Why They Hate Us
Why do they hate us? By and large, they don’t. The very inference that all Muslims hate us is reminiscent of the mantra of the 1950s and 1960s that all communists hated us. That, too, proved to be largely false.
There are over 1.3 billion Muslims among the 6.6 billion people in today’s world, and 45 of the world’s 193 nation states are largely or predominantly Muslim. The economic circumstances, religious attitudes and political preferences of these Muslims vary widely, of course. The vast majority are moderate, responsible citizens, who are the same as people everywhere. They want meaning and purpose in their lives, sustenance and economic opportunity, family, friends and happiness. They need to matter and to have respect. As President George Herbert Walker Bush has said, “People everywhere want the same things.”
But there are millions among these Muslims who are despairing, disenfranchised and excluded, and are thus vulnerable to the messages and leadership of extremists. Some heed that message; many others become sympathizers, most often because they are looking for nothing more than hope and a better life. Only a small number hate us — but that number is rising.
In this section of the essay we will speak to the further reasons the broad Muslim population under occupation or oppression would be susceptible to these extremists and this hatred—primarily the legacy of colonial subjugation, the rapid pace of global social change and dire economic poverty . Cultural and religious factors are secondary to these. Religious factors come into play primarily where stress and change have precipitated a broader return to fundamentalism as discussed below.
For well over two centuries, especially since the Industrial Revolution, European countries have subjugated Islamic nations. 41 of the 45 predominately Muslim nations in the world were former European colonies or subsumed as Soviet states, and these imperialists— England, France and others—moved in varying degrees to dispossess the people of their land, assets, self-determination and religion. Colonial status prevented or impaired the development of leadership and political infrastructure, and therefore most—37 by our imperfect calculation—have not transitioned from colonies to bona fide democracies. Most are effectively dictatorships, many with the complicity of the West, and most remain in economic disrepair. This imperialism was too often accompanied by murder, torture, rape, de facto enslavement and humiliation. When citizens of these colonies protested or rebelled, they were suppressed or crushed. In no small way, this legacy of humiliation remains.
At its most extreme, this colonial attitude was captured by Cecil Rhodes when he stated, “[W]e Britons are the first race of the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.”
A colonial legacy is not by itself sufficient to cause extremism, but it has contributed. The list of the 41 current Muslim countries that were formerly colonies is long and includes Algeria, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Indonesia and (de facto) Egypt. In the aftermath of World War I, Britain and France carved Middle Eastern colonies out of the defeated Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and kept many countries under their direct rule, including modern-day Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
The West has also intervened in Muslim countries that were not its colonies. When Iranians took steps toward a democracy in 1953 by electing their own premier, the United States, because of concerns about Soviet influence on Iran and oil supplies, acted to depose the democratically elected premier and return the Shah to power. The Shah’s regime was corrupt and oppressive, but was supported by the United States because it was anti-Soviet and receptive to U.S. directives regarding oil and other foreign policy matters.
Years earlier, the Russians also had helped suppress an Iranian pro-democracy movement. During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, hundreds were imprisoned and many executed for their reform efforts. The Iranian revolution of 1979—and its hostage crisis under Ayatollah Khomeini, which so deeply shocked the U.S. public—was in many respects a reaction to these two foreign interventions. In addition, the United States armed and trained tens of thousands of Muslims as part of its Cold War efforts, most notably against the USSR after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Osama bin Laden was a beneficiary of this support. And the U.S. intervened to aid Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war with Iran.
The United States also played a significant role in the establishment of Israel in 1948, which to this day helps define the Muslim world’s view of the policies of the West in general and the U.S. in particular. This is not to suggest that the U.S. should not have supported its creation. Rather, as a result of that action, our country now has a particular responsibility to help bring about a fair, impartial and balanced solution to the dispute between Israel and Palestine. We are strongly supportive of the existence and continued health of Israel, but circumstances in Palestine continue to contribute profoundly to concerns and adversarial attitudes between Muslims and the West, with deadly consequences throughout the Middle East, Europe and the world. A balanced resolution to this Palestinian dilemma is one of the keys to reducing global terrorism. That fact has been under recognized.
