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Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will
not easily be mollified

by Bernard Lewis



IN one of his letters Thomas Jefferson remarked that in matters of religion
"the maxim of civil government" should be reversed and we should rather say,
"Divided we stand, united, we fall." In this remark Jefferson was setting
forth with classic terseness an idea that has come to be regarded as
essentially American: the separation of Church and State. This idea was not
entirely new; it had some precedents in the writings of Spinoza, Locke, and
the philosophers of the European Enlightenment. It was in the United States,
however, that the principle was first given the force of law and gradually,
in the course of two centuries, became a reality.

If the idea that religion and politics should be separated is relatively
new, dating back a mere three hundred years, the idea that they are distinct
dates back almost to the beginnings of Christianity. Christians are enjoined
in their Scriptures to "render ... unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's
and unto God the things which are God's." While opinions have differed as to
the real meaning of this phrase, it has generally been interpreted as
legitimizing a situation in which two institutions exist side by side, each
with its own laws and chain of authority -- one concerned with religion,
called the Church, the other concerned with politics, called the State. And
since they are two, they may be joined or separated, subordinate or
independent, and conflicts may arise between them over questions of
demarcation and jurisdiction.
Discuss this article in the Global Views forum of Post & Riposte.

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This formulation of the problems posed by the relations between religion and
politics, and the possible solutions to those problems, arise from
Christian, not universal, principles and experience. There are other
religious traditions in which religion and politics are differently
perceived, and in which, therefore, the problems and the possible solutions
are radically different from those we know in the West. Most of these
traditions, despite their often very high level of sophistication and
achievement, remained or became local -- limited to one region or one
culture or one people. There is one, however, that in its worldwide
distribution, its continuing vitality, its universalist aspirations, can be
compared to Christianity, and that is Islam.

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what
I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has
brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It
has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught
people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different
creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great
civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives
and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like
other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its
followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part,
though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going
through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred
is directed against us.

We should not exaggerate the dimensions of the problem. The Muslim world is
far from unanimous in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim regions
of the Third World been the most passionate and the most extreme in their
hostility. There are still significant numbers, in some quarters perhaps a
majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral,
social and political, beliefs and aspirations; there is still an imposing
Western presence -- cultural, economic, diplomatic -- in Muslim lands, some
of which are Western allies. Certainly nowhere in the Muslim world, in the
Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or
encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central
America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place
where American forces are involved as combatants or even as "advisers." But
there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that
distresses, alarms, and above all baffles Americans.

At times this hatred goes beyond hostility to specific interests or actions
or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western
civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the
principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen
as innately evil, and those who promote or accept them as the "enemies of
God."

This phrase, which recurs so frequently in the language of the Iranian
leadership, in both their judicial proceedings and their political
pronouncements, must seem very strange to the modern outsider, whether
religious or secular. The idea that God has enemies, and needs human help in
order to identify and dispose of them, is a little difficult to assimilate.
It is not, however, all that alien. The concept of the enemies of God is
familiar in preclassical and classical antiquity, and in both the Old and
New Testaments, as well as in the Koran. A particularly relevant version of
the idea occurs in the dualist religions of ancient Iran, whose cosmogony
assumed not one but two supreme powers. The Zoroastrian devil, unlike the
Christian or Muslim or Jewish devil, is not one of God's creatures
performing some of God's more mysterious tasks but an independent power, a
supreme force of evil engaged in a cosmic struggle against God. This belief
influenced a number of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects, through
Manichaeism and other routes. The almost forgotten religion of the Manichees
has given its name to the perception of problems as a stark and simple
conflict between matching forces of pure good and pure evil.

The Koran is of course strictly monotheistic, and recognizes one God, one
universal power only. There is a struggle in human hearts between good and
evil, between God's commandments and the tempter, but this is seen as a
struggle ordained by God, with its outcome preordained by God, serving as a
test of mankind, and not, as in some of the old dualist religions, a
struggle in which mankind has a crucial part to play in bringing about the
victory of good over evil. Despite this monotheism, Islam, like Judaism and
Christianity, was at various stages influenced, especially in Iran, by the
dualist idea of a cosmic clash of good and evil, light and darkness, order
and chaos, truth and falsehood, God and the Adversary, variously known as
devil, Iblis, Satan, and by other names.


