]

During the past few weeks the worldwide exposure given to the views and actions of Osama bin Laden and his hosts the Taliban has provided a new and vivid insight into the eclipse of what was once the greatest, most advanced, and most open civilization in human history.

To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny—that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles.

If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination—perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some expanding superpower in the East. But if they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is theirs.

Links referenced within this article

Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century
http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/ihame/Sec11.htm
establishment of the state of Israel
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00hb0

Find this article at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm

setTimeout('showLayer();',200);

http://www.princeton.edu/~nes/profiles/Lewis.htm

BERNARD LEWIS
Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus

I was educated in the University of London, primarily but not entirely at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where I took both my B.A. (Honors in History) and my Ph.D. My B.A. degree was in History with special reference to the Near and Middle East; my Ph.D. in the History of Islam. I also studied Law, and went part of the way towards becoming a barrister, but decided that I didn't like it, and returned to study, and later teach, Middle Eastern History. It was a choice that I have never regretted. I also did part of my graduate work in the University of Paris, and spent some months touring the Middle East. I received my first teaching appointment in 1938, as an assistant lecturer (the lowest form of human life in British universities) in Islamic History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. With the exception of the years 1940 to 1945, when I was otherwise engaged, I remained a University teacher until my formal retirement in 1986, and, in a less formal sense, ever since. Until 1974, I taught at the University of London; since 1974 at Princeton.
Like most university teachers, I have had a somewhat narrow field in which I conducted my own research, a rather wider one in which I was willing to assist others undertake research, and a still wider one in which I was willing to risk undergraduate teaching. My earliest interest was in medieval Islamic History, especially that of religious movements such as the Ismailis and Assassins. The war years awakened and nourished an interest in the contemporary Middle East, which I have retained ever since. My major research interest for some time past has been the history of the Ottoman Empire. At the present time I am trying to combine all three by studying the history of the relations between Europe and Islam from early through Ottoman to modern times.
As an emeritus professor I teach no courses -- that is, not at Princeton, though an occasional invitation gives me the opportunity to ply my trade elsewhere. At the moment of my retirement, seven students were preparing dissertations under my guidance. Six of them--Müge Göçek, Leslie Peirce, Amy Singer, Shaun Marmon, Corinne Blake and Dina Le Gall--have obtained their doctorates. Of these Müge Göçek is teaching at Michigan, Leslie Peirce at Cornell, Amy Singer at the University of Tel-Aviv, Corinne Blake at Rowan College, Shaun Marmon in the Religions Department here and Dina Le Gall at Macalester College in Minnesota. Their dissertation topics were as follows: Muge Göcek - "Toward a Theory of Westernization and Social Change: Eighteenth & Nineteenth Century Ottoman Society" (1988); Leslie Peirce - "The Imperial Harem: Gender and Power in the Ottoman Empire 1520-1656" (1989); Amy Singer - "Ottoman Officials and Palestinian Peasants: Rural Administration in the Sancak of Jerusalem in the Mid-Sixteenth Century" (1989); Shaun Marmon - "The Eunuchs of the Prophet: Space, Time, and Gender in Islamic Society" (1990); Corinne Blake - "Training Arab-Ottoman Bureaucrats: Syrian Graduates of the Mulkiye Mektebi 1890-1920" (1990); Dina Le Gall - "The Ottoman Naqshbandiyya in the Pre-Mujaddidi Phase: A Study in Islamic Religious Culture and Its Transmission" (1991).
Some representative publications:
The Arabs in History, London 1950;
The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London and New York 1961
The Assassins, London 1967
The Muslim Discovery of Europe, New York 1982
The Political Language of Islam, Chicago 1988
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry, New York 1990
Islam and the West, New York, 1993
Islam in History, 2nd edition, Chicago, 1993
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, New York, 1994
Cultures in Conflict, New York, 1994
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, New York, 1995
The Future of the Middle East, London, 1997
The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, London, 1998
A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of life, letters and history, New York, 2000

18 posted on 02/07/2002 8:00:46 AM PST by Tolik

the reformers split into two diametrically opposed camps: the Western-oriented movements, which sought adaptation, imitation and accommodation with modernity, though within a moderately Muslim order of things; and the conservatives, who angrily claimed that the reason for the decline was traitorous forces within their own societies, those who had strayed from the true path of the prophet. These forces, the conservatives argued, were even more sinful and deserved more punishment than the infidels themselves. It is not difficult, in reading these earlier denunciations of Arab liberals, to recall bin Laden's recent ferocious speeches against the Saudi leadership and others in the Middle East for defiling the true faith.

- - - - - - -

9-11 was an attack on the First Amendment.

911 asserts that an "accomodationist" Moslem (the good neighbor you might have) is worse than an infidel, and "infidel" just another word for "target."

America will somehow explain to the reactionary islamic that America, diverse as it is, is not only unwilling but unable to reject the First Amendment. And that, powerful as it is, America will make sure that it does not have to do what it is not only unwilling but unable to do.

19 posted on 02/07/2002 8:44:09 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion

''a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences and join their talents, energies and resources in a common creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the rest of our planet..

He could just as well be talking about Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Barbara Lee and the rest of the American Africans who hold their victimhood in high regard.

20 posted on 02/07/2002 8:50:48 AM PST by Rudder

What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself. Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East, will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences and join their talents, energies and resources in a common creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a bit, though probably not much.

I just read Prof. Lewis' book, and enjoyed it. A key test of this thesis will probably be what happens in Afghanistan over the next five years. If that country is built properly, on free markets, openness to the outside world and non-theocratic government, it could become a model for the Islamic world. I'm not optimistic, but it could happen.

As for the rest of that Muslim world, whether the outside world is in a position to "help" or not really depends on how fanatic the jihadists become, and how much power they accumulate, before they are finally vanquished. If they are defeated within the Muslim world relatively soon, then Prof. Lewis is probably right. But I suspect several Muslim states are a mere one or two major atrocities away from being conquered and forcibly assimilated to modern civilization world from top to bottom, in the manner of postwar Germany and Japan.

