The infidels are us

Christian Century, May 8, 2002 by Lamin Sanneh

IN THE WAKE of the terrorist fury unleashed by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic al-Qaeda organization on September 11, Western analysts have been scrambling to analyze the competing ideologies that have brought about a violent collision between two cultures. The American culture of consumerism and of popular entertainment has spread deep into the Muslim world, and there collided with Islamic fundamentalism's moral struggle against infidels and their Muslim quislings.

For the most part the West has paid little heed to the competing ideologies behind the terrorist attacks, and in stead has focused on what is closer at hand in terms of past U.S. actions and policies. Let's consider some of these national actions and policies to see what connections there are, if any, with foreign terrorist groups.

During the cold war, the U.S. actively fought communism in Vietnam and Cuba, but there has been no comparable American campaign against the Muslim world, so it seems unlikely that geopolitics alone could explain the vicious network that Islamic radicals have set up to terrorize the U.S. Furthermore, the Muslim countries with which bin Laden is identified contain immense wealth, which undermines the notion that his real enemy is Western-induced poverty. Bin Laden himself comes from a wealthy Saudi family, and his terrorist network hasn't shown particular solidarity with impoverished populations in, say, India, Africa and Latin America. As far as we know, bin Laden hasn't challenged the economic injustice that was exacerbated by the phenomenon of "Petro-Islam," which has funneled oil revenues to a tiny minority of Muslim elites.

The U.S. support of Israel--including its connivance in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's repressive policies in Gaza and the West Bank--has understandably caused outrage around the world, and that has been given as a reason for the attacks. While America's unconditional backing of Israel continues to hinder relations with Muslim regimes, it is difficult to see how that could account for both fundamentalism and terrorism. Many in the Middle East remember that America had little say in the founding of the state of Israel, and that it was Czechoslovakia that saved the infant state from certain oblivion by providing military aid. And in the Suez crisis of 1956, the U.S. intervened on the side of Egypt and against the British government, forcing the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli troops from the Suez Canal. If that intervention was meant as a strategic geopolitical move, it backfired: in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, Egypt, Iraq and Syria formed a cold-war alliance with the Soviet Union. (Malcolm Kerr describes this shift in his indispensable book, The Arab Cold War.) Together the Soviet Union and its Arab allies assailed the U.S. on the floor of the UN, and much present-day American resentment of the UN harks back to that time.

An oft-repeated reason given for anti-Western Islamic views is U.S. support for corrupt undemocratic Muslim governments, but that reason also seems inadequate given the relative weakness in conservative societies of domestic support for progressive social policies. To accuse the U.S. of allowing corrupt regimes to hold off on domestic social reform lest their people charge them with betraying their culture seems circuitous. What interest of the U.S. does it serve that authoritarian regimes promote a conservative cultural agenda to stem cultural defections to the West? The external influence of the U.S. has not helped even its staunchest allies when the radicals have come calling, as the case of the shah of Iran showed.

A LITANY OF sins of omission and commission has been laid at the feet of the U.S. to explain the nature of the radical Islamic anti-Western campaign, including slavery, racism and global unilateralism. It has been widely noted that the U.S. government recently pulled out of the Kyoto agreement on the environment, refused to recognize the International Court of Human Rights at the Hague, held off on paying its UN dues, walked out of the UN racism conference in South Africa and abandoned the ABM treaty. Yet it's not clear why such sins should outrage Muslim fundamentalists more than they do, say, transatlantic leftists. In any case, it seems unlikely that the Muslim world would rise in righteous indignation on the issue of reparations for slavery, since the Muslim practice and defense of slavery--from the Zanj slave revolt in the ninth century to the plight of captives in Sudan today--is well documented.

A further explanation is that anti-U.S. terrorism is yet another manifestation of anti-imperialism. This is not a convincing argument either, however, though it contains a grain of truth. The U.S. took a very active role in the process of decolonization, even if cold-war considerations often overshadowed its commitment to nationalism. And there have been other imperialisms, too, such as those of Russia and Japan. In fact, Islam itself is not innocent of imperial pretensions, as manifest in Islamic expansionist regimes under the Arabs, the Mongols, the Ottomans, and the Moghuls of the Indian subcontinent. It was Ivan the Great who freed Russia of the Tartar yoke. One might argue, accordingly, that America has appropriated the sense of dominion that was once Islam's. It has extended its influence over the entire world, including the Muslim world, not by pursuing a policy of suppressing religion but by requiring no religious mandate for its policies.