Muslims and the West are blaming each other for the present tensions in their relations. What we perhaps need is some introspection and calm examination by each side of its own internal or domestic problems instead of finger pointing the Other as the root cause of its problems. Each side has done wrong to the Other at some time, and even today injustices continue to be inflicted by the strong on the weak. While we excoriate each other, we should not deny that our actions are partly to blame for the morass we have sunk in.
We Muslims should take stock of our condition and address our own internal problems and should not attribute all of them to the real or imaginary Machiavellian machinations of the West. The West suffers from, and endeavors to eradicate, or at least minimize, its endemic moral, social, economic and political problems, which have led to an erosion of family values, and an increase in crime, poverty, racism and homelessness. It is in no position to pontificate to Muslims on how to lead their lives. Similarly, the Muslims are buffeted by their moral, social, political, educational and economic failings and are doing what they can and when they can to institute the necessary reforms to ameliorate their sorry situation. Islam and its civilization have been a light to the nations for centuries, but its latter-day followers are deluding themselves if they think their societies are a shining example to their own people or to the rest of the world in our day. Muslims have faced various challenges throughout history and have overcome them. In the modern period, they have been constantly and for many decades engaged in self-criticism, but this painful exercise needs continuity, especially in times of stress and crises, when it is human nature to seek comfort in introversion and isolation and blaming of the Other. Each side — the Muslims and the West — must be willing to look at itself and try to address the problems it is responsible for. Blame will get us nowhere.
It is now fashionable in the West — and particularly in the United States — to lash out at Muslims for spawning terrorists as if the entire world’s alleged terrorists come solely from Muslim countries and as if Muslims are not themselves the targets of violence. No religion or country has a monopoly on terrorism: Europe and the Americas have a not insignificant record in producing a broad variety of home-grown terrorists, although these are never called Christian or Jewish terrorists. Nor is — and rightly so — Christianity or Judaism blamed for the conduct of their followers, whether they are Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, Ariel Sharon or other criminals, who sanctimoniously wear the mantle of nationalism and civilization but whose barbaric acts against humanity can easily earn them the pride of place in Dante’s hell.
Using a broad brush with which to tar the Muslims as terrorists is racist, inflammatory and dangerous. The shallowness and evil of blanket condemnation of an entire people and civilization is encapsulated in the following anecdote about the greatest contemporary athlete, who once claimed with his customary mixture of verbal irreverence and sweetness to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." When Muhammad Ali visited Ground Zero in New York after the 11 September attacks, a bigoted journalist — relying on US claims that the perpetrators of the attacks were Muslims — asked him, "How do you feel about belonging to a religion, which has produced such people?" The butterfly’s stinging answer was, "How do you feel about belonging to a religion which produced Hitler?"
What is striking is that there is a state of official denial in the West — unquestioned by its tame media — for its culpable responsibility, for the injustices and violence committed against Muslims, particularly in Palestine. There is very little public awareness of this and Western governments, for reasons of real politic and domestic pressures, want to hide the truth from their people. These governments and their powerful media are trying to de-link Middle Eastern terrorism — committed by angry individuals — from some of its principal root causes in order to deflect their citizenry’s attention by inventing some red herrings.
One of the latest canards Western pundits have come up with is to blame the religious content of the educational system of some Muslim countries for breeding terrorists. But the Muslim world has had the same Islamically based curriculum for several hundred years, and produced no terrorists. Are the curricula of Western societies to blame for such monsters as Stalin, Hitler, Milosovic, Sharon, and, to quote an example seared in recent American memory, McVeigh?
This is a meretricious - and potentially dangerous — attempt to de-link terrorism, a worldwide and multinational phenomenon, from its main spring: Western injustices. It also seems to demonstrate the negligence of Western politicians, whose primary aim is short-term electoral gains, in protecting their citizens and nations’ interests. In the case of the Middle East, this attempt also shows the crass ignorance if not the dishonesty of most Western Middle Eastern "experts," the majority of whom cannot speak Arabic or write a short paragraph, or even two sentences, in that language. The question should be asked, "Why did the Muslim world’s curricula not produce terrorists for centuries, but suddenly and only in the last few decades they are turning out people angry at the West, and primarily America?"
