In reading the debate over Guantanamo, there seemed to be a lot of question about where the apparent hatred of many terrorist groups originates. As it happens, I recently wrote a short essay on that question. I thought I'd post it, for your consideration, in the hopes that it would spark a more informed debate.
I can post the bibliography if you like.
At the dawn of the 21st century, Western Civilization was presented with a memorandum of hatred, issued by one of the foremost Radical Islamists of our time. This statement elicited two responses: the first response, primarily from the West, consisted of shock and horror, the second, from Islamic populated countries, tacit and sometimes open endorsement. The vehicle used to spread this message of hate was, of course, the September 11th terrorist attacks. The man chiefly responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Ladin, and it was suggested that he was also the chief author of the apparently widespread hatredlater, this would be recognized as a cursory explanation. Immediately following the attacks, an effort was made by Western media, scholars, and politicians to explain where this violent hatred had originated. For the radical minority of Islam, no such explanation was necessary. The West’s surprise at the attacks can be attributed to its short memoryhistorically speaking. The Islamic world, on the other hand, suffers no such amnesia. Indeed, Osama bin Ladin possesses a lengthy list of historical and spiritual wrongs from which he claims to derive his hatred. This essay will examine this list, with a few additions, in an attempt to better explain the overarching hatred directed towards the West by Islamic extremists.
As with all lists, it is only logical to start from the beginning, with an event that only recently began to feature prominently in the criticisms of Islamic fundamentalists: namely, the Crusades. At the dawn of their religious empire, the Muslim leaders understood that the Christian West would be their primary competitors when it came to expansion. The West, however, took some time before coming to a similar conclusion. The resulting three centuries of Crusades would end disastrously for the Crusaders, culminating in their expulsion from Palestine and its surrounding lands. The hatred, then, does not stem from a Crusader victory, but from the perceived audacity of the West in its attacks on Islam. The most criticized of these attacks were those made by the Crusader Prince Reginald de Chatillion. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Reginald launched five galleys on the Red Sea: they not only blockaded the Muslim port of Eilat (Elath) but also harassed shipping, raided other ports, and even threatened Mecca until an Egyptian fleet destroyed them” (Britannica 1). This threat to Mecca and the Hijaz is as profane to modern Muslims as it was to Chatillion’s contemporaries, and is used by fundamentalists as evidence of the West’s contempt for their Holy Land.
After the Crusades, the list is silent until the decline of the Ottoman Empire. This decline is referenced often, specifically the Treaty of Karlowitz and the further territorial capitulations demanded by the Eastern European powers following the defeat of the Ottomans in their campaigns to spread Islamic influence throughout Austria. For the Islamic world, these capitulations marked the beginning of a long descent from superpower status to that of a second or even third rate power. For the Radicals, the reasons for these impositions and defeats are irrelevant; what is important is that these treaties can be seen as a deliberately organized attempt to humiliate Islam internationally and to return Muslim-converted lands into the Christian fold. According to Bernard Lewis, eminent Middle-Eastern historian, the reason that these forced capitulations are viewed so violently is because “It was a crime and a sin for Europeans to conquer and rule Muslims and, still worse, to try to lead them astray…In Islamic law, conversion from Islam is apostasya capital offense” (Lewis 55). Any concession of Islamic lands into Christian hands bears the potential that Muslims will be led away from the true faith, and is therefore, in the eyes of the radical sects of Islam, tantamount to blasphemy.
Nor was Karlowitz the only difficulty to face the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, as Turkish imperial strength waned, the Western nations began to establish their own globe-spanning empires. The Europeans focused mainly on Africa and Southeast Asia; lands which traditionally felt a strong Islamic influence. The subsequent colonization of countries like India, Egypt, and the Sudan sent shockwaves throughout the Islamic world that are reverberating to this day. Even more outrageous to the Radicals was the action taken against the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I by the victorious Allies. In what amounts to the final, tangible expression of Western Imperialism, the Ottoman Empire was fully partitioned by the victorious Allies in the days following the Versailles Treaty.
