The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington Read Free Book Online Page B

repudiation of European and American influence upon local society, politics, and morals.” [9] On occasion in the past, Muslim leaders did tell their people: “We must Westernize.” If any Muslim leader has said that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, he is a lonely figure. Indeed, it is hard to find statements by any Muslims, whether politicians, officials, academics, businesspersons, or journalists, praising Western values and institutions. They instead stress the differences between their civilization and Western civilization, the superiority of their culture, and the need to maintain the integrity of that culture against Western onslaught. Muslims fear and resent Western power and the threat which this poses to their society and beliefs. They see Western culture as materialistic, corrupt, decadent, and immoral. They also see it as seductive, and hence stress all the more the need to resist its impact on their way of life. Increasingly, Muslims attack the West not for adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religion, which is nonetheless a “religion of the book,” but for not adhering to any religion at all. In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them. In the Cold War the West labeled its opponent “godless p. 214 communism”; in the post-Cold War conflict of civilizations Muslims see their opponent as “the godless West.”
    These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamentalist imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters. Few books by Muslim authors published in the 1990s in the West received the praise given to Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy, generally hailed by Westerners as the courageous statement of a modern, liberal, female Muslim. [10] The portrayal of the West in that volume, however, could hardly be less flattering. The West is “militaristic” and “imperialistic” and has “traumatized” other nations through “colonial terror” (pp. 3, 9). Individualism, the hallmark of Western culture, is “the source of all trouble” (p. 8). Western power is fearful. The West “alone decides if satellites will be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them. . . . It crushes our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products and televised movies that swamp the airwaves. . . . [It] is a power that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest resources, initiatives, and potentialities. That was how we perceived our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude” (pp. 146-47). The West “creates its power through military research” and then sells the products of that research to underdeveloped countries who are its “passive consumers.” To liberate themselves from this subservience, Islam must develop its own engineers and scientists, build its own weapons (whether nuclear or conventional, she does not specify), and “free itself from military dependence on the West” (pp. 43-44). These, to repeat, are not the views of a bearded, hooded ayatollah.
    Whatever their political or religious opinions, Muslims agree that basic differences exist between their culture and Western culture. “The bottom line,” as Sheik Ghanoushi put it, “is that our societies are based on values other than those of the West.” Americans “come here,” an Egyptian government official said, “and want us to be like them. They understand nothing of our values or our culture.” “[W]e are different,” an Egyptian journalist agreed. “We have a different background, a different history. Accordingly we have the right to different futures.” Both popular and intellectually serious Muslim publications repeatedly describe what are alleged to be Western plots and designs to subordinate, humiliate, and undermine Islamic institutions