Islam Against the West?

By LANCE MORROW

Whenever they kindle a fire for war, Allah extinguishes it. And they strive to create disorder in the earth, and Allah loves not those who create disorder.--The Koran

The West and the world of Islam sometimes resemble two different centuries banging through the night on parallel courses. In full raucous cultural panoply, they keep each other awake. They make each other nervous. At times, as now, they veer together and collide: up and down the processions, threats are exchanged, pack animals and zealots bray, bales of ideological baggage spill onto the road. Embassies get burned, hostages taken. Songs of revenge rise in the throat.

Are these collisions inevitable? The mutual misunderstandings of the West and the Islamic world have a rich patina of history. Jews, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book," draw much of their faith from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidel." At such moments, the Imam takes on the wild and grainy aspect of a dire Mohammedan prophet by DeMille.

Khomeini may even wish to transcend Iranian nationalism and export his fundamentalist Islamic revival. The prospect of such contagious piety disturbs other Muslim leaders, the Saudi royal family, for example. But it also raises apprehension and a certain amount of bewilderment in the West. When Mahdist Saudi zealots took over the mosque in Mecca last month, the Islamic world displayed a disconcerting readiness to believe Khomeini's incendiary report that the attack had been the work of Zionists and U.S. imperialists. "The Americans have done it again," many Muslims told themselves reflexively. Some Americans have responded by asking with a truculent innocence: "What did we ever do to them?"

If the question is disingenuous, the answers are complex.

The U.S. never colonized Islamic countries, as, for example, Britain and France did. The U.S. has no large Islamic minority and thus, unlike the Soviet Union, has no record of bitter internal relations with Muslims. Besides (as some Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress, a machine overwhelmingly vigorous, profoundly tempting and yet decadent by all the disciplines of the Prophet, has threatened Muslim identity.

Western science and technology have wounded the deep pride of Islam. The success of the unvirtuous, the infidel unfavored of Allah, is psychologically confusing. "Seen through Muslim eyes," writes Berkeley Historian Peter Brown, "the emergence of [the West] as the temporary master of the world remains an anomaly in the natural unfolding of the course of history." Muslims have recoiled from modernization in exact proportion to the force of its temptation for them. They have been attracted by secular materialism, have tried it in the guise of both capitalism and Marxism, but they have often been disappointed by it, have associated it with the colonial masters who introduced them to it. They have found it dangerously, almost radioactively, corrupt.

Some Muslims, of course, insist that Islam and modernization are perfectly compatible. Many Islamic countries supply the oil that is, for now, the indispensable ingredient of modernization, and they have tried to use their staggering and sudden wealth to buy the machines of progress without the devils that often inhabit them. Conservative Saudi leaders, for example, a pursue a selective strategy regarding the technological riches of the West: they seek to modernize without the garish libertine free-for-all that Western secular individualism has promoted.

But for Muslims, the dilemma remains: if they are to develop economically, they must import Western technology. To master Western technology, they must send their young to be educated in the West. And that invariably means diluting their culture. Progress means better medicine and other mitigations of life's harshness, of course, but it also means the young women returning from Paris or Palo Alto in short skirts instead of chadors; it means 30% inflation, pollution, an open door to all the depressing vitality of the junk culture; it means the young leaving the villages and becoming infested with all kinds of Hefnerian tastes for hi-fis and forbidden pleasures. It is sometimes difficult for a Westerner to understand that to a Muslim, the cultural dismantling of Islam, the governing apparatus of his life and civilization, is a tragedy that amounts to a form of annihilation.

The sort of Muslim fundamentalism evident in Iran or Muammar Gaddafi's Libya may confirm a remark by Frantz Fanon, the philosopher of Third World uprisings: the native response to imperial domination is to fall back on what is authentic, what is resistant to modernization. The mosque becomes a symbolic safe haven.

Islam is not inherently or inevitably antiWestern, despite the often bloody encounters of the past. Muslims have historically occupied a geographically vulnerable position, which may account for their militant touchiness. But the religion has become the vehicle for certain antiWestern, anti-American resentments and antipathies. In some ways, the specifically Islamic religious component is almost incidental: Islam is, as much as anything else, the repository for grievances, envies and hatreds that Third World have-nots harbor for the privileged of the globe. Islam gives cohesion to complaints about the injustices of the world. The Muslim tradition provides the language and symbolism to express a wide social message: it is not necessarily a religious phenomenon. It is not antiChristian. In fact, Muslims really regard modern Westerners as a species of pagan. Ironically, some of the resentment has been aroused by the emergence of oil-rich classes within the Islamic countries themselves. With that wealth came a widening gap between rich and poor, a dangerous ambivalence of rising expectations and an anxiety that old ways might be endangered. The resentment of modernization is not anything so simply and piously self-abnegating as a wish to avoid luxury; it is also a bitterness at being forced to live adjacent to a wealth one cannot possess.

Iran embodies both the essence of the Islamic complaint against the West and unique historical grievances of its own. By race (Aryan), language (Persian), religion (Shi'ite Muslim) and historical tradition (ancient Persia was conquered by Muslims in the 8th century), Iran is different from the rest of Middle Eastern Islam. It was never colonized, in the usual sense of the word, by the West. And yet the penetration of Western ideas was deeper in Iran than in some other parts of the Middle East and came to be seen in a considerably more sinister light.

