9/11: September 11, Islam, and a history of hatred

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The Age, Australia

September 12 2002

Muslim frustration and anger, building for centuries, have reached a climax in our time, writes Bernard Lewis.

The immediate, general reaction as the facts of what happened on September 11, 2001, became known was one of utter astonishment. Most people in the Western world find it impossible to understand the motives and purposes that drove the perpetrators of these crimes, those who sent them and those who applauded them with song and dance in the streets.

Why would anyone be willing to sacrifice his own life to accomplish the random slaughter of other people selected merely by the place where they happen to be, irrespective of age, sex, nationality and religion?

This indifference to the suffering of others, even of their own people, is a common feature not of Islam as a religion but of these terrorist movements and of the regimes that use them. The motive, clearly, is hatred, and from then until now the question is being asked, with urgency and bewilderment: "Why do they hate us Americans so?"

At one level the answer is obvious. It is difficult if not impossible to be strong and successful and to be loved by those who are neither. The same kind of envious rancour can sometimes be seen in Europe, where attitudes to the US are often distorted by the feeling of having been overtaken, surpassed and in a sense superseded by the upstart society in the West. This feeling, with far deeper roots and greater intensity, affects attitudes in the Muslim world towards the Western world or, as they would put it, the infidel countries and societies that now dominate the world.

Most Muslims, unlike most Americans, have an intense historical awareness and see current events in a much deeper and broader perspective than Westerners normally do. And what they see is, for them, profoundly tragic.

For many centuries Islam was the greatest civilisation on earth - the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavour. Its armies, its teachers and its traders were advancing on every front in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, bringing, as they saw it, civilisation and religion to the infidel barbarians who lived beyond the Muslim frontier.

And then everything changed, and Muslims, instead of invading and dominating Christendom, were invaded and dominated by Christian powers. The resulting frustration and anger at what seemed to them a reversal of both natural and divine law have been growing for centuries, and have reached a climax in our own time. These feelings find expression in many places where Muslims and non-Muslims meet and clash - in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Israel and Palestine, Sudan, Kashmir and the Philippines, among others.

The prime target of the resulting anger is, inevitably, the US, now the unchallenged leader of what we like to call the free world and what others variously define as the West, Christendom and the world of the unbelievers.

For a long time politicians in Arab and some other Third World countries were able to achieve at least some of their purposes by playing the rival outside powers against one another - France against Britain, the Axis (German, Italy, and Japan up to WWII) against the Allies, the Soviet Union against the US. And then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, came a truly radical change. Now, for the first time, there is only one superpower, dominant, however unwillingly, in the world: the United States.

Some Arab leaders try frantically to find a substitute for the Soviet Union as patron and protector of anti-American causes. Others, notably Osama bin Laden, took a different view. As they saw it, it was they who, by the holy war they waged in Afghanistan, brought about the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union. From their perspective, they had dealt with one of the infidel superpowers - the more determined, the more ruthless, the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the soft and pampered US would, so it seemed, be a much easier task.

The reasons for hatred are known and historically attested; the hatred has been growing steadily for many years and has been intensified by the conduct of some of the rulers whom America calls friends and allies and whom their own people see and resent as American puppets. A more important question is the reason for the contempt with which they regard the US. The basic reason for this contempt is what they perceive as the rampant immorality and degeneracy of the American way - contemptible but also dangerous, because of its corrupting influence on Muslim societies. What did the Ayatollah Khomeini mean when he repeatedly called America the "Great Satan"? The answer is clear. Satan is not an invader, an imperialist, an exploiter. He is a tempter, a seducer, who, in the words of the Koran, "whispers in the hearts of men".

Another aspect of this contempt is expressed again and again in the statements of bin Laden and others like him. The refrain is always the same. Because of their depraved and self-indulgent way of life, Americans have become soft and cannot take casualties. And then they repeat the same litany - Vietnam, the Marines in Beirut, Somalia. Hit them and they will run. More recent attacks confirmed this judgment in their eyes - on the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993; on the US mission in Riyadh in 1995; on the military living quarters in Khobar in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the embassies in East Africa in 1998; on the USS Cole in Yemen in October, 2000 - all those brought only angry but empty words and, at most, a few misdirected missiles.

The immediate and effective response against their bases in Afghanistan must have come as a serious shock to the terrorist organisations and compelled some revision of their earlier assessment of American weakness and demoralisation. The US must make sure they are not misled, by the unfamiliar processes of a democratic society, to return to that earlier misjudgment.

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2002


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