21 posted on 02/07/2002 9:03:53 AM PST by untenured

There is a very nice touch in Bernard Lewis' biography. He names his last six students to receive Ph.D.'s and says where they are now teaching or working. I've never seen an academic do that before. It increases by respect for this man who is also a thorough and able scholar.

Congressman Billybob

22 posted on 02/07/2002 9:40:47 AM PST by Congressman Billybob

To: billorites; *Clash of Civilizatio

I just finished What Went Wrong and it is typical Lewis--excellent.

23 posted on 02/07/2002 9:57:57 AM PST by denydenydeny

To: Congressman Billybob, denydenydeny

Please, note that the following very long (sorry) but brilliant as always article, Bernard Lewis The Roots of Muslim Rage was published back in 1990. It's one of the best I read so far on the "clash of civilizations". It is remarkable, that the author, even with his knowledge of the subject, could not provide an answer to the problem, and finished the article with an open ending:

"There are other [traditions within Islam besides fundamentalism], more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices."

It is easier to say than to do. If attacked, what should you do, curl up and die?!

I agree that forceful solutions, like Oslo process invented by Israeli leftists and Clinton's push for "peace now" with a Nobel Prize deadline did more harm than good. The article was written before that, and before Iraq's invasion into Kuwait, and before the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Legitimization of bloody Arafat who at that time already lost support of oil-reach sponsors was a huge mistake (immediately obvious to everybody on the right). There was a chance before that for peace with people who could (maybe) appreciate benefits of trade and economical cooperation between Israeli and Palestinians. It indeed looked like doing nothing (as Bernard Lewis suggested). Resolute deterrence, no false expectations and demagogy, slow integration. But, how can you talk with people whose the only solution to the problem is for you to die?!

What United States should have done when Iraq invaded Kuwait? Do nothing? Besides Kuwait itself, Saudis were begging US to intervene because they would have been the next. Their own military was no match to Iraq's. Other oil emirates would fall as well. Oil dependency plus desire not to repeat appeasement a'la giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler left no choice. From another hand, Saudis (the major “friend” of the US among oil producers) did not want Iraq's collapse afterwards, to keep them as a buffer against Iran's ayatollahs. Tough choices...

And how could we do nothing now, after the September 11, 2001?

It was definitely more hope for peace in the Middle East back in 1990.

Nevertheless, it's great analysis, agree or not, I believe you will find them very interesting.

Copyright © 1990 by Bernard Lewis. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 1990; The Roots of Muslim Rage; Volume 266, No. 3; pages 47 - 60.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm

S E P T E M B E R 1 9 9 0

Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified

by Bernard Lewis

IN one of his letters Thomas Jefferson remarked that in matters of religion "the maxim of civil government" should be reversed and we should rather say, "Divided we stand, united, we fall." In this remark Jefferson was setting forth with classic terseness an idea that has come to be regarded as essentially American: the separation of Church and State. This idea was not entirely new; it had some precedents in the writings of Spinoza, Locke, and the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. It was in the United States, however, that the principle was first given the force of law and gradually, in the course of two centuries, became a reality.

If the idea that religion and politics should be separated is relatively new, dating back a mere three hundred years, the idea that they are distinct dates back almost to the beginnings of Christianity. Christians are enjoined in their Scriptures to "render ... unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's." While opinions have differed as to the real meaning of this phrase, it has generally been interpreted as legitimizing a situation in which two institutions exist side by side, each with its own laws and chain of authority -- one concerned with religion, called the Church, the other concerned with politics, called the State. And since they are two, they may be joined or separated, subordinate or independent, and conflicts may arise between them over questions of demarcation and jurisdiction.

This formulation of the problems posed by the relations between religion and politics, and the possible solutions to those problems, arise from Christian, not universal, principles and experience. There are other religious traditions in which religion and politics are differently perceived, and in which, therefore, the problems and the possible solutions are radically different from those we know in the West. Most of these traditions, despite their often very high level of sophistication and achievement, remained or became local -- limited to one region or one culture or one people. There is one, however, that in its worldwide distribution, its continuing vitality, its universalist aspirations, can be compared to Christianity, and that is Islam.

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. 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.

We should not exaggerate the dimensions of the problem. The Muslim world is far from unanimous in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim regions of the Third World been the most passionate and the most extreme in their hostility. There are still significant numbers, in some quarters perhaps a majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral, social and political, beliefs and aspirations; there is still an imposing Western presence -- cultural, economic, diplomatic -- in Muslim lands, some of which are Western allies. Certainly nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as "advisers." But there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that distresses, alarms, and above all baffles Americans.

At times this hatred goes beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen as innately evil, and those who promote or accept them as the "enemies of God."

This phrase, which recurs so frequently in the language of the Iranian leadership, in both their judicial proceedings and their political pronouncements, must seem very strange to the modern outsider, whether religious or secular. The idea that God has enemies, and needs human help in order to identify and dispose of them, is a little difficult to assimilate. It is not, however, all that alien. The concept of the enemies of God is familiar in preclassical and classical antiquity, and in both the Old and New Testaments, as well as in the Koran. A particularly relevant version of the idea occurs in the dualist religions of ancient Iran, whose cosmogony assumed not one but two supreme powers. The Zoroastrian devil, unlike the Christian or Muslim or Jewish devil, is not one of God's creatures performing some of God's more mysterious tasks but an independent power, a supreme force of evil engaged in a cosmic struggle against God. This belief influenced a number of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects, through Manichaeism and other routes. The almost forgotten religion of the Manichees has given its name to the perception of problems as a stark and simple conflict between matching forces of pure good and pure evil.

The Koran is of course strictly monotheistic, and recognizes one God, one universal power only. There is a struggle in human hearts between good and evil, between God's commandments and the tempter, but this is seen as a struggle ordained by God, with its outcome preordained by God, serving as a test of mankind, and not, as in some of the old dualist religions, a struggle in which mankind has a crucial part to play in bringing about the victory of good over evil. Despite this monotheism, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was at various stages influenced, especially in Iran, by the dualist idea of a cosmic clash of good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, truth and falsehood, God and the Adversary, variously known as devil, Iblis, Satan, and by other names.