The subsequent destruction of the Ottoman Empire had been facilitated by two pieces of Allied statesmanship. The first, known as the Balfour Declaration, was a statement issued by the British government which “…viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their [Britain’s] best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object…”(Shlaim 1). The second, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, was based on an understanding between the French and British governments to split the Ottoman Empire between them after the war. Aside from the obvious reasons for inspiring resentmentpartitioning of an Islamic imperial powerthere were other considerations at work that drove a spike of bitterness into the thinking of the Islamic Radicals. Chief among them were the violations of the promises made to the Arab National Council, following their successful revolt against the Turks in the greater Syrian provinces. Whereas the British had secured Arab assistance by assuring them that they had no intention of expanding into Arabia and the Transjordan Middle-East, Balfour and Sykes-Picot essentially proved that a lie. The Council managed to deny the British control of Arabia proper, and kept the international community from realizing any dream of a Jewish homeland. Even so, it marks what Radicals consider one of the greatest Western betrayals of Islam of all time.
The breakup of the Ottoman Empire also allowed for a more spiritual attack on Islam. This attack, however, did not come from the Western quarter, but from a secular Turkish leader. In 1920, Mustafa Kemel (later Ataturk) established himself as President of Turkey and launched a campaign of westernization. Kemel planned to move past the losses of World War I, reverse the trend of kowtowing to Western powers, and massively modernize the country. However, as Radical Islamists are quick to point out, Kemel, while concerned about the state of the Middle-East, was no devout Muslim. Indeed, he was chiefly concerned with reorganized Turkey along “Western” lines. Seeing State advocated Islam as a contributing factor to the suspension of Turkish dominance, Kemel:
…set out to limit the place of religion and religious leaders in daily affairs…Religious courts were abolished, replaced by secular law codes that were inspired by European models. Religious schools gave way to state schools that taught such secular subjects as science, mathemematics and social sciences. (McKay 909)
This rapid secularization of Turkey culminated in 1924 with the abolition of the Caliphate. For six centuries the Caliph had been the religious and political leader of the Islamic world. His summery dismissal by Kemel left a void that haunts the Islamic world to this day. In many ways, the loss of the Caliphate underscored the transition of traditional Islam into its newer incarnations. Hereafter, if the Islamic world wanted to remain vigorous, it had a choice to make: it could either accept the secularized example of Kemel and deal with the West as an equivalent culture, or it could reject modernization, often violently, in favor of a return to hyper-traditional Islam that advocated open denouncement of the West.
Incidentally, this is the choice that faced Saudi Arabia when oil was discovered by an American geological expedition in 1933. Ibn Saud, having recently established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, saw both potential and calamity in the discovery. On one hand, the oil offered the possibility for vast amounts of Western capital, on the other, it promised to alienate the Wahhabi Islamic Radicals that had helped him ascend to the throne. Ultimately, Saud settled for a compromise: he would allow the Westerners, chiefly American, to exploit the oil fields, and in return he would use a portion of the money received by the Kingdom to spread Wahhabism throughout the Islamic world. At first, the compromise was accepted, but it has been increasingly criticized by Radicals in recent years as being Western-predisposed. Indeed, a continued Western military presence in Arabia, ostensibly to protect Western oil interests, in close proximity to the holiest sites of Islam is seen as a direct challenge to Islamic power, and is the leading complaint of the Radical Islamic world today.