The Rise of the House of Unbelief

IN Islam the struggle of good and evil very soon acquired political and even
military dimensions. Muhammad, it will be recalled, was not only a prophet
and a teacher, like the founders of other religions; he was also the head of
a polity and of a community, a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle
involved a state and its armed forces. If the fighters in the war for Islam,
the holy war "in the path of God," are fighting for God, it follows that
their opponents are fighting against God. And since God is in principle the
sovereign, the supreme head of the Islamic state -- and the Prophet and,
after the Prophet, the caliphs are his vicegerents -- then God as sovereign
commands the army. The army is God's army and the enemy is God's enemy. The
duty of God's soldiers is to dispatch God's enemies as quickly as possible
to the place where God will chastise them -- that is to say, the afterlife.

Clearly related to this is the basic division of mankind as perceived in
Islam. Most, probably all, human societies have a way of distinguishing
between themselves and others: insider and outsider, in-group and out-group,
kinsman or neighbor and foreigner. These definitions not only define the
outsider but also, and perhaps more particularly, help to define and
illustrate our perception of ourselves.

In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to
return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam,
where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of
Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to
bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam,
and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim
radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has
been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and
continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.

Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in
its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded
by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize.
But between the different groups of barbarians there was a crucial
difference. The barbarians to the east and the south were polytheists and
idolaters, offering no serious threat and no competition at all to Islam. In
the north and west, in contrast, Muslims from an early date recognized a
genuine rival -- a competing world religion, a distinctive civilization
inspired by that religion, and an empire that, though much smaller than
theirs, was no less ambitious in its claims and aspirations. This was the
entity known to itself and others as Christendom, a term that was long
almost identical with Europe.

The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen
centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and
has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long
series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and
reconquests. For the first thousand years Islam was advancing, Christendom
in retreat and under threat. The new faith conquered the old Christian lands
of the Levant and North Africa, and invaded Europe, ruling for a while in
Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and even parts of France. The attempt by the
Crusaders to recover the lost lands of Christendom in the east was held and
thrown back, and even the Muslims' loss of southwestern Europe to the
Reconquista was amply compensated by the Islamic advance into southeastern
Europe, which twice reached as far as Vienna. For the past three hundred
years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and
the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been
on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of
Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world, including Islam,
within its orbit.

FOR a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this
Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore
Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The
first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of
Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his
own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life
and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of
native non-Muslim elements. The third -- the last straw -- was the challenge
to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious
children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these
alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his
dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his
home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed
primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from
ancient beliefs and loyalties.

Europe and her daughters? The phrase may seem odd to Americans, whose
national myths, since the beginning of their nationhood and even earlier,
have usually defined their very identity in opposition to Europe, as
something new and radically different from the old European ways. This is
not, however, the way that others have seen it; not often in Europe, and
hardly ever elsewhere.

Though people of other races and cultures participated, for the most part
involuntarily, in the discovery and creation of the Americas, this was, and
in the eyes of the rest of the world long remained, a European enterprise,
in which Europeans predominated and dominated and to which Europeans gave
their languages, their religions, and much of their way of life.

For a very long time voluntary immigration to America was almost exclusively
European. There were indeed some who came from the Muslim lands in the
Middle East and North Africa, but few were Muslims; most were members of the
Christian and to a lesser extent the Jewish minorities in those countries.
Their departure for America, and their subsequent presence in America, must
have strengthened rather than lessened the European image of America in
Muslim eyes.

In the lands of Islam remarkably little was known about America. At first
the voyages of discovery aroused some interest; the only surviving copy of
Columbus's own map of America is a Turkish translation and adaptation, still
preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum, in Istanbul. A sixteenth-century
Turkish geographer's account of the discovery of the New World, titled The
History of Western India, was one of the first books printed in Turkey. But
thereafter interest seems to have waned, and not much is said about America
in Turkish, Arabic, or other Muslim languages until a relatively late date.
A Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain at the time wrote what must surely be
the first Arabic account of the American Revolution. The Sultan of Morocco
signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the United States in 1787, and
thereafter the new republic had a number of dealings, some friendly, some
hostile, most commercial, with other Muslim states. These seem to have had
little impact on either side. The American Revolution and the American
republic to which it gave birth long remained unnoticed and unknown. Even
the small but growing American presence in Muslim lands in the nineteenth
century -- merchants, consuls, missionaries, and teachers -- aroused little
or no curiosity, and is almost unmentioned in the Muslim literature and
newspapers of the time.