The Rise of the House of Unbelief

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 -- 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.

Clearly related to this is the basic division of mankind as perceived in Islam. Most, probably all, human societies have a way of distinguishing between themselves and others: insider and outsider, in-group and out-group, kinsman or neighbor and foreigner. These definitions not only define the outsider but also, and perhaps more particularly, help to define and illustrate our perception of ourselves.

In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.

Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize. But between the different groups of barbarians there was a crucial difference. The barbarians to the east and the south were polytheists and idolaters, offering no serious threat and no competition at all to Islam. In the north and west, in contrast, Muslims from an early date recognized a genuine rival -- a competing world religion, a distinctive civilization inspired by that religion, and an empire that, though much smaller than theirs, was no less ambitious in its claims and aspirations. This was the entity known to itself and others as Christendom, a term that was long almost identical with Europe.

The struggle between these rival systems 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.

FOR a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third -- the last straw -- was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.

Europe and her daughters?

The phrase may seem odd to Americans, whose national myths, since the beginning of their nationhood and even earlier, have usually defined their very identity in opposition to Europe, as something new and radically different from the old European ways. This is not, however, the way that others have seen it; not often in Europe, and hardly ever elsewhere.

Though people of other races and cultures participated, for the most part involuntarily, in the discovery and creation of the Americas, this was, and in the eyes of the rest of the world long remained, a European enterprise, in which Europeans predominated and dominated and to which Europeans gave their languages, their religions, and much of their way of life.

For a very long time voluntary immigration to America was almost exclusively European. There were indeed some who came from the Muslim lands in the Middle East and North Africa, but few were Muslims; most were members of the Christian and to a lesser extent the Jewish minorities in those countries. Their departure for America, and their subsequent presence in America, must have strengthened rather than lessened the European image of America in Muslim eyes.

In the lands of Islam remarkably little was known about America. At first the voyages of discovery aroused some interest; the only surviving copy of Columbus's own map of America is a Turkish translation and adaptation, still preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum, in Istanbul. A sixteenth-century Turkish geographer's account of the discovery of the New World, titled The History of Western India, was one of the first books printed in Turkey. But thereafter interest seems to have waned, and not much is said about America in Turkish, Arabic, or other Muslim languages until a relatively late date. A Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain at the time wrote what must surely be the first Arabic account of the American Revolution. The Sultan of Morocco signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the United States in 1787, and thereafter the new republic had a number of dealings, some friendly, some hostile, most commercial, with other Muslim states. These seem to have had little impact on either side. 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. Cinema and later television brought the American way of life, or at any rate a certain version of it, before countless millions to whom the very name of America had previously been meaningless or unknown. 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?

Some Familiar Accusations

Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe. One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture: rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown; mechanical, not organic; technologically complex but lacking the spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and other "authentic" peoples. German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.

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 though these imported philosophies helped to provide intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world receptive to such ideas.

It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheistic communism, which can have had little appeal for Muslims, but rather their common anti-Westernism. Nazism and communism were the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in the world, and as such they could count on at least the sympathy if not the support of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.

But why the hostility 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.

Another explanation, more often heard from Muslim dissidents, attributes anti-American feeling to American support for hated regimes, seen as reactionary by radicals, as impious by conservatives, as corrupt and tyrannical by both. This accusation has some plausibility, and could help to explain why an essentially inner-directed, often anti-nationalist movement should turn against a foreign power. But it does not suffice, especially since support for such regimes has been limited both in extent and -- as the Shah discovered -- in effectiveness.

Clearly, something deeper is involved than these specific grievances, numerous and important as they may be -- something deeper that turns every disagreement into a problem and makes every problem insoluble.

THIS revulsion against America, more generally against the West, is by no means limited to the Muslim world; nor have Muslims, with the exception of the Iranian mullahs and their disciples elsewhere, experienced and exhibited the more virulent forms of this feeling. The mood of disillusionment and hostility has affected many other parts of the world, and has even reached some elements in the United States. It is from these last, speaking for themselves and claiming to speak for the oppressed peoples of the Third World, that the most widely publicized explanations -- and justifications -- of this rejection of Western civilization and its values have of late been heard.

The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet.

Is racism, then, the main grievance? Certainly the word figures prominently in publicity addressed to Western, Eastern European, and some Third World audiences. It figures less prominently in what is written and published for home consumption, and has become a generalized and meaningless term of abuse -- rather like "fascism," which is nowadays imputed to opponents even by spokesmen for one-party, nationalist dictatorships of various complexions and shirt colors.

Slavery is today universally denounced as an offense against humanity, but within living memory it has been practiced and even defended as a necessary institution, established and regulated by divine law. The peculiarity of the peculiar institution, as Americans once called it, lay not in its existence but in its abolition. Westerners were the first to break the consensus of acceptance and to outlaw slavery, first at home, then in the other territories they controlled, and finally wherever in the world they were able to exercise power or influence -- in a word, by means of imperialism.

Is imperialism, then, the grievance? Some Western powers, and in a sense Western civilization as a whole, have certainly been guilty of imperialism, but are we really to believe that in the expansion of Western Europe there was a quality of moral delinquency lacking in such earlier, relatively innocent expansions as those of the Arabs or the Mongols or the Ottomans, or in more recent expansions such as that which brought the rulers of Muscovy to the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Hindu Kush, and the Pacific Ocean? In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.

Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism -- sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not -- as for Western critics -- the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.

THERE are other difficulties in the way of accepting imperialism as an explanation of Muslim hostility, even if we define imperialism narrowly and specifically, as the invasion and domination of Muslim countries by non-Muslims. If the hostility is directed against imperialism in that sense, why has it been so much stronger against Western Europe, which has relinquished all its Muslim possessions and dependencies, than against Russia, which still rules, with no light hand, over many millions of reluctant Muslim subjects and over ancient Muslim cities and countries? And why should it include the United States, which, apart from a brief interlude in the Muslim-minority area of the Philippines, has never ruled any Muslim population? The last surviving European empire with Muslim subjects, that of the Soviet Union, far from being the target of criticism and attack, has been almost exempt. Even the most recent repressions of Muslim revolts in the southern and central Asian republics of the USSR incurred no more than relatively mild words of expostulation, coupled with a disclaimer of any desire to interfere in what are quaintly called the "internal affairs" of the USSR and a request for the preservation of order and tranquillity on the frontier.