The complaint of prevalent Western influence has its basis in two things: the Western track record of support for dictatorial Middle-Eastern governments who are friendly to the West, and support for Israel. In the case of dictatorial governments, it has long been understood that the West will do anything in its power to maintain influence in the Middle-East, even if it means using local tyranny as a vehicle. An excellent example would be American support of the Iranian Shah in the 1960’s and 70’s. The Shah, by Islamic standards, was a corrupt, ineffective leader, and as proof of his extravagances there were several popular uprisings under his reign. These uprisings, however, were generally fundamentalist in nature, anti-western, and therefore unacceptable to the Western powers. In at least one instance, the U.S. restored a deposed Shah to the throne, and helped to suppress, by force, a popular revolution. The hatred of heavy-handed Western policies was so great that, through the crucible of the 1978 revolution, the remarkable mantra of “Death to America” was born. The establishment of Israel, in lieu of Palestinian protest, is seen as an even more extravagant case of Western bullying, and, in the case of the numerous Arab-Israeli wars, an outright attack on Islam proper. That the majority of Israel’s early economic and military support came from Western nations has not escaped the notice of the Radicals. All of which comes together to promote the feeling that either the West doesn’t care about the rights of Muslims, or that it cares more for its own interests than human dignities.
It must be noted that conditions under these Middle-Eastern tyrants are appalling, and that the average Egyptian, or Saudi Arabian, or Syrian lives in dismal conditions. These conditions are then exploited by the dictatorships of these countries, piling blame on the West, and are used to turn popular opinion against the U.S. When asked where the hatred originates, famed Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany puts it this way, "poor areas, because the poor are desperate, religion is being used as a cover for social unrest, a way to empower those people who are not empowered” (Koystal 33). Radical Islam, in most cases, is the only political outlet to which these people can turn. And since they are routinely denied the right to self-determination by Western-supported governments, it is easy to see why it is in this direction that their contempt and loathing is aimed.
There is another aspect of the hatred that must also be acknowledged. Unlike the others, it is not historical in nature but spiritual and cultural. The idea that, somehow, the West is amoral and primitivespiritually in any casehas circulated through the Islamic world since its inception. It was not, however, until recent decades that the idea acquired its current fervency. It is also important to note that this sentiment is now directed chiefly at the U.S., rather than Europe. The reasons for this are twofold: the first being that the U.S. has since assumed the role of sole superpower, the second that, through its long centuries of conflict, the Islamic world has begrudgingly recognized that Europe has a heritage of sorts. The U.S., on the other hand, is seen as a cultureless conglomerate that routinely encourages its people to be tactless. This view was most fervently developed by Sayyid Qutb, one of the forefathers of modern Radical Islam. Over the course of his stay in the U.S., Qutb made several disconcerting observations about American culture. He claims that America was founded by “…groups of adventurers and groups of criminals…’ ”(Von Drehle 98), and that the American people themselves were anesthetized to “ ‘…faith in religion, faith in art and faith in spiritual values altogether’ ” ( Von Drehle 98). America may’ve been the most technologically advanced and affluent nation in the world, but when it came to spirituality, we were bankrupt. This belief enjoys the zealous assent of most of Radical Islam, and there is no coincidence that the rhetoric of Osama Bin Ladin routinely condemns the amorality of the West. David Von Drehle puts it this way: “A direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Ladin, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman a-Zawahiri” (Von Drehle 96).
Ultimately, it is clear many of the complaints issued by the Radical Islamists have merit. The historical record of West-East relations is very poor and the West is legitimately guilty of much of bin Ladin's list. The response of the West, then, must only be given after careful evaluation of the past. Whereas it would be arrogant to assume that it is within the power of the West to right any past wrongs, to respond without having studied this list would be grossly negligent. Additionally, to act without consideration of opposing claims would further alienate the moderate Muslim who, while perhaps agreeing with bin Ladin’s assessment of the West, still condemns his message. In short, if the West is as determined as it claims to understand the prevalent hatred of the Middle East then it must overcome its historical amnesia and begin the effort to analyze its own shortcomings. To do so can have no repercussion, except perhaps for a wounded sense of pride, but to fail to do so could have catastrophic results, as Mr. bin Ladin has already demonstrated.
I can post the bibliography if you like.
