The roots of Islamic anger

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor, Nablus
Sunday October 14, 2001
The Observer

The teenagers were teasing us in bad English. 'Do you like bin Laden?' asked the one leaning over my chair. 'Do you respect him?' he pestered, giggling with his friends among the shabab - 'the boys'.

In the barber's shop opposite the mosque in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus, it was difficult to know the correct response. For slow-thinking journalists, however, there is a primer scrawled recently in Arabic on the mosque's walls. 'Blood for blood,' it warns, 'the West will fall.'

Among a sizeable minority of the young men of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, bin Laden has become a folk hero. It is not just for his championing of the Palestinian cause, as he did on Arab television last week after the first day of the US bombing. It is not even for attacking America in the first place, which many, even among Hamas supporters, admit repelled and shocked them.

Instead, by a convoluted logic, they admire him for becoming the target - with the Taliban - of American bombing. Strangely self-fulfilling, it is the fatalistic logic of those who feel themselves to be perpetually the victim.

It was a contradiction summed up last week by a survey of Palestinian students at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University - 89 per cent believed the US was wrong to attack Afghanistan; 64 per cent said the attacks on the United States violated Islamic law. What is most alarming, however, is the sizeable minority - 26 per cent - who said they believed the suicide hijackings were consistent with the teachings of Islam.

Last week in Gaza City those tensions erupted as the policemen of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority fought with the young men of Hamas who had come out to demonstrate in sympathy with the people of Afghanistan - and bin Laden - in the worst outbreak of inter-Palestinian violence in years.

What is certain is that Osama bin Laden is opening deep and dangerous fault lines throughout the societies of the Middle East. In a month since 11 September, his actions and the West's reaction to them have become, for a substantial and radicalised minority, a kind of shibboleth that marks you on either side of an ideological divide: Are you for - or against - America and the West? It is the question bin Laden wants the Islamic world to ask itself. Ironically, the outcome he envisages is one he shares with the right-wing US historian Samuel Huntington who - like bin Laden - believes that, by their inherent, contradictory cultural values, conflict between Islam and the West is inevitable.

But is it?

For behind the simplistic world views of the Huntingtons and bin Ladens - sitting at at their culturally excluding and exclusive poles - is a reality as complex as it is murky. The hostility towards the West, for all its specific grievances such as the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America's support for Israel, is as deeply embedded in a century of internal conflicts as in the history of the West's often clumsy interventions.

They are frictions specifically born of the struggle of the Islamic world to reinvent itself amid competing ideas of democracy, nationalism, modernisation and religious revival.

That struggle - for better and worse - inevitably has been played out in terms of a continuous process of evaluation of its progress against the achievements and failures of America and the West.

But the question remains: What, precisely, fuels that rage against the West?

I find Professor Abdu Sattar Kassem, a lecturer in political science at the University of Nablus, outside his apartment block in the city centre. It is Friday and he is anxious to pray. To keep the interview as short as possible, he hands me an article he has written on the question. 'As an Arab,' he writes, 'I understand why so many Arabs and Muslims hate the US and look at it as a power of evil.'

A charming and clever man who studied in the United States, he says: 'The dumbest thing of all is that when I tried to talk to American colleagues and explain why they were disliked in the Middle East, they simply did not want to hear it or believe it.

'It is a form of cultural arrogance. They simply believe that they are best, and nothing can challenge that.

'What you have to understand is that many Arabs and Muslims want to build an Islamic civilisation in its own right. They blame the West in general - and America in particular - for subjugating that ambition by dividing the Arab world through the dictators that America supports.

'America has done this by fragmenting the Islamic world, dividing it under rulers it supports.

'America has perverted the attempts to democratise the Arab world. They are hypocrites. They preach freedom and democracy, but prevent Arabs from enjoying it and exploit their wealth.

'The final issue is the US support for Israel in tormenting the Palestinians. Let me tell you something, it will not be enough for America to force the Israelis to accept a Palestinian state.

'Muslims will not be satisfied with that. They must withdraw all support for Israel. Create a level playing field.'

These are complaints you will hear repeated by many Muslim and Arab intellectuals across the region. But not all are happy simply to blame the West for all the failings of the Muslim world.

Among them is Hazem Saghiyeh, a London-based columnist for the Arabic newspaper Al Hayat, who, while identifying the same causes of friction as Professor Sattar Kassem, puts a radically different gloss on the roots of Muslim dislike of the West.

These, he says, have as much to do with the failure of the Islamic project itself in issues of governance and modernisation in the past century and a half as they do with American and Western interference. He does not deny there are good reasons for Muslims to dislike America and the West - not least the almost universally unifying feature of the widespread Islamic support for the Palestinian cause and the way in which the West has shored up obnoxious regimes across the Middle East.