One reason for this somewhat surprising restraint is to be found in the nature of events in Soviet Azerbaijan. Islam is obviously an important and potentially a growing element in the Azerbaijani sense of identity, but it is not at present a dominant element, and the Azerbaijani movement has more in common with the liberal patriotism of Europe than with Islamic fundamentalism. Such a movement would not arouse the sympathy of the rulers of the Islamic Republic. It might even alarm them, since a genuinely democratic national state run by the people of Soviet Azerbaijan would exercise a powerful attraction on their kinsmen immediately to the south, in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Another reason for this relative lack of concern for the 50 million or more Muslims under Soviet rule may be a calculation of risk and advantage. The Soviet Union is near, along the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan; America and even Western Europe are far away. More to the point, it has not hitherto been the practice of the Soviets to quell disturbances with water cannon and rubber bullets, with TV cameras in attendance, or to release arrested persons on bail and allow them access to domestic and foreign media. The Soviets do not interview their harshest critics on prime time, or tempt them with teaching, lecturing, and writing engagements. On the contrary, their ways of indicating displeasure with criticism can often be quite disagreeable.

But fear of reprisals, though no doubt important, is not the only or perhaps even the principal reason for the relatively minor place assigned to the Soviet Union, as compared with the West, in the demonology of fundamentalism. After all, the great social and intellectual and economic changes that have transformed most of the Islamic world, and given rise to such commonly denounced Western evils as consumerism and secularism, emerged from the West, not from the Soviet Union. No one could accuse the Soviets of consumerism; their materialism is philosophic -- to be precise, dialectical -- and has little or nothing to do in practice with providing the good things of life. Such provision represents another kind of materialism, often designated by its opponents as crass. It is associated with the capitalist West and not with the communist East, which has practiced, or at least imposed on its subjects, a degree of austerity that would impress a Sufi saint.

Nor were the Soviets, until very recently, vulnerable to charges of secularism, the other great fundamentalist accusation against the West. Though atheist, they were not godless, and had in fact created an elaborate state apparatus to impose the worship of their gods -- an apparatus with its own orthodoxy, a hierarchy to define and enforce it, and an armed inquisition to detect and extirpate heresy. The separation of religion from the state does not mean the establishment of irreligion by the state, still less the forcible imposition of an anti-religious philosophy. Soviet secularism, like Soviet consumerism, holds no temptation for the Muslim masses, and is losing what appeal it had for Muslim intellectuals. More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.

A Clash of Civilizations

THE origins of secularism in the west may be found in two circumstances -- in early Christian teachings and, still more, experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart. Muslims, too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the separation of religion from the state. Only by depriving religious institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.

Muslims experienced no such need and evolved no such doctrine. There was no need for secularism in Islam, and even its pluralism was very different from that of the pagan Roman Empire, so vividly described by Edward Gibbon when he remarked that "the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship. It did, however, accord to the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until the West adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

At first the Muslim response to Western civilization was one of admiration and emulation -- an immense respect for the achievements of the West, and a desire to imitate and adopt them. This desire arose from a keen and growing awareness of the weakness, poverty, and backwardness of the Islamic world as compared with the advancing West. The disparity first became apparent on the battlefield but soon spread to other areas of human activity. Muslim writers observed and described the wealth and power of the West, its science and technology, its manufactures, and its forms of government. For a time the secret of Western success was seen to lie in two achievements: economic advancement and especially industry; political institutions and especially freedom. Several generations of reformers and modernizers tried to adapt these and introduce them to their own countries, in the hope that they would thereby be able to achieve equality with the West and perhaps restore their lost superiority.

In our own time this mood of admiration and emulation has, among many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation -- a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. In part this mood is due to events in the Western world itself. One factor of major importance was certainly the impact of two great suicidal wars, in which Western civilization tore itself apart, bringing untold destruction to its own and other peoples, and in which the belligerents conducted an immense propaganda effort, in the Islamic world and elsewhere, to discredit and undermine each other. The message they brought found many listeners, who were all the more ready to respond in that their own experience of Western ways was not happy. The introduction of Western commercial, financial, and industrial methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to transplanted Westerners and members of Westernized minorities, and to only a few among the mainstream Muslim population. In time these few became more numerous, but they remained isolated from the masses, differing from them even in their dress and style of life. Inevitably they were seen as agents of and collaborators with what was once again regarded as a hostile world. Even the political institutions that had come from the West were discredited, being judged not by their Western originals but by their local imitations, installed by enthusiastic Muslim reformers. These, operating in a situation beyond their control, using imported and inappropriate methods that they did not fully understand, were unable to cope with the rapidly developing crises and were one by one overthrown. For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were best and that their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for his people.

ULTIMATELY, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.

There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country -- even the spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical religion -- to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their Prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.

The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate source of these cataclysmic changes in the West and in attributing the disruption of their old way of life to the impact of Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and example. And since the United States is the legitimate heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of the West, the United States has inherited the resulting grievances and become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger. Two examples may suffice. In November of 1979 an angry mob attacked and burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The stated cause of the crowd's anger was the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a group of Muslim dissidents -- an event in which there was no American involvement whatsoever. Almost ten years later, in February of 1989, again in Islamabad, the USIS center was attacked by angry crowds, this time to protest the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a British citizen of Indian birth, and his book had been published five months previously in England. But what provoked the mob's anger, and also the Ayatollah Khomeini's subsequent pronouncement of a death sentence on the author, was the publication of the book in the United States.

It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations -- the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.