The Second World War, the oil industry, and postwar developments brought
many Americans to the Islamic lands; increasing numbers of Muslims also came
to America, first as students, then as teachers or businessmen or other
visitors, and eventually as immigrants. Cinema and later television brought
the American way of life, or at any rate a certain version of it, before
countless millions to whom the very name of America had previously been
meaningless or unknown. A wide range of American products, particularly in
the immediate postwar years, when European competition was virtually
eliminated and Japanese competition had not yet arisen, reached into the
remotest markets of the Muslim world, winning new customers and, perhaps
more important, creating new tastes and ambitions. For some, America
represented freedom and justice and opportunity. For many more, it
represented wealth and power and success, at a time when these qualities
were not regarded as sins or crimes.

And then came the great change, when the leaders of a widespread and
widening religious revival sought out and identified their enemies as the
enemies of God, and gave them "a local habitation and a name" in the Western
Hemisphere. Suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy, the
incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good, and
specifically, for Muslims, of Islam. Why?


Some Familiar Accusations

Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of
anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe.
One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part
of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including
writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin
Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of
civilization without culture: rich and comfortable, materially advanced but
soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown;
mechanical, not organic; technologically complex but lacking the
spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the
Germans and other "authentic" peoples. German philosophy, and particularly
the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and
some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this
philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.

After the collapse of the Third Reich and the temporary ending of German
influence, another philosophy, even more anti-American, took its place --
the Soviet version of Marxism, with a denunciation of Western capitalism and
of America as its most advanced and dangerous embodiment. And when Soviet
influence began to fade, there was yet another to take its place, or at
least to supplement its working -- the new mystique of Third Worldism,
emanating from Western Europe, particularly France, and later also from the
United States, and drawing at times on both these earlier philosophies. This
mystique was helped by the universal human tendency to invent a golden age
in the past, and the specifically European propensity to locate it
elsewhere. A new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third
World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve was ruined by the
Western serpent. This view took as axiomatic the goodness and purity of the
East and the wickedness of the West, expanding in an exponential curve of
evil from Western Europe to the United States. These ideas, too, fell on
fertile ground, and won widespread support.

But though these imported philosophies helped to provide intellectual
expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it,
and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made
so many in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world receptive to
such ideas.

It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse
doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for
Arabs, or Soviet atheistic communism, which can have had little appeal for
Muslims, but rather their common anti-Westernism. Nazism and communism were
the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in
the world, and as such they could count on at least the sympathy if not the
support of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.

But why the hostility in the first place? If we turn from the general to the
specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and
taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate
anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples. Yet all too often, when
these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is only a
local and temporary alleviation. The French have left Algeria, the British
have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the
westernizing Shah has left Iran -- yet the generalized resentment of the
fundamentalists and other extremists against the West and its friends
remains and grows and is not appeased.

The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling among Muslims
today is American support for Israel. This support is certainly a factor of
importance, increasing with nearness and involvement. But here again there
are some oddities, difficult to explain in terms of a single, simple cause.
In the early days of the foundation of Israel, while the United States
maintained a certain distance, the Soviet Union granted immediate de jure
recognition and support, and arms sent from a Soviet satellite,
Czechoslovakia, saved the infant state of Israel from defeat and death in
its first weeks of life. Yet there seems to have been no great ill will
toward the Soviets for these policies, and no corresponding good will toward
the United States. In 1956 it was the United States that intervened,
forcefully and decisively, to secure the withdrawal of Israeli, British, and
French forces from Egypt -- yet in the late fifties and sixties it was to
the Soviets, not America, that the rulers of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other
states turned for arms; it was with the Soviet bloc that they formed bonds
of solidarity at the United Nations and in the world generally. More
recently, the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran have offered the most
principled and uncompromising denunciation of Israel and Zionism. Yet even
these leaders, before as well as after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, when they decided for reasons of their own to enter into a
dialogue of sorts, found it easier to talk to Jerusalem than to Washington.
At the same time, Western hostages in Lebanon, many of them devoted to Arab
causes and some of them converts to Islam, are seen and treated by their
captors as limbs of the Great Satan.

Another explanation, more often heard from Muslim dissidents, attributes
anti-American feeling to American support for hated regimes, seen as
reactionary by radicals, as impious by conservatives, as corrupt and
tyrannical by both. This accusation has some plausibility, and could help to
explain why an essentially inner-directed, often anti-nationalist movement
should turn against a foreign power. But it does not suffice, especially
since support for such regimes has been limited both in extent and -- as the
Shah discovered -- in effectiveness.

Clearly, something deeper is involved than these specific grievances,
numerous and important as they may be -- something deeper that turns every
disagreement into a problem and makes every problem insoluble.



Copyright © 1990 by Bernard Lewis. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 1990; The Roots of Muslim Rage; Volume 266,
No. 3; pages 47 - 60.












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With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
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May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. Ameen


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