Why can't they be like us? Islam & the West
Pfaff, William
OF SEVERAL MINDS WILLIAM PFAFF WHY CAN'T THEY BE LIKE US? The West & Muslims in the months following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, it was politically taboo to say that the United States...
...2002, Tribune Media Services International...
...The West & Muslims in the months following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, it was politically taboo to say that the United States had in some way brought these attacks upon itself...
...The Israel-Palestine conflict is a self-evident source of the alienation of Arab Muslims from the United States since 1948, and particularly since 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank...
...Yet anyone with any serious knowledge of the American relationship with the Muslim Middle East in recent years knows that it is true- even if it is only part of the truth...
...The West takes for granted that the existing religious assumptions of Islamic society have to be overturned, not only because they don't suit the West, but because the West believes that they are unsuitable for the Muslims themselves...
...A long military occupation of Iraq is envisioned by Washington...
...Why indeed...
...bases in that country, and in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan...
...But for people in other societies, Westernization frequently means destruction, and social and moral crisis, with individuals cast adrift in a destructured and literally demoralized world...
...Standard American discussion of American destiny and the "end of history" takes for granted an eventual benevolent Americanization of global society...
...But when the Gulf War was over, the United States rashly pressed a reluctant Saudi monarchy to allow permanent American bases...
...In short, they are to become like us...
...Cultural and political disorientation, violent resistance to the intruder, and attempts to recapture a lost golden age are natural reactions to this...
...We in the West are inclined to think that everybody must eventually become like us...
...Washington remorselessly expands its military presence in the Islamic world in order to fight the anti-American terrorism that its presence causes...
...base system...
...The violence of the shock is intensified when the foreigner establishes military bases and tries to shape an Islamic country's policies...
...The essential cause for conflict, however, is one that commentators are trying to get at when they talk about the "crisis of modernization" in the Islamic world...
...The war against terror has expanded American troop presence in Georgia and in the Muslim southern Philippines...
...This has been Pentagon policy during the past decade, with regional commanders for all of the world's major geographical zones and expansion of the worldwide U.S...
...We see all of this today...
...The Afghanistan intervention has left U.S...
...The United States has now extended its presence in Kuwait to nearly a third of that state's territory...
...It was a moment when the Saudis believed they needed protection from Iraq...
...The September 11 attacks, carried out mainly by Saudis, were avowedly revenge for the "contamination" of the Islamic holy places by those bases...
...To the orthodox Muslim, that means apostasy, immorality, and God's condemnation...
...Every base conveys the contamination of "infidel" modernization, as well as the oppressive suggestion of foreign military occupation...
...Television talk-show hosts and print journalists lost their jobs for suggesting such a thing...
...The British conservative writer Roger Scru-ton recently asked why we should blame Islam for trying to reject "Western technology, Western institutions, Western conceptions of religious freedom" when all of these "involve a rejection of the idea on which Islam is founded-the idea of God's immutable will, revealed once and for all to his Prophet, in the form of an unbreachable and unchanging code of law...
...this will almost certainly be so if there is no UN mandate for the attack...
...Relations between Washington and the Saudi monarchy today are so strained that the United States will likely be denied use of the bases for an attack on Iraq...
...campaign to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait...
...No one in the U.S...
...There is constant Western pressure on Islamic governments to conform to Western conceptions of human rights and to promote free and critical religious and political thought...
...Westernization, to Westerners, means liberation...
...government seems to see a contradiction in this...
...Americans do not conceive of themselves as inheritors of a Western legacy of Promethean violence...
...Originally, the U.S...
...It is the incompatibility of values between Islamic society and the modern West...
...Last month, the New York Times reported the rise of ultraconservative or radical Islam in Saudi Arabia, and acknowledged that its growing influence has been directly connected to the presence of American troops in that country since 1990...
...There are new bases in the other Gulf monarchies...
...The power and material dynamism of the West seem inseparable from a value system that demands that Muslims give up their moral identity...
...bases were temporary, needed for the U.S...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