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. Even the Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected assembly, as well as a kind of episcopate, for none of which is there any prescription in Islamic teaching or any precedent in the Islamic past. All these institutions are clearly adapted from Western models. Muslim states have also retained many of the cultural and social customs of the West and the symbols that express them, such as the form and style of male (and to a much lesser extent female) clothing, notably in the military. The use of Western-invented guns and tanks and planes is a military necessity, but the continued use of fitted tunics and peaked caps is a cultural choice. From constitutions to Coca-Cola, from tanks and television to T-shirts, the symbols and artifacts, and through them the ideas, of the West have retained -- even strengthened -- their appeal.

THE movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.

To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics. To describe this perception I shall end as I began, with a quotation from an American President, this time not the justly celebrated Thomas Jefferson but the somewhat unjustly neglected John Tyler, who, in a letter dated July 10, 1843, gave eloquent and indeed prophetic expression to the principle of religious freedom:

"The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgement. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgement of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mahommedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions.... The Hebrew persecuted and down trodden in other regions takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid.... and the Aegis of the Government is over him to defend and protect him. Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free government would be imperfect without it.

The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air."

24 posted on 02/07/2002 10:42:15 AM PST by Tolik

I have no problem with leaving the Islamic theocracies and their people in isolation to do as they wish. This was generally done in the past. However, as the world moves inexorably toward increasing modernity, we are, all people, forced into closer and closer proximity, and the cultural clash is inevitable. If presently conceivable trends continue, Western Civilisation and Islam will collide inextricably, and they will either accomodate to one another, destroy one another, or one will destroy the other.

25 posted on 02/07/2002 6:17:43 PM PST by Savage Beast

To: Cicero; rudder; askel5

Note the discrepancies between the read article and Lewis' own words. According to the review, the toppling of the Shah spelled Iran's end. Yet Lewis, in his own words, says nothing of the sort. Rather, he says, the problem is a lack of freedom. When the Shah left Iran, involuntarily, for the second time, the political scene was fairly fragmented; while Khomeini, backed by French and Iraqi money, was one of the most well known oppositional figures, everyone from the Communist party of Iran to mullahs were high-fiving each other on the exodus of a tragic man, who had never really wanted to rule his country, but been imposed on it, twice, by outsiders.

The Clerics were not expected to hold the day, but rather be one party among many. Then, for whatever reason, a mustachioed Iraqi decided to lop off a peace of Iran by force; this instantly forced the Iranians to freeze the gradual sedimentation of their polity, and wage war. The clergy, being the best organized group in the country, ad the only political group that could mobilize people in every single hamlet of the country, was indispensable to this endeavor, and took full advantage of their irreplacability.

Saddam's behavior has never been completely explainable in rational terms, but, the Arab street, never bereft of conspiracy theories, does make much of the fact that Iraq was not punished for embarking on this war by the Western powers, but rather rewarded. Slapping an oil embargo on Iraq would have ended the war rather quickly, however, the prevailing mindset was best captured by Heinrich K.'s quip that "It was a pity that both sides couldn't lose."

My personal hunch is that the Arabs will in the end be the masters of their own fate, but that we, through hints and nudges can and could have helped them along. The imperative, however, has been to prevent nuclear war, the simplest and easiest way being to keep the countries mired in their own problems. In the end, the Arab world won't be able to modernize without some end to the conflict with Israel, and Israel will never see peace until the Arab world prospers. My money says that in the end, as in Germany, our soldiers will be needed on the ground to enforce peace.

26 posted on 02/08/2002 11:58:05 AM PST by a history buff

To: Savage Beast

A side comment on what is now a backwater issue - South Africa. The above comment from SB is exactly what has happened with South Africa. No matter how bad Apartheid may have been, the overthrow of the Afrikaaners in favor of socialist self-rule is turning the country into a nightmare. In ten years, on the current track, they will be indistinguishable from The Congo or Uganda.

And, as so many have observed, this is the kind of thread that makes keeping up with FreeRepublic totally worthwhile.

27 posted on 02/09/2002 4:59:52 AM PST by FreedomPoster

To: Savage Beast

"However, as the world moves inexorably toward increasing modernity, we are, all people, forced into closer and closer proximity,..."

I am sorry I do not see the connection.

28 posted on 02/11/2002 10:57:27 AM PST by alex

What I mean is that the modern world has the effect of making the earth smaller and smaller and forcing all of its people into closer and closer proximity. Therefore, whereas once the West and the Islamic World could ignore one another and go their seperate ways, in today's world this is impossible. And it is not only these two worlds that are forced to coexist; there are others, e.g. China and the West. Such 'different worlds' must accomodate one another, destroy one another, or one must destroy the other. Accomodation is by far the best choice.

29 posted on 02/11/2002 2:24:26 PM PST by Savage Beast

To: Savage Beast

"What I mean is that the modern world has the effect of making the earth smaller and smaller and forcing all of its people into closer and closer proximity."

IMHO, this is not true anymore. Look, in the 19-20th centuries countries were fighting for the pieces of Africa (WWI, Boer's war, a number of smaller conflicts), because there was some economic value there. Productivity gains made Africa simply economically irrelevant for the Western Society (the evidence is abundant). And once it is economically irrelevant it is irrelevant in all other senses too, there is plenty of tragic processes going on in Africa for years, however, event bleediest heart liberals are not ready to do anything about it beyond cheapest lip service, Africa is simply irrelevant.

This process was masked for a while by geopolitical games originated in the Cold War. Cold War is over and the new reality slowly sinks in. So, the modern world WAS pushing people to the closed proximity, but this is not a case any more.

"Such 'different worlds' must accomodate one another, destroy one another, or one must destroy the other. Accomodation is by far the best choice."

Sure, and the isolation is the most basic form of accomodation between societies. We do not have any accomodations with some societies now and there is no hope that it will suddenly emerge from the outer space. So, let us start from the most basic form of civilized co-existence - establish borders, do not invide their truf and do not allow them to invide ours. Destruction does not smell right for me.

And let us give these morons a chance to grow up without being disturbed by interaction with our world. It did made wonders in the past with other morons, who are now respected members of world community, and I do not see any reason why not to try it again.

