_______ ____ ______ / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S / /|_/ / /_/_ / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East /_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\© http://www.MiddleEast.Org News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know! -------------------------- IF YOU DON'T GET MER, YOU JUST DON'T GET IT! To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] WAR ON TERROR FACES WEIGHT OF HISTORY By Jonathan Lyons "What we need instead is an open public and civil debate on policy. Sending in troops will have absolutely no effect and will be entirely futile." Hamid Dabashi Columbia University WASHINGTON (Reuters - 17 September): As Americans struggle to come to terms with the "why?" of Tuesday's devastating attacks on New York and Washington, a number of experts on Islam point to what they see as decades of neglect and misguided U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. Surely the assault on symbols of the nation's financial and military power was the unprovoked work of madmen, many people say. But was it? Absolutely not, say several academic experts. They cite powerful historical, religious and economic grievances against the West, symbolized by the United States at least since 1972, when it replaced Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East. "Since 1972, we've been on a death-march into the politics of the Islamic world," William Beeman, an expert on Middle East culture at Rhode Island's Brown University, told Reuters. "We've had no comprehensive policy on the Middle East for many decades. "This was a despicable act, but it was definitely rational," said Beeman, who noted the hijackers were educated, intelligent and able to fit undetected into U.S. society. "If you say they are madmen, it allows you to do anything in response," said John Esposito, Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "The terrorists demonize us and that allows them to do what they did. We will sink to the same level of barbarism," Esposito said. Instead, say these and other experts, the United States must mine the historical record of the Islamic world and critically reassess its own Middle East policy. That would, they argue, reveal much about the best ways to respond. MEMORIES OF GREATNESS "The grievance is both historical and contemporary," said Hamid Dabashi, a scholar at Columbia University. "But this has to be understood in the memory of Islam as a world power." That began to unravel with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the defeat of the Persian and Ottoman empires at the hands of the Russians and other Europeans in the early 19th century -- a period that forced an unsuspecting Islamic world to confront its weakness in the face of the West. "Islam emerged as a dialogue with the West -- the point at which it ceased to be a universal religion and became an ideology and a political response to colonialism," said Dabashi, author of "Theology of Discontent," which chronicles part of this evolution. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant singled out by President Bush as a prime suspect in the attacks, clearly subscribes to this vision. In a religious decree in 1998, bin Laden gave religious sanction to attacks on Americans in order to drive U.S. troops from "the lands of Islam in the holiest of places" -- a clear reference to Saudi Arabia, home to the faith's most sacred site, Mecca. He and his associates also repeatedly refer to Americans as "crusaders," invoking the medieval invasion of the Holy Lands, then under Muslim control, by Christian Europeans. "You can hear the weight of the ages in the rhetoric of individuals like bin Laden, but he is not specifically anti-American," said Beeman. "He just wants us out of there." ANGRY MUSLIM MIDDLE CLASS But it is not simply bin Laden and other militants who see the world's superpower as an economic, political and cultural force to be resisted. Increasingly, says Georgetown's Esposito, the growing Muslim middle class takes a similar view. "There are many people in the Muslim world who are not extremists -- business people, professionals -- who feel the United States is a hegemon, politically and economically," Esposito said. Feeding their anger, he said, is unqualified U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians, the bombing and sanctions against Iraq and backing for unpopular regional rulers. "For them, the United States is part of the problem. A lot of people hate American foreign policy, and many of them are mainstream. This creates conditions for radicalism." In such an environment, symbols of power like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon emerge for some as natural targets. "When you emasculate a culture for 200 years and tell them they are nothing, they will target the most potent symbols of your power," said Dabashi. Nor should the very fact of the attacks come as such a complete surprise, growing as they have from what Beeman called "a long, long, long litany of insults by Europeans," including the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. "The events that led to the Iranian revolution (against the U.S.-backed monarch) are perceived as the same that led to this event. The historical pattern is very, very old, a continuation of the same kind of events," said Beeman. If such analysis is correct, then what of the head-long U.S. push toward war and retribution, which U.S. planners suggest may involve a vast military presence in the region? "What we need instead is an open public and civil debate on policy. Sending in troops will have absolutely no effect and will be entirely futile," said Dabashi. "The presence of U.S. troops (now in Saudi Arabia) is a concrete denial of Islam as a world power. It is going to be even more catastrophic if more (Western) troops enter Muslim lands," he said. "Then George Bush will be right -- this will truly be the first 21st-century war." ---------------------------------- MiD-EasT RealitieS - http://www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: 202 362-5266 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: 815 366-0800 To subscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject SUBSCRIBE To unsubscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject UNSUBSCRIBE
