Israelis and their neighbours, moreover, the Muslim-Christian relationship implicates more than half of the world’s people
.
June 23, 2006
UPDATE ON THE FAMILY QUARREL
The past year has been one of the worst in recent history for relations between Muslims and “the West” (as the part of the world formerly called “Christendom” is now known). According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, an opinion survey conducted in thirteen mainly Christian or Muslim countries by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., the majorities who saw relations between the West and Islam as “generally bad” ranged from 53 percent in Russia and Indonesia to highs of 70 percent in Germany and 84 percent in Turkey.
There were purely local causes for some of the extreme reactions, like resentment among Turks at being seen as problem candidates for European Union membership simply because they are Muslims. The violent uproar in January over Danish newspaper cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad doubtless influenced the answers of many respondents, both Muslim and Western, in a poll conducted only monthslater. But military confrontations that killed a lot of people were the core problem: Western armies fought local insurgents in two occupied Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan; suicide bomb attacks by young British Muslims killed fifty-two people in London; and the nightmare images of 9/11 were never far from the surface in the United States. Furthermore, the Arab-Israeli fight over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea had entered its seventieth bloody year.
Seventy years, give or take a few, depending on whether you date that long conflict from the great Palestinian revolt against Jewish immigration in 1936 or from some other clash of that period. Without that open sore, however, the deep resentment of Muslims at having been conquered by European empires—as they all were, apart from the Turks—would probably have mostly died down by now. It is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has kept it alive for generations of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.
The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake that confirmed existing suspicions in the Muslim world: its declared motives were so transparently false that Muslims everywhere were driven to look for ulterior, undeclared motives—like a Western crusade against Islam. On the other hand, Muslims have remained in denial about how their own internal conflicts have spilled over into anti-Western terrorism. Majorities in most of the Muslim countries polled still refuse to believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States, taking refuge in fantasies about Zionist or CIA plots.
Descend from high politics to cultural stereotypes, and it starts to look like a classic family quarrel. A majority of Muslims see Westerners as violent and immoral, while the view from the reverse perspective is that Muslims are violent and fanatical. Majorities in every Western country polled see Muslims as disrespectful of women, and majorities in every Muslim country polled (except Turkey) see Westerners as disrespectful of women. But then, it
is
a family quarrel.
Just the same, you cannot really have a “clash of civilizations” between Muslims and “Westerners” (Christians and Jews, by belief or at least by cultural descent) because they are members of the same civilization—the twin descendants of the old classical civilization of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. That world was divided almost fourteen centuries ago between competing but clearly related religions—the Christians ofseventh-century Syria and Egypt who were the first to face Muslim armies surging out of Arabia saw Islam as a new Christian heresy—but it remains a single civilization whose fundamental cultural values are largely shared.
The surviving half of the former Christian world subsequently spread its faith and its genes across the Americas and
.
June 23, 2006
UPDATE ON THE FAMILY QUARREL
The past year has been one of the worst in recent history for relations between Muslims and “the West” (as the part of the world formerly called “Christendom” is now known). According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, an opinion survey conducted in thirteen mainly Christian or Muslim countries by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., the majorities who saw relations between the West and Islam as “generally bad” ranged from 53 percent in Russia and Indonesia to highs of 70 percent in Germany and 84 percent in Turkey.
There were purely local causes for some of the extreme reactions, like resentment among Turks at being seen as problem candidates for European Union membership simply because they are Muslims. The violent uproar in January over Danish newspaper cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad doubtless influenced the answers of many respondents, both Muslim and Western, in a poll conducted only monthslater. But military confrontations that killed a lot of people were the core problem: Western armies fought local insurgents in two occupied Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan; suicide bomb attacks by young British Muslims killed fifty-two people in London; and the nightmare images of 9/11 were never far from the surface in the United States. Furthermore, the Arab-Israeli fight over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea had entered its seventieth bloody year.
Seventy years, give or take a few, depending on whether you date that long conflict from the great Palestinian revolt against Jewish immigration in 1936 or from some other clash of that period. Without that open sore, however, the deep resentment of Muslims at having been conquered by European empires—as they all were, apart from the Turks—would probably have mostly died down by now. It is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has kept it alive for generations of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.
The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake that confirmed existing suspicions in the Muslim world: its declared motives were so transparently false that Muslims everywhere were driven to look for ulterior, undeclared motives—like a Western crusade against Islam. On the other hand, Muslims have remained in denial about how their own internal conflicts have spilled over into anti-Western terrorism. Majorities in most of the Muslim countries polled still refuse to believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States, taking refuge in fantasies about Zionist or CIA plots.
Descend from high politics to cultural stereotypes, and it starts to look like a classic family quarrel. A majority of Muslims see Westerners as violent and immoral, while the view from the reverse perspective is that Muslims are violent and fanatical. Majorities in every Western country polled see Muslims as disrespectful of women, and majorities in every Muslim country polled (except Turkey) see Westerners as disrespectful of women. But then, it
is
a family quarrel.
Just the same, you cannot really have a “clash of civilizations” between Muslims and “Westerners” (Christians and Jews, by belief or at least by cultural descent) because they are members of the same civilization—the twin descendants of the old classical civilization of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. That world was divided almost fourteen centuries ago between competing but clearly related religions—the Christians ofseventh-century Syria and Egypt who were the first to face Muslim armies surging out of Arabia saw Islam as a new Christian heresy—but it remains a single civilization whose fundamental cultural values are largely shared.
The surviving half of the former Christian world subsequently spread its faith and its genes across the Americas and
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