30 posted on 02/11/2002 5:17:20 PM PST by alex

What you say is true. However, Western--and especially American--cultural influences are ubiquitous in the world today, and nations that do not welcome them appear to be powerless to stop them. The Islamic theocracies cannot seem to prevent the inflow of Western--especially American--influences, which they hate, and they conclude that the only way to stop it is to destroy America. Evidently, one thing that they particularly despise is democracy, which, evidently, conflicts with the sharia and therefore cannot be allowed; however, democracy is what the United States is all about and is fundamental to Western Civilisation. There seems to be an irreconcilable conflict here. Something's gotta give. Don't you agree/

31 posted on 02/11/2002 5:34:09 PM PST by Savage Beast

To: Savage Beast

"What you say is true. However, Western--and especially American--cultural influences are ubiquitous in the world today, and nations that do not welcome them appear to be powerless to stop them. The Islamic theocracies cannot seem to prevent the inflow of Western--especially American--influences, which they hate, and they conclude that the only way to stop it is to destroy America."

We strong enough to defeat any attempt to do and isolating them will make our job of defending against any attack even easier.

"Evidently, one thing that they particularly despise is democracy, which, evidently, conflicts with the sharia and therefore cannot be allowed; however, democracy is what the United States is all about and is fundamental to Western Civilisation. There seems to be an irreconcilable conflict here."

IMHO, the freedom of society is defined by freedom of its enterprises, democracy without capitalism does not bring much to the table - there are plenty of examples throughout the history, with Zimbabwe and SA being the most recent ones. These guys first and foremost hate our freewheeling culture of greedy individualism.

"Something's gotta give. Don't you agree"

??? It seems like you are bent on destruction, I think that isolation is much more human way of addressing these issues.

32 posted on 02/12/2002 6:09:01 AM PST by alex

No, I am definitely NOT bent on destruction. I am bent on adjustment and accomodation. The French and Russian Revolutions loom in the international psyche as examples of intransigence and failure to find ways to live together. And I am not suggesting that the West try to isolate the Islamic World either; I was merely pointing out the the Islamic World cannot seem to isolate ITSELF from Western Influences in the ever shrinking modern world and this is a fundamental cause the Islamic rage.

33 posted on 02/12/2002 6:46:03 AM PST by Savage Beast

To: Alex, Savage Beast

I like a number of points you make in the posts 29 -33, and, please, allow me to contribute a few words here.

In regards of Africa irrelevance and isolation as the most basic form of accommodation:

Muslim world is a source of oil. Or better put: OIL. It’s the biggest and often the only significant source of income for those countries. If not the OIL, they would be irrelevant as Africa now and easily ignored.

There is a good argument that they need us as much as we need them: somebody has to buy their oil to give them money after all. But the recent events show that normal economic pragmatism is not always in the picture. Islamist put their religious fanatical ideas ahead of the economics. They would have no problem to cut the oil supply at least for a while, create panic on the world markets, deeper recession, etc. They don’t control all oil in the world, of course, but more than enough to do a lot of damage. Iraq has no problem to starve their own population, in the same time building palaces and arming the army, and blame us for the starvation. They do sell oil now, and they do have more than enough resources not to have starving children. It’s not their priority though.

Osama’s brand of fanatics would do the same after getting control over the oil fields. Almost all oil-rich regimes in the area are sitting on the islamist powder keg ready to blow up. If not the ruthlessness of the current rulers, it would happen already. Normal people in all overtaken countries would suffer, but fanatics would not even notice. They have shown willingness to die for their idea. They did attack us. They want war. They asked for war. (I think they underestimated us, but it’s another story…) So, they would not think twice to shut down the oil supply, and sit back and enjoy a nice western chaos.

My point is: despite how much I personally wish, as we stand now, does not look like the West can simply separate from the Muslim world, shut the doors, and let them brew.

34 posted on 02/12/2002 6:49:47 AM PST by Tolik

I agree with everything you have said. The mutual isolation of the Western and the Islamic Worlds is a practical impossibility in today's world. That's why I originally said that the only alternatives are for them to accomodate somehow to one another--and maybe that means a prolonged stalemate--destroy each other, or have one destroy the other. If there's an alternative I overlooked I will be overjoyed. It seems that the secularisation of Islam, similar to the secularisation of Christianity in the West, is the best solution, but I don't know if that is possible, and this, of course, reflects my Western bias. The second best solution would seem to be the development of alternatives to Middle Eastern oil; but that doesn't seem to be on the horison. The only other solution, it seems to me, from the Western point of view, would be Western overpowering of those who control the oil fields, and that really seems like a bad idea; maybe there's a better one. What do you think/

35 posted on 02/12/2002 7:04:45 AM PST by Savage Beast

Great posts - thanks, and you cost me money...ordered two of Lewis's books just now. You should ask Amazon for a commission...

It is difficult to isolate the evolution of the relationship between Islam and Christendom to a few factors because so much was going on for so long within the two. Islam's success in the seventh century at the expense of Christendom was aided if not caused by the schism of the latter between Rome and Constantinople, a schism that hindered the defense of Christendom in the latter until it finally fell to the former in 1543. However, in the meantime Islam fell prey to schism as well, first between what became Sunni and Shiite, then between the Omiyyad and Abbaside factions, and finally between the Arab caliphs and the Seljuk/Ottoman sultans, religious and military respectively. Once this took place Islam experienced a resurgence on the part of its Christian foes.

Because of this it is no longer possible to lump the development of either major division into a monolithic group. At the eastern and western wings of Islam cultural and religious toleration were the norm; it might be argued that these (Isfahan/Baghdad and Toledo, respectively) were the real genesis of Islamic cultural flowering. Much of this was, in fact, not even by Muslims - in the east, the famous translations of the Greek cultural works were done by Nestorian Christians; in the west, much of the work was done by Jews. Both of these populations found living under Muslim rule preferable to the greater oppression of the Christian neighbors (in the west) and schismatic coreligionists (in the east). Here the key, IMHO, was toleration, a toleration not much evidenced in the middle of the Islamic geography, which not coincidentally corresponds to the present-day Middle East. There massacre was more the norm than toleration; it was there that "convert or die" became policy. Not a lot has changed in that sense since the original Omar went marching through in the mid-seventh century.