The answer should not be to far to seek. To the wonderment of everyone in the Muslim world, President Bush asks what seems to them a puzzling, and even naïve, question, "Why they hate us?" I do not know any Muslims who hate Americans, but I know very few, who do not hate most of the policies of American administrations — and of the European governments who tow the US line — towards the adherents of Islam. Such policies stick out like a sore thumb in the cruel and inhumane sanctions imposed on millions of Iraq’s innocent, starving and sick children, women and elderly people, and also in the case of Palestinians, a nation which has been under the longest post-World II occupation.
The helpless Palestinians, who do not even have the semblance of an army, are asked to go to negotiations to settle their life-and-death problems with Israel, the US-backed regional superpower of the Middle East, which is armed to the teeth, possesses weapons of mass destruction that include nuclear weapons and believes in the employment of brute force to establish facts on the ground. Can negotiations between such unequal parties ever lead to peace? The US is opposed to UN involvement in resolving this conflict, but selectively enlists UN backing in other trouble spots. It claims that it is the ‘honest broker’ who will see a so-called Middle East peace process through to a successful conclusion.
It is the same US who recently refused negotiations and went to war instead when its own interests and security were threatened. And it is the same ‘honest broker’ who laid wreaths on sites where Israelis fell in the Intifada but whose milk of human kindness ran dry and could not manage to even utter a few words of condolences to the parents of Palestinian children, who were blown up by Israeli bombs, let alone grace the sites of these heinous crimes with floral arrangements. Can you fault the Muslims if they are bewildered and outraged by this concept of honest brokerage?
Israel occupied Palestinian territories over thirty years ago in the 1967 Six-Day War, and there is no reason on earth that it cannot be forced to withdraw from them in less than six days. Only the United States stands in the way of such a solution, setting its face against UN resolutions and the opinion and conscience of the rest of the world.
To protect America’s interests in the Arab world after the Suez War of 1956, US President Eisenhower gave Israel forty-eight hours to withdraw from the Sinai. It withdrew well before the deadline expired. That was statesmanship. When will the US have another Eisenhower? Israel’s intransigence, aggression, occupation, killing and uprooting of the Palestinians are supported in every way — militarily, financially and diplomatically — by the United States. Successive administrations have done this by reaching into the wallets of the unwary American taxpayer who has, mostly without his knowledge, paid for the crimes of Israeli state terrorism an average of $115 per second, $6,777 per minute and $10 million a day for the past 20 years. American citizens would be shocked to learn that, since 1949, they have given grants and loans to the tune of approximately $160 billion to an aggressive and oppressive state, which tramples on basic human rights and flouts international law with impunity.
This does not include the cost of interest the US Treasury has paid on the money it had to borrow to give Israel. What has been the American citizen’s return on this largesse, one wonders. At home, horrendous, unjustifiable and senseless loss of life and limb and abroad, an ugly image, a shattered credibility, and widespread outrage among more than a billion Muslims. Quo vadis, America?
As long as such one-sided policies continue and the rogue state of Israel is treated as a spoilt child who is protected by the US in defiance of international law and world public opinion, tension will keep going growing between the Muslims and the United States. The Muslims feel frustrated, powerless, humiliated and angry because of America’s double standards and Orwellian doublespeak. They do not want American sympathy and lip service to the concepts of democracy, justice, freedom and anti-terrorism but visible and immediate action to redress the wrongs they feel are being done to them.
All of America’s slick public relations, all of its officials’ soothing speeches and promises, all of its current or contemplated TV transmissions and Voice of America programs in various languages, all of its monetary aid (sometimes a euphemism for bribes) will do nothing, absolutely nothing, to alleviate the suffering and hurt that American policies are inflicting on the Muslim world.
What Muslims want is for America to change its unjust policies. They believe that, with the common spiritual, moral and humanitarian values and economic interests which they share with the Americans — and with the West in general — this would result in a sea-change in relations and perceptions that would benefit not only Muslims but also secure the real national interests of the US and all other peace-loving nations, which lie with the some 1.3 billion Muslims spread across the globe.
With peace and justice, the blame game will be over.
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(Ismail Ibrahim Nawwab, formerly a university professor and a general manager of Saudi Aramco, is co-editor of the forthcoming The Foundations of Islam. His latest publication was a paper on "Muslims and the West in History." E-mail: [email protected])
