The Complex Relationship between America and the Arab World

Apart from the direct political consequences of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the fall of the Twin Towers immediately following a terrorist attack, which the Taliban was accused of carrying out — that is, the United States’ declaration of the War on Terror, its occupation of Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and the strategic changes to the political map in the Middle East — those events also serve as a tool to explain the complex relationship that links America to the Arab states, through the two lenses of historical background and present practice.

Here it’s worth referring to an important book by the British Orientalist Bernard Lewis, with the title, “What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.” The book’s importance is due to the author’s known expertise as a theorist of the American War on Terror, and, according to his introduction, as an authority on the Sept. 11 attacks, having researched what happened before and in the years since, as well as the broader patterns of events, thoughts and trends that resulted in these attacks.

The Arabs’ and Muslims’ realization of the breadth of the civilizational gap between them and the advanced West, as Lewis asserts, was the first support for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which has been trying to transplant the practice of suicide bombing from the occupied Palestinian territories to other regions of the world. The Ottoman state’s signing of the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, where for the first time the Empire acknowledged their defeat by European powers — Poland, Russia and Austria — as well as the subsequent military defeats Muslims received at the hand of the Western powers, deepened the Arabs’ and Muslims’ question about what it was they had done wrong. With the start of the 17th century and the continuation of Christian victories over the Muslims, culminating in Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there came to be a focus on the external, the question changing to, “What are they doing? What can we do to regain our ancient supremacy?”

However, though Islamic societies now have newspapers, political parties and parliaments, these things have not brought those societies to the stage of faith in the value of tolerance, democracy and acceptance of the other. Thus the perception of the civilizational gap between them and the West from the objective side, and their rejection of this gap on a social and emotional level, led directly to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, violent and harsh in its views of the West, clearly embodied in the events of Sept. 11.

Note that the explanations posited for the events of Sept. 11, Lewis’ thesis at their head, rush to condemn the Arabs and the Muslims and to stigmatize their cultures for civilizational backwardness and lack of democracy, freedom and tolerance. These theories, however, ignore the role of Western colonialism in its capacity to cause fundamental change. Colonialism certainly contributed to the rise of the conflict in goals and methods that dominates the relationship between the West and America on the one hand, and the regimes of the Arab world on the other, conflict sometimes in the form of direct confrontation and at other times in the form of avoidance. This has devalued freedom and tolerance and created the hostile character of the Arabs’ and Muslims’ view of the West.

Historically, colonialism contributed to the consolidation of the legitimacy of the regimes in the Arab world. Egypt, for example, had experienced a parliamentary democracy system in the period between the 1919 revolution and the July 1952 revolution. However, the British occupation of Egypt and the accusation of the political powers that represented the main support for this system, led by the Wafd party, of being in alliance with colonialism, provided the appropriate pretext for Nasser’s movement to attack this experiment.

The Western alliance between American leadership and Israel during the 1950s and 1960s helped to strengthen the appeal of the Nasser regime, which raised the banners of national liberation and anti-colonialism as substitutes for democracy and freedom for the people. Similarly, colonialism contributed to America’s current practice of pragmatic logic regarding the issue of democracy in the Arab world, as the pressure it applied to many regimes in our Arab world — which increased after Sept. 11 in the interests of establishing democracy and respect for human rights — was employed for the sake of creating safe measures to facilitate American military operations in the region, or to preserve the security of its ally, Israel…

In general, this means that the clash between the Muslims and the West — which culminated in the events of Sept. 11 — represents a reflection of the conflict between the logic of colonialism that dominates American political practice toward the Arab world, and the messianic role that clothes the political and civilizational discourse directed to that world and its leadership. This opposes Bernard Lewis’ theories and the United States’ position regarding the results of the events of September, as confirmed by what the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said wrote: that political interests produce cultural practices.