So instead of two opposing "cultures" we really have a dozen or more, and overlaying this is the different behavior each showed with respect to the industrial revolution, several centuries later. It is an oversimplification to claim that secular societies embraced that where theocratic ones did not - Western societies, even American society, weren't that secular, yet, and even some theocratic Eastern societies not under Islam (Japan comes to mind) embraced the industrial revolution suddenly and successfully. So it wasn't that, either.

What it really was I do not profess to know, and will happily leave to theorists such as Professor Lewis. But to view the current "clash of civilizations" as bilateral between West and Islam is not a position that bears up very well under either historical or current political analysis. IMHO, of course...

36 posted on 02/12/2002 8:20:58 AM PST by Billthedrill

At the end of the day, Lewis argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself. Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East, will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences and join their talents, energies and resources in a common creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a bit, though probably not much.

I suspect a lot of us here at F.R. came to that conclusion some time ago without needing to devote decades of research to the subject.

37 posted on 02/12/2002 8:40:53 AM PST by jpl

To Tolik, Savage Beast and Billthedrill.

Thanks for your posts. First, about OIL, we have to reduce our exposure by all means necessary - nuclear power, drilling in Alaska, switching into buying OIL from friendlier suppliers. Arab oil is cheap as long as you are not counting cost maintaining stability in the region, once it is factored in Norway's one would look more and more attractive. Also, by reducing demand we would have a very good leverage into getting some oil from Muslim world without being politically involved there.

I am affraid I do not quite understand what do you mean under accomodation. Let us assume that we are neighbors and I happen to be stronger than you. Does accomodation mean that any time you are in the mood to burn my house I have just smile and put out the fires and in exchange I have a right to go into your house and lecture you for hours about importance of brashing your teeth every morning ?

IMHO, accomodation is that I will beat crap out of you every time you try to burn my house, at the same time I am not going into your house with a goal of establish my rules over there (e.g. telling you to empower your wife).

BTW, let another wonder of long term isolation - it seems like Libiya is slowly coming to some sense.

38 posted on 02/12/2002 8:45:03 AM PST by alex

39 posted on 02/12/2002 8:46:34 AM PST by DoctorMichael

Also, by reducing demand we would have a very good leverage into getting some oil from Muslim world without being politically involved there.

And it wouldn't have to be very much demand - we're exposed about 15%, I believe. This may well be a near-future option - OPEC is no longer in lockstep, major non-Arab and even non-OPEC oil producers have come online, and the Saudis no longer have their economic hands around Europe's neck. The challenge, as I see it, isn't so much oil independence as it is keeping economic panic and political instability from resulting when it becomes apparent that we are oil independent. Economics is such a matter of perception that I suspect with a vigorous ~~propaganda~~, er, "publicity" campaign we might avoid a worldwide panic when we finally do tell OPEC to, forgive me, "pound sand." Not much more would be needed, perhaps, but at least that would.

Of course, there would be inevitable political and military problems resulting from this, and that's one thing recommending against it. The Saudi government at least, and probably others, would fall to more aggressive, radical, probably more theocratic political parties who needn't have the oil revenues in hand, necessarily, to be troublesome. All they'd need for that is possession of a few nuclear weapons and somebody in control of them crazy enough to think using them would be advantageous. Are these guys that crazy? I think the events of 9/11 are a pretty good indication that the answer is yes.

So there's the challenge to Western administrations - current policies have as advantages cheap oil from elsewhere, which conserves domestic supplies, and this political stability (if you can call it that, and I think it is temporary at best). How quickly these policies change, and how disruptive the effects, are not light matters...which is why we do not need lightweight policymakers.

40 posted on 02/12/2002 9:06:11 AM PST by Billthedrill

To: Billthedrill

"The challenge, as I see it, isn't so much oil independence as it is keeping economic panic and political instability from resulting when it becomes apparent that we are oil independent."

????? I do not see any particular harm to us here ?????

"Of course, there would be inevitable political and military problems resulting from this, and that's one thing recommending against it. The Saudi government at least, and probably others, would fall to more aggressive, radical, probably more theocratic political parties who needn't have the oil revenues in hand, necessarily, to be troublesome."

Why should I care and why should we intervene there ? I suppose that we have to let Muslims to solve their internal problems to their own liking - our society managed to get througn walking over the same path, I suppose it is simply unfair (some would even call it racist) to assume that Muslims would not be able to do the same some time in the future.

"All they'd need for that is possession of a few nuclear weapons and somebody in control of them crazy enough to think using them would be advantageous. Are these guys that crazy? I think the events of 9/11 are a pretty good indication that the answer is yes."

They are even crazier than you think, e.g. soviet party bosses had something to loose, most of these guys simply have nothing to loose at all. However, the question is 'Will oil independence and isolation of the Muslim World make a terror attack harder or easier ?' - I suppose that answer is isolation will make this attack almost impossible - isolation would deprive them from cheap delivery means.

41 posted on 02/12/2002 9:27:37 AM PST by alex

To: Savage Beast

I wish I had some easy, simple answers!

What I have is more questions. One thing which astonished me in the 9/11 events was the fact that the hijackers lived here among us for quite a long time, some of them lived with families! (I wonder if that reports of the families were true, I don't remember reading any follow-ups: where are that families now, disappeared?) Nevertheless, they remained undeterred.

I want to compare their brainwashing with the Soviet propaganda. It was not terribly effective, but it messed up minds well enough. It appeared to be in layers. Top layer for the most gullible, then another layer for a bit smarter ones, and so on. So many times I heard smart people saying "yes that was a lie, but in the core..., [the idea is right]". So, the propaganda machine kind of worked. Nevertheless, those who had more info and a chance, tried to escape, at least for a moment. Soviet apparatchiks, "nomenklatura", fought to put their kids into any job abroad. People coveted any trip, any glimpse outside. Does not matter how ideologically solid they were, most recognized where the "good" life is. When circumstances happened to allow a safe defection, so many decided to "choose freedom". Whole system existed not to allow the "safe" defection with "hostages" (family members) staying at home, extensive KGB background checking, which countries one can visit or not, etc.