The United States has recently backed highly repressive Middle Eastern regimes. This is not a new phenomenon. Historically, we supported many of these regimes because of the need for Cold War allies as well as oil. Thus, the West appears to be tacitly supporting repression, imprisonment of dissenters and economic injustice, in which a select few reap great wealth while the majority is excluded from opportunity
The U.S. invasion of Iraq—without the support of the United Nations and against the conclusions of U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix about the presence of weapons of mass destruction—has added considerably to the Islamic world’s suspicions. Many hold that the oil fields of Iraq were as much a motivation for the invasion as any other factor. And the horrors that occurred within the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons profoundly color the current views of many Muslims regarding Western justice and morality. (Ironically, experts have long known that the surest way to get information from prisoners is not through torture, but by establishing trust and rapport.)
Beyond this, Muslim and other developing countries also are struggling with the onrush of global social change, which, in turn, has stirred profound transformations in all aspects of daily life, including the family. For Muslim societies, this change “is roaring ahead much faster and transforming the lives of many more people. Britain supported just 8 million people when it began its 250 year progression from the farm to the laptop. Indonesia is making that same journey in only four decades—with a population of more than 200 million.” (Hernando De Soto, The Other Path, Basic, 1989, p. xxxiv.)
Rapid change often destabilizes. It causes people to seek out the traditions and the perceived certainty of the past. The alienating and disruptive effects of the modern world was captured in 1978 by Michel Foucault, one the more notable philosophers of the 20th century, who put his finger directly on the pulse of the current Muslim unrest while reporting from the Shah's Iran:
“Foucault could see how the experience of deprivation, loneliness, and anomie made many Muslims in urban centers turn to rather than away from Islam; how there was little ‘protection’ for the millions of uprooted Muslims except in Islam, which for centuries has regulated everyday life, family ties, and social relations with such care. Foucault could also see how, in the absence of any democratic politics, Muslims used Islamic themes of sacrifice and martyrdom to challenge despotic and corrupt rulers who claimed legitimacy in the West as modernizers and secularizers. Foucault also managed to see that this Muslim revolt was unlikely to be confined to Iran. The West had deemed modernization and securitization as the highest aim for Muslim societies ever since it began to dominate them in the nineteenth century. But the process, now advanced by westernized postcolonial elites, of uprooting people from their traditional cultures and forcing them into Western-style cities and occupations was only likely to produce more converts to political Islam.” (Pankaj Mishra, “The Misunderstood Muslims,” The New York Review of Books, November 17, 2005, p. 15)
A society coping with stress often turns to the certainties of tradition and the past as it confronts the unknown. This helps explain the movement toward fundamentalism within Islam. Fundamentalism strips away the “new.” Fundamentalism lends meaning to an extremist movement. Widespread stress and uncertainty can make the certainty of the fundamentalist message more appealing to a broader audience. Not all fundamentalists embrace terrorism, nor are all terrorists fundamentalists. Nor is the phenomenon of embracing fundamentalism in the face of societal upheaval exclusive to Islam or the Middle East.
All religious traditions contain certain exclusionary tenants, yet practitioners of those religions — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — have found ways to coexist productively with other faiths in society. Examples abound in the history of all three of these great religions. In times of profound change or stress, however, some factions within those three religions have embraced fundamentalist, exclusionary or hostile principles.
All this helps to set the stage for understanding terrorism in the Middle East. But what about terrorism in places like Britain and Spain? As Europe’s own population growth has slowed, and in some countries declined, immigrants—including millions of Muslims—have filled the continued demand for the workers necessary to sustain economic expansion. This population regularly faces discrimination and disenfranchisement in the new countries where they find themselves—exclusion from better jobs, political office, social services and other vital resources.
Whether in their home countries or as immigrants elsewhere, those enduring extreme economic poverty also labor under difficult social pressures. People seek relief. Fundamentalists purport to have solutions and actively market them. It should have surprised no one that when the citizens of Palestine and Egypt finally had a chance to vote, many voted for fundamentalist opposition parties. After all, the current regime was failing them and these parties were offering the promise of a better life.
Two other factors are inextricably intertwined in this equation. The creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the world’s dependency on oil, both of which have only heightened the stakes and complicated the solutions.