But he argues that equally important is a historic sense of inferiority in the Muslim world. It is a sense of inferiority, he believes, that has magnified the importance of America and the West in its history. 'Crucial is the sense of superiority to Europe enjoyed for almost a thousand years by Islam. For centuries after the defeat of the Crusaders it felt, not without some justification, that it was intellectually, morally, scientifically superior.

'Islam - and the Ottoman Empire in particular - was plunged into a deep crisis from which it has never really recovered following the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

'For a long time the Muslim world had become isolated and inward-looking and had had little contact with the outside world. The new epoch of European supremacy was a trauma and injury to its psyche.'

Significantly - as other historians of the Middle East have pointed out - this crisis in the middle of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the emergence of deep divisions in the Islamic world itself over how best to reassert its values.

It divided those who argued for reform, modernisation and an Islamic Enlightenment from those arguing for Islamic fundamentalism.

The result, Saghiyeh believes, was a narcissistic culture of victimisation that survives until the present day. 'That narcissism and sense of humiliation,' he says, 'was accentuated by the disaster in 1948 when the Arab armies were defeated by the Israelis.'

They were tensions exacerbated, says Saghiyeh, by the widespread failure of nationalist Arab models of governance in the postwar era that delivered autocratic, human rights-abusing regimes across the region.

A side-effect of the poor record on human rights and freedom of speech has been the rise of a parallel narrative in Islamic consciousness. Robbed of the freedom to express themselves, many have turned to the 'conspiracy theory' as an alternative model to explain the problems of the world.

'The rise of the conspiracy theory in the Muslim world in the last few decades is extremely important. Because people feel they are not in control, because they feel they world is becoming stranger and stranger, they look for something behind it.'

That 'something' is the myth of an almost omnipotent and controlling American power behind the scenes.

At the heart of the hostility towards the West is a shared set of specific discontents across the Muslim world that have created a feeling of powerlessness and alienation in a substantial section of its populations. Specifically it is a discontent being driven by a myriad of social, demographic, political and economic problems.

They are problems neatly encapsulated by experiences of the Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait. The rapid growth in population, which in some states has left a population where two-thirds are under the age of 30, has combined with general economic problems and issues of bad governance (in particular, rampant corruption) to create a massive gap of expectation in its young and sometimes well-educated populations.

At its heart is a feeling of deracination and alienation among young Muslims across the region.

'There has been a process of suburbanisation,' says Saghiyeh. 'There has been a population explosion that has been accompanied by a shift from the countryside to the cities without gaining the benefits they expected of urban life: a comfortable life and the best jobs. Consequently these young people feel neither urban nor from the countryside.'

It is a feeling of rootlessness that is mirrored in the failures of modernising projects in the Muslim world itself.

'These are also people who have lost their traditional ways of life but have not become modern, who have not benefited through all their education. It is a recipe for psychological breakdown and hysteria.'

In the past two decades that gap of expectation has increasingly been filled by the politicisation of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism - which has emerged out of the failure of the Arab nationalist secular project that created a series of violently monolithic states, including Syria and Iraq.

The result, says an Egyptian diplomat based in the Middle East, is that many people - frustrated with the failure of economics, politics or nationalism to give them the better lives they seek - have turned to Islam as a revolutionary solution.

'They look to men like bin Laden as a revolutionary solution - a magic formula when all else has failed.

'And remember that people like bin Laden carefully target the poor and illiterate, people they know are suffering, and present their vision as a kind of revolutionary Islam that will magically solve all their ills.' It is a revolutionary message first preached two decades ago by Ayatollah Khomeini.

It was Khomeini who in the Eighties provided the vocabulary for hatred of America as the 'Great Satan' that has been recycled by others, such as bin Laden, who seek to reimpose the seventh-century utopian community of the Prophet Muhammad - the velayat-e faqih (clerical rule).

Walking through the alleys of Nablus's refugee camps with Samir, my driver, during Friday prayers, it is hard to avoid the sense of the continuing politicisation of Islam or its appeal. It is equally hard to avoid the fact that for many of the younger generation it is a process framed explicitly in a hostility to the West.

'You know,' he says, 'when I was young it was only the old men who went to the mosque. Now it is almost everyone. Especially the young men.'

We stop and chat to 30-year-old Tawfik Ibrahim. 'The Americans are happy with what has happened to the Palestinians,' he tells us politely. 'Now they are bombing the poor people of Afghanistan who have no planes or bombs.

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