But you can't even start to compare soviet brainwashing with the Arab/Muslim one. When small children are singing how they want to grow up and be a suicide bomber, when people are laughing and singing to celebrate another's tragedy, when one is a hero for blowing up kids in a pizzeria, its just scary. What can overcome such brainwashing and conditioning? Even when people live years in the West in the relative financial comfort, in the West with its openness and tolerance and still hate it so much. Did not they meet at least a few nice people here they would not want to kill? It's like we are from different planets. Astonishing.

42 posted on 02/12/2002 9:41:40 AM PST by Tolik

If the idea that religion and politics should be separated is relatively new, dating back a mere three hundred years, the idea that they are distinct dates back almost to the beginnings of Christianity.

The ancient Kingdom of Israel didn't have separation of church and state in the modern sense, but there was a clear cut division between secular authority (the king), and religious authority (the priests).

43 posted on 02/12/2002 9:47:51 AM PST by Salman

To: Billthedrill

There were some nice discussion here about energy alternatives, primarily nuclear energy. As FReepers showed plans exist for building nuclear power plants. The problem is that after all regulatory and environmental requirements are satisfied, there is still a venue of lawsuits to effectively stop constructions for years. Of course, no one can afford to freeze huge investments indefinitely. I don't think we need any subsidies for nuclear plants, I don't think that we need to circumvent public review and scrutiny. What we need is some limits on litigations, so the power plants can be actually built.

France relies on nuclear power for 75%+. (Nuclear Power and Global Electricity) Do we want to be more saint then French in scrutiny? Oil threat is good reason as any to get some more nuclear plants.

Disclaimer: I don't work myself, and I don't have any connections to anybody working in the Nuclear Energy industry or having anything to do with it.

44 posted on 02/12/2002 10:04:57 AM PST by Tolik

The Annointed One Speaketh!!!
Oh? Who annointed him?
What do you mean 'who annointed him'? His annointed status is self-evident on the face of it.
How is it self evident?
It is self-evident because he is the Annointed One.
Oh. I see. I think. But...
Now shut up and sit at the feet of the Annointed One and drink in his words of wisdom.
But where is he from? What was he doing before he suddenly sprang--like Athena from the head of Zeus--into our midst to inform us about these troubling current events?
What does it matter from where he sprang? How can the boring, dusty past possibly matter to the turbulent Now?
Oh, I don't know. It just seems odd somehow that here, in Our Great Bastion of Freedom, terrible events happen and--shazaaam--an Annointed One is right on the spot to tell us everything that happened and why and who, and especially, what we need to do about it.
Are you a conspiracy theorist?
no, no...please, I just wanted to....
Are you against a Secure Homeland?
Preposterous! Of course not! How dare you...

Then we will thank you to fold your hands and sit quietly while the Annointed One tells us All About It....

Alternative view-itis:

Bernard Lewis, Zbigniew Brzezinski , Muslim Fundamentalist And The Soviet Union

PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS

"....Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II

....Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all, the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.

To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new "Thirty Years War" in Eurasia....

Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the University of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the original India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.

Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the history of Islam from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime "engagements."

Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably responsible for every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his madness" has been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system, and launch murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.

* During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan - six months prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.

As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf - in alliance with Israel.

* It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of Civilizations" - in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of Civilizations."

* In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of "Lebanonization" - i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos. "The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists." He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization" of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East ... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates - as happened in Lebanon - into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

* In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece, "License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar."

Caught In The Act

Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give financial and military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British intelligence elements, and based in London......"

(Verily--a "wilderness of mirrors"....)

45 posted on 02/12/2002 10:18:06 AM PST by LaBelleDameSansMerci

To: LaBelleDameSansMerci

Now, Belle, I know I've seen you provide proper attribution to posts like that before, so I can't for the life of me imagine how you managed to omit the source for this article. It's good to see that some things are constant, and that there will always be those who devote their lives to fighting the secret forces of Executive Order 12333.

But I don't blame you for dropping the source - I know what it's like to be rushed because you have a lot to say...

46 posted on 02/12/2002 11:05:21 AM PST by general_re

the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.

Either within the Muslim world or Islam itself. Anybody that wants to possess this mudball, earth, to the exclusion of those who don't want to say God is Great several times a day --religion for a man on the go-- is welcome to it.

Kick the space program into high gear, and do it today. The universe is vast and it will be a very long time before man can conquer a significant part of it. You go that way or stay behind, we'll go the other, and we'll never have to think about each other again.

47 posted on 02/12/2002 11:17:06 AM PST by RightWhale

Thank you for clarifying the source of the critique!!!!!!!!

48 posted on 02/12/2002 11:20:06 AM PST by DoctorMichael

To: DoctorMichael

Why, it's my pleasure. I'm sure it was a simple slip by Belle.

49 posted on 02/12/2002 11:28:47 AM PST by general_re

I did source it. After pulling it off an unsourced post on a Che Guevara chat site. When someone--like you general--came on to object to the source I was going to ponder the idea that the comrade on the Che site probably didn't source it for the same reason.

My purpose in doing so was to provoke thought about the role of the Annointed Class in the United States--so-called bastion of free-wheeling freedom and thinking. (Anyone who has ever lived abroad knows this to be false. There are fewer things that can be debated in The Land Of The Free than in many places on earth--FreeRepublic notwithstanding.)

For example, do you remember when you first heard (from one of the Annointed) that the--now absolutely undeniable---"Gobal Economy" was , well, absolutely undeniable?You see what I mean?

A quotation from Milan Rai:

"..."We can no longer perceive the ideas that are shaping our thoughts, as the fish cannot perceive the sea."...

Are you at all nervous that no one on this thread gave any consideration to Dr. Lewis' history except a crackpotsource? Perhaps not, since the undeniable goal of modern conservatism seems to be to protect and defend the globalist status quo.

Are any of the facts in the crackpot article incorrect? Or simply unacceptaby sourced? The Annointed have much work to do in the world and will not brook being questioned as to their sources.

Perhaps that is why so few Americans bother themselves to do so.

50 posted on 02/12/2002 11:55:08 AM PST by LaBelleDameSansMerci

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