-Written by AJ Reibel, MIR program, New Zealand
In his address to a joint session of Congress on the evening of September 20, 2001 – 9 days after the surprise terrorist strikes against the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City – President George W. Bush asked America “...why they hate us.”[1] He answered his rhetorical question, or, more specifically, his anacoenosis[2], with the explanation that the terrorists who struck the nerve-centre of America’s commercial capital hate not only the democratic governmental system, but the freedoms that Americans enjoy.[3] Is it true then that the people who attacked America – all of them Muslims – hated what America stands for? Can this question be broadly expanded to an examination of why Muslims might hate the United States, and, more importantly, Western civilization?
The second question posed above is simply a speculative one. It is fundamentally wrong to think that Muslims, as a whole nation, hate the West. Furthermore, to say that even some Muslims hate the West is also troubling as it presents the West as a monolithic amalgamation of identities, cultures, values, and economic systems comprising those of the United States, various European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and territorial[4] dependencies of the previously-mentioned states.
The idea that a wider Muslim nation, spanning the Asian, African, European, and North American continents, has a unified dislike for a particular cultural amalgamation (or, according to Huntington, ‘civilization’) is unreasonable and hugely simplistic. It is true that Muslims – whether they be Chinese Uighurs, Indonesian Acehnese, Iranian Persians, Turkish Kurds, Nigerian Hausas, or members of the Nation of Islam in the United States – consider both the Qur’an and the Sunnah to be their two sacred texts.[5] Nonetheless, as Ramadan points out, there are many differences between diverse Muslim peoples.
Broadly speaking, Shiites see themselves as fundamentally different from Sunnis. Kurds maintain an identity different to that of Turkic, Allawite, and Druze Muslims. Literalist interpreters of Islam hold different views from those held by mystical interpreters[6]. Despite the fact that there are clear differences between Muslim communities and peoples, American political theorists and IR scholars have repeatedly made broad assumptions and consigned various cultures and nations to reductionist categories.
Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial “The Clash of Civilizations” espouses a reductionist ethno-centric world view. This fear-mongering is not new. Bartolus de Sassoferrato, a 14th Century jurist, set a precedent for such divisive IR philosophy when he “...divided the world into five classes – [the Roman Catholic world] and four classes of [foreign people made up of] the Turks, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Saracens."[7]
Similarly, Huntingon breaks the world into eight major civilizations and asserts that the new stage for international conflict will occur between civilizations and, in particular, Muslims against Westerners. He stresses a clash of values and morals that explain the attacks of 9-11 on the WTC and maintains that Islamic groups will continue to target Western capitals, transportation infrastructure, and citizens in an endless quest to defeat Western civilization.
Despite Huntington’s emphasis on a civilizational clash, in an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, a journal of political and social thought, he admitted that one should not “...think in terms of two homogenous sides starkly confronting each other [because] Western countries [do] collaborate with Muslim countries and vice versa.”[8] In the interview, Huntington also explained that he did not see an emerging organisational bloc made-up of Muslim states and nations despite the existence of trans-Islamic political movements.[9]
While some of the trans-national and trans-Islamic political/ideological movements that Huntington vaguely referred to in his interview with NPQ, most likely including Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, openly target civilians and are indiscriminate in their use of violence, they also call for the removal of Western influence, and sometimes even troops, from the Middle East[10]. More specifically, these groups call for the removal of American influence from their states.
Scholars and journalists have attributed a strong measure of Muslim grassroots frustration and distrust of American influence to American policies in the Middle East. Although this explanation is easy to support with examples of hypocritical American foreign policy – such as the U.S. support for the economically and morally corrupt oil-producing states of Saudi Arabia and the UAE[11] – this grassroots Muslim frustration is not the reason that Al Qaeda targeted the WTC. Instead, it is a tool that Al Qaeda used in order to sell its policies to the down-trodden and idealistic masses in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and within European Muslim enclaves. Hezbollah, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and the previous GSPC[12] all employ the useful recruiting, fundraising, and attention-grabbing tool that stresses the ‘evil’ and hypocritical qualities of America, the leader of Western civilization.
