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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Why They Hate Us
On The Issues
December 2001
Muslim teachings envision a world united under Islam, but in modern times the previously great cities of the Arab and Ottoman Empires have become weak and the Muslim world has diminished politically, militarily, and economically when compared with the progress of European civilization. It is therefore no wonder that Muslim radicals want to destroy the West.
Osama bin Laden and other radical Muslims look at the present condition of the world not just in contemporary terms, but in light of the whole 1,400—year sweep of Islamic history. They cite medieval authorities as frequently as living experts; ancient battles as readily as recent ones. To understand today's Islamic radicals, it is necessary to appreciate how unappetizing civilization's current trends look to them.
Keep in mind that for at least 1,000 years after Islam's founding in 622, Islamic states and their rulers were the most powerful entities in the world, far more impressive than any of their European and Christian rivals. At the turn of the previous millennium, the great cities of culture, learning, and science were Cordoba, Baghdad, and other urbane Arab metropolises. That is emphatically no longer the case.
To the contrary, today's Muslim nations are weak and, by and large, failed states. Whatever importance they possess derives almost entirely from where they are located—atop the largest proven reserves of oil in the world.
A Glorious Past
For a long time, the Islamic empire stretched from the Pyrenees to Indonesia, including most everything in between. As recently as the sixteenth century, the most powerful state in the world, including Europe, was Muslim: the Ottoman Empire. As recently as the seventeenth century, the Ottomans came remarkably close to capturing Vienna. Had they done so, all of Europe could have come under Muslim rule.
But things turned out differently. For the past two or three centuries, the Muslim world has been in retreat#8212;politically, militarily, and economically. To the west, Muslim states were forced to give up rule in Europe; in the east, they were pushed out of India. For a period, Muslims even had to submit to the rule of non-Muslims in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia.
Today, all Muslim nations are self-governing and with few exceptions are officially Muslim states. Geographically speaking, the Muslim world is not grossly smaller than it was at its height. But politically, Muslim countries are shadows of their former selves.
This situation is not only a function of the rapid progress of their competitors and adversaries. The Islamic world itself has stopped improving; Muslim leaders have not appropriated those aspects of modernity that made their rivals strong. Worse still, Muslims have intermittently tried to adopt defective forms of modernization—especially various types of socialism. What they have not lastingly tried is democratic capitalism. Almost all Muslim countries are still ruled by some form of autocracy—some softer, some harsher—and most of their autocrats are corrupt.
The Muslim world has a truly glorious past—not only politically and militarily but also intellectually and spiritually—and a diminished and humbling present. The natural consequence is disappointment, shame, even despair. The contrast with life in today's powerful advanced democracies like the United States is stark and often embittering.
Of course, there are many peoples and countries that have lost the preeminence they once enjoyed. The city of Rome, after all, once ruled the world. In modern times, England and France rose to great power, then declined. The French, in particular, still find it hard to bear their reduced position, but these peoples have "moved on." Why then does the diminished political station of Islamic countries so often yield fanaticism, rage, and terrorism?
The Role of Islam
The clearest explanation is that the Muslim faith assigns religious value to political success. The Koran presents Islam as the worthy successor, indeed the superior, of its monotheistic predecessors, Judaism and Christianity. Islam, unlike Christianity, has a political mission at its very heart. In contrast to Judaism (with which it shares a political element) Islam has a universalizing and missionary impulse. It looks forward eventually to a world united under Islam.
The original political and military successes of Islam served to confirm and reinforce the importance of political mission within its religious teachings. This has made Islam's more recent weakness especially troubling and freighted with greater significance than the ordinary rise and fall of state fortunes. Today's fanatics and terrorists have put an extreme interpretation on these circumstances. It is not merely history that has gone awry, they say, but the very constitution of the world. Demonic forces must be loose. How else is one to understand the current weakness of Mohammed's homelands? Satan himself must be at work—in the form of America, the Great Satan. America has achieved what has heretofore been unprecedented—"the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places," Arabia, the very birthplace of Islam.
To be sure, only a minority of Muslims share this interpretation, and a still smaller number are prepared to act on it with terror and violence. Still, the view is sufficiently popular to be convenient for Muslim tyrants—like Saddam Hussein, who has his own, hardly pious, reasons for wanting the United States out of the Arabian Peninsula.
Regrettably, demonizing views of the United States have also been given a platform in the press of several "moderate" Muslim countries, fanning popular resentment and hatred toward everything American. Faced with indigenous resistance to their own regimes, the rulers of nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan have found it useful to let the United States be the bogeyman, distracting their populations from problems at home. This may backfire spectacularly. It is certain to make our war against terrorism more difficult.
Hillel Fradkin, who until recently was a W. H. Brady Fellow at AEI, is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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