Islam, the Middle East and the West

At the core of the set of problems that we're dealing with now is this Arab Muslem world of authoritarian regimes, denial of human rights, a lack of development, and so on. Huntington has suggested in a broader, theoretical statement that there's a "clash of civilizations." What is the answer to this regional conundrum where members of the "axis of evil" are in that region?

This is an question that lends itself to a number of racist answers. One racist answer says that's the Arabs are what they are, they're beyond change. We have to either accept it or fight them or leave them alone. It's the racist multi-culturist answer. It says "This is what the culture is like. It's not amenable to change, and we ought to respect it as such."

The other racist answer might be that precisely because "they are what they are," as McKinley put it with respect to the Filipinos, we have to "take our little brown brothers in hand, uplift them, civilize and Christianize them," conveniently forgetting that the Filipinos had been Catholics for the last two or more centuries.

Here's my take with all due caution. I think we have a problem in the Arab Middle East. I'll distinguish it deliberately from Islam as such, because by the time you get to Iran, you already have a different picture. In modern-day terms, [the Arab Middle East] is a highly dysfunctional political culture. It doesn't deliver economic growth that keeps up with even population growth. It doesn't deliver a modicum of participation. I'm not talking about English liberties, but a modicum of participation, or a modicum of communal equality -- say, equality of the sexes, or tribes, or religions other than Sunni.

These pathologies or dysfunctionalities were the underlying reasons for 9/11. It is zillions of youth without a perspective on their future because there are no jobs. It is societies which are kept in check as, say, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, by deliberate fostering of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism ... not just anti-Israel. These dysfunctionalities have spilled out into the larger realm.

If this analysis is correct, we have to deal with the dysfunctionalities. I don't think it's enough to just contain the neighborhood. We did contain the neighborhood for the last fifty years, but now it's beginning to spill over. So if this premise is correct, then it follows that we have to intervene and intrude. We, the rest, intrude in this culture to create some of those minimum quantum of participation, economic growth, and so on. So if the premise is correct, that follows necessarily.

Now, you'll ask me, can we do it? Is Arab society amenable? I don't know, but I would think that given the threats that have emanated from these dysfunctional worlds, we have to do something. Not to recreate Westernist democracy, or the American Supreme Court, or the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments, but something that's going to take the pressure out of their system, that is going to set in motion some economic reforms, some political reforms. That's the impetus that follows from this analysis. But I honestly couldn't tell you whether it can be done the way it was done in Japan and Germany.

Nobody would have thought in 1945 that the Germans would ever become the kind of emblematic liberal democracy that they have become in the Year of the Lord 2003. In '45, they would have said you are crazy if you predict that. But then we know the differences between European culture and Arab culture.

Next page: Conclusion