As such, it is misleading and wrong (even if a distinction is made between ‘good’, pro-American, and ‘bad’, democracy-despising, Muslims) to claim, as many in the present American administration have done, that Muslims hate democratically-inclined and freedom-loving Americans/Europeans/Kiwis. The issue at hand is not whether Muslims inherently hate a foreign cultural amalgamation, but that many people in the states of the Middle East have been taught to hate Western imperialism in the form of cultural, economic, and political dominance.
Orphaned children in Karbala or Ramallah have been taught to hate Americans and Israelis because they have been told that they are responsible for the death of their parents, the destruction of their economic future, and the continuing insult to their religious beliefs posed by their material and decadent culture. According to Ian Burma, the Middle Eastern masses really grow to hate the effects of neo-liberalism on their societal conditions – exposed by crippling poverty, curtailed livelihoods, and social dislocation.[13]
Unfortunately extremist leaders employ ideological arguments for why ideologies and specific nations represent a dire threat to their audience’s existence. This type of ideological and cultural flame-fanning is extremely dangerous – as shown by both the actions of a few politically and ideologically indoctrinated individuals who targeted downtown Manhattan on 9-11 and the reactive threat-creation exhibited by the Bush administration and his advisors (including Huntington). Nonetheless, broad generalisations about civilizational conflict are more damaging than they are helpful in understanding the causes of conflict between the United States (and its allies) and disparate Muslim movements and networks spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The second question posed above is simply a speculative one. It is fundamentally wrong to think that Muslims, as a whole nation, hate the West. Furthermore, to say that even some Muslims hate the West is also troubling as it presents the West as a monolithic amalgamation of identities, cultures, values, and economic systems comprising those of the United States, various European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and territorial[4] dependencies of the previously-mentioned states.
The idea that a wider Muslim nation, spanning the Asian, African, European, and North American continents, has a unified dislike for a particular cultural amalgamation (or, according to Huntington, ‘civilization’) is unreasonable and hugely simplistic. It is true that Muslims – whether they be Chinese Uighurs, Indonesian Acehnese, Iranian Persians, Turkish Kurds, Nigerian Hausas, or members of the Nation of Islam in the United States – consider both the Qur’an and the Sunnah to be their two sacred texts.[5] Nonetheless, as Ramadan points out, there are many differences between diverse Muslim peoples.
Broadly speaking, Shiites see themselves as fundamentally different from Sunnis. Kurds maintain an identity different to that of Turkic, Allawite, and Druze Muslims. Literalist interpreters of Islam hold different views from those held by mystical interpreters[6]. Despite the fact that there are clear differences between Muslim communities and peoples, American political theorists and IR scholars have repeatedly made broad assumptions and consigned various cultures and nations to reductionist categories.
Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial “The Clash of Civilizations” espouses a reductionist ethno-centric world view. This fear-mongering is not new. Bartolus de Sassoferrato, a 14th Century jurist, set a precedent for such divisive IR philosophy when he “...divided the world into five classes – [the Roman Catholic world] and four classes of [foreign people made up of] the Turks, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Saracens."[7]
Similarly, Huntingon breaks the world into eight major civilizations and asserts that the new stage for international conflict will occur between civilizations and, in particular, Muslims against Westerners. He stresses a clash of values and morals that explain the attacks of 9-11 on the WTC and maintains that Islamic groups will continue to target Western capitals, transportation infrastructure, and citizens in an endless quest to defeat Western civilization.
Despite Huntington’s emphasis on a civilizational clash, in an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, a journal of political and social thought, he admitted that one should not “...think in terms of two homogenous sides starkly confronting each other [because] Western countries [do] collaborate with Muslim countries and vice versa.”[8] In the interview, Huntington also explained that he did not see an emerging organisational bloc made-up of Muslim states and nations despite the existence of trans-Islamic political movements.[9]
While some of the trans-national and trans-Islamic political/ideological movements that Huntington vaguely referred to in his interview with NPQ, most likely including Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, openly target civilians and are indiscriminate in their use of violence, they also call for the removal of Western influence, and sometimes even troops, from the Middle East[10]. More specifically, these groups call for the removal of American influence from their states.