While leaders in other Muslim states (Saudi Arabia and Libya, for example) have moderated Western influences, the Shah embraced the West with (as it turned out) a heedless enthusiasm. He set up a secular state, destroying the classic and crucial unity in Islam between church and government. Under the Pahlavis, women were liberated from the traditional chador, permitted to vote and divorce their husbands. The Shah made the mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life and profoundly disorienting social change all accompanied his rule; so did political suppression and the tortures of SAVAK, his secret police. The U.S. was inextricably implicated in the career of this potentate--Ozymandias and Faust--and shared the people's judgment of him when it came.

Anti-Western, and specifically anti-American, sentiment in Iran is therefore not surprising or irrational, whatever irrational forms it has taken. The deep social anger at the Shah and the U.S. that supported him has assumed an air of fanaticism in its Shi'ite expression. Shi'ites, who make up 10% of Islam, tend toward a passionate, activist religious life and flirtation with martyrdom (they have been known to commit suicide accidentally by bashing and mutilating themselves in mourning for their founder, Husain, the slaughtered grandson of the Prophet). Shi'ites also prefer charismatic leaders: they are forever parading the portrait of the Imam Khomeini.

The special ferocity and condensation of the will that are evident in the Iranian revolution owe much to this tendency toward the cult of personality. (One ironic aspect is that Khomeini may not, strictly speaking, be a very good Muslim at all. He not only condoned the violation of Islam's protection of foreign emissaries, but also made inflammatory, groundless claims about the American responsibility for the Mecca attack. He has deliberately fomented violence, which the Koran forbids.)

The distinction between Sunnis and Shi'ites is, according to some scholars of Islam, much greater than that between, say, Roman Catholics and Protestants. It is one of the most basic of many differences that make it not only inadvisable but impossible to generalize about Islam as if it were a single, coherent bloc. Just as the Communist world includes antagonists (U.S.S.R. and China, Viet Nam and Cambodia), the Islamic world is very much fragmented. Morocco and Algeria are fighting in the western Sahara. The Middle East is a psychodrama of the paranoiac fears entertained by Arabs for one another. North and South Yemen were at war earlier this year. Moderate Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Jordan fear a radical trend that might become uncontrollable. It is important to notice that for all the incendiary mobs that have eddied around American outposts in the past few weeks, none has ever got out of control of the governing authorities; when the government said stop, the rioting stopped. That suggests that the mobs might be viewed more as a form of demonstrative Muslim rhetoric (dangerous and expensive rhetoric, of course) rather than as any tidal force of history.

Furthermore, the world of Islam extends far beyond the Middle East. The largest single concentration of Muslims in the world exists in Indonesia, where there is virtually no Islamic out cry against the West or America. Says former Malaysian Premier Tunku Abdul Rahman: "It is a shame to think that Iran, one of the progressive Muslim countries, has, literally speaking, gone to the dogs."

One inexhaustible source of anti-Americanism in Muslims is U.S. support of Israel and the question of a Palestinian homeland, issues that blend with the Third World prejudice against the privileged. But, says French Sociologist Jacques Berque, "any hopes or fears that the entire Muslim world will unite against the West amount to a romantic vision of pan-Islamism."

Muslims have aggressively sought the material wonders of the West, yet are ambivalent in their souls. Berque locates the central dilemma of Islam: If Islam is ever to become an economic and political competitor of capitalism and Marxism, it must embrace a progress that may forever weaken its ethical and spiritual structures, just as other religions have been drained by the secularization of the Western world. So far, Islam has not proved itself a vehicle of social change, a program to confront the modern world.

Still, oil has convinced the Islamic world--or half-convinced it--of its worth and power. The presence of oil in the complicated psychology of anti-Westernism makes the volatility of the Islamic world especially perilous. It is an interesting point of Muslim psychology that the Arabs who grow unimaginably rich off Western payments for oil (and squander their petrodollars on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Rolls-Royces and golden bathroom fixtures) have still in them enough desert asceticism to be contemptuous of the West's energy addictions. So here the old relation is reversed: the West is dependent on the East, and is learning something about the frustration that dependence brings.

In this encounter of East and West, the rage on either side has a way of spiraling up in a murderous double helix: the anger of the Muslims may feed on itself, and the countering anger of the West may further ignite the anger of Islam. So great is the mutual incomprehension that international relations degenerate rapidly to the chaotic psychology of the mob. Although U.S. reactions have been, all things considered, remarkably mild, the Iranian crisis has legitimized among Americans a new stereotype of the demented Muslim. Says University of Wisconsin Historian Kemal H. Karpat: "Khomeini has done more harm to the Islamic image in one month than all the propaganda of the past 15 years."

It should be possible for Americans to preserve an intelligent sympathy for the Islamic perspective without feeling vaguely guilt-stricken by the past. Anti-Americanism--the specific, sharper focus of anti-Westernism--is in some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives it the aspect of a bizarre, dangerous but spiritually trivial cult. To the extent that Muslims support Khomeini, they share in the image of Islam that he has created.

-Lance Morrow

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