Scholars and journalists have attributed a strong measure of Muslim grassroots frustration and distrust of American influence to American policies in the Middle East. Although this explanation is easy to support with examples of hypocritical American foreign policy – such as the U.S. support for the economically and morally corrupt oil-producing states of Saudi Arabia and the UAE[11] – this grassroots Muslim frustration is not the reason that Al Qaeda targeted the WTC. Instead, it is a tool that Al Qaeda used in order to sell its policies to the down-trodden and idealistic masses in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and within European Muslim enclaves. Hezbollah, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and the previous GSPC[12] all employ the useful recruiting, fundraising, and attention-grabbing tool that stresses the ‘evil’ and hypocritical qualities of America, the leader of Western civilization.
As such, it is misleading and wrong (even if a distinction is made between ‘good’, pro-American, and ‘bad’, democracy-despising, Muslims) to claim, as many in the present American administration have done, that Muslims hate democratically-inclined and freedom-loving Americans/Europeans/Kiwis. The issue at hand is not whether Muslims inherently hate a foreign cultural amalgamation, but that many people in the states of the Middle East have been taught to hate Western imperialism in the form of cultural, economic, and political dominance.
Orphaned children in Karbala or Ramallah have been taught to hate Americans and Israelis because they have been told that they are responsible for the death of their parents, the destruction of their economic future, and the continuing insult to their religious beliefs posed by their material and decadent culture. According to Ian Burma, the Middle Eastern masses really grow to hate the effects of neo-liberalism on their societal conditions – exposed by crippling poverty, curtailed livelihoods, and social dislocation.[13]
Unfortunately extremist leaders employ ideological arguments for why ideologies and specific nations represent a dire threat to their audience’s existence. This type of ideological and cultural flame-fanning is extremely dangerous – as shown by both the actions of a few politically and ideologically indoctrinated individuals who targeted downtown Manhattan on 9-11 and the reactive threat-creation exhibited by the Bush administration and his advisors (including Huntington). Nonetheless, broad generalisations about civilizational conflict are more damaging than they are helpful in understanding the causes of conflict between the United States (and its allies) and disparate Muslim movements and networks spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
__________________
[1] Speech given by George W. Bush, 20/9/01, found at: __, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” The White House – President George W. Bush, Sept., 20th, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html [viewed 08/08/08].
[2] A rhetorical question aimed at endearing oneself to a particular audience.
[3] Ibid.
[4] By ‘depedant territories’ I refer to territories such as French Guiana, French Polynesia, the Falkland Islands, Diego Garcia, Ceuta, Melilla, Puerto Rico, the USVIs, Netherland Antilles, Guam, American Samoa, and Madeira (among others).
[5] Tariq Ramadan, “Islam Today: The Need to Explore Its Complexities,” Nieman Reports (Summer, 2007), http://www.tariqramadan.com/article.php3?id_article=1167&lang=en.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Elizabeth Shackman Hurd, “The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2004): 250.
[8] Interview with Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations Revisted,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter, 2007, http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2007_winter/14_huntington.html.
[9] Interview with Samuel P. Huntington, NPQ, 2007.
[10] Hezbollah asserts that one of its goals is to secure an “Islam [that] is...civilized... [and] rejects injustice, humiliation, slavery, subjugation , colonialism and blackmail...”. These altruistic and lofty goals seem completely devoid of the hatred and violence associated with Hezbollah’s targeting of civilians with Katyusha rockets launched from Lebanon. Taken from: “Statement of Purpose,” Hizbullah – Party of G-d, http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/300/320/324/324.2/hizballah/statement01.html [viewed 08/08/08].
[11] Terrorist groups garner their support from projecting themselves as protectors of Muslim interests in the face of encroaching Western interests. It is in this way that the West – with an American, French, or Israeli face – has been seen, by people on the streets of Algiers, Beirut, and now Baghdad, as “standing behind [authoritarian governments whose policies often include] repression of Islamist parties.” Taken from: Elizabeth S. Hurd, “The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol.10, No.2 (2004): 239.
[12] The Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat, now known as the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb has waged a war of insurgency against the Algerian government, which it sees as a French puppet.
[13] Ian Burma argues that Islamic movements are really fighting against modernity, individualism, urbanization, liberalism, and humanism. Taken from: Ervand Abrahamian, “The US Media, Huntington and September 11,” Third World Quarterly, Vol.24, No.3 (2003): 534.
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