Fundamentalism searches for such people everywhere; it, too, has been globalized. One can now find men in Indonesia who regard the Palestinian cause as their own. Twenty years ago an Indonesian Muslim would barely have known where Palestine was. Often they learned about this path away from the West while they were in the West. The Arab world has a problem with its Attas in more than one sense.
Globalization has caught it at a bad demographic moment. Arab societies are going through a massive youth bulge, with more than half of most countries' populations under the age of Young men, often better educated than their parents, leave their traditional villages to find work. They arrive in noisy, crowded cities like Cairo, Beirut and Damascus or go to work in the oil states.
Almost 10 percent of Egypt's working population worked in the gulf at one point. In their new world they see great disparities of wealth and the disorienting effects of modernity; most unsettlingly, they see women, unveiled and in public places, taking buses, eating in cafes and working alongside them.
A huge influx of restless young men in any country is bad news. When accompanied by even small economic and social change, it usually produces a new politics of protest. In the past, societies in these circumstances have fallen prey to a search for revolutionary solutions. France went through a youth bulge just before the French Revolution, as did Iran before its revolution. In the case of the Arab world, this revolution has taken the form of an Islamic resurgence.
Nasser was a reasonably devout Muslim, but he had no interest in mixing religion with politics. It struck him as moving backward. This became apparent to the small Islamic parties that supported Nasser's rise to power. The most important one, the Muslim Brotherhood, began opposing him vigorously, often violently. Nasser cracked down on it in , imprisoning more than a thousand of its leaders and executing six. One of those jailed, Sayyid Qutub, a frail man with a fiery pen, wrote a book in prison called "Signposts on the Road," which in some ways marks the beginnings of modern political Islam or what is often called "Islamic fundamentalism.
In his book, Qutub condemned Nasser as an impious Muslim and his regime as un-Islamic. Indeed, he went on, almost every modern Arab regime was similarly flawed. Qutub envisioned a better, more virtuous polity that was based on strict Islamic principles, a core goal of orthodox Muslims since the s. As the regimes of the Middle East grew more distant and oppressive and hollow in the decades following Nasser, fundamentalism's appeal grew. It flourished because the Muslim Brotherhood and organizations like it at least tried to give people a sense of meaning and purpose in a changing world, something no leader in the Middle East tried to do.
In his seminal work, "The Arab Predicament," Fouad Ajami explains, "The fundamentalist call has resonance because it invited men to participate At a time when the future is uncertain, it connects them to a tradition that reduces bewilderment.
On that score, Islam had little competition. The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no free press, few pathways for dissent. As a result, the mosque turned into the place to discuss politics. And fundamentalist organizations have done more than talk. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to Hizbullah, they actively provide social services, medical assistance, counseling and temporary housing. For those who treasure civil society, it is disturbing to see that in the Middle East these illiberal groups are civil society.
I asked Sheri Berman, a scholar at Princeton who studies the rise of fascist parties in Europe, whether she saw any parallels. In Islamic countries there is a ready-made source of legitimacy in the religion. So it's not surprising that this is the foundation on which these groups have flourished. The particular form--Islamic fundamentalism--is specific to this region, but the basic dynamic is similar to the rise of Nazism, fascism and even populism in the United States.
Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost in when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled the Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution demonstrated that a powerful ruler could be taken on by groups within society.
It also revealed how in a broken society even seemingly benign forces of progress--education and technology--can add to the turmoil. Until the s most Muslims in the Middle East were illiterate and lived in villages and towns.
They practiced a kind of street-Islam that had adapted itself to the local culture. Pluralistic and tolerant, these people often worshiped saints, went to shrines, sang religious hymns and cherished religious art, all technically disallowed in Islam. This was particularly true in Iran.
By the s, however, people had begun moving out of the villages and their religious experience was not rooted in a specific place.
At the same time they were learning to read and they discovered that a new Islam was being preached by the fundamentalists, an abstract faith not rooted in historical experience but literal, puritanical and by the book.
It was Islam of the High Church as opposed to Islam of the village fair. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini used a powerful technology--the audiocassette. His sermons were distributed throughout the country and became the vehicle of opposition to the shah's repressive regime. But Khomeini was not alone in using the language of Islam as a political tool. Intellectuals, disillusioned by the half-baked or overrapid modernization that was throwing their world into turmoil, were writing books against "Westoxification" and calling the modern Iranian man--half Western, half Eastern--rootless.
Fashionable intellectuals, often writing from the comfort of London or Paris, would critique American secularism and consumerism and endorse an Islamic alternative. As theories like these spread across the Arab world, they appealed not to the poorest of the poor, for whom Westernization was magical it meant food and medicine.
They appealed to the half-educated hordes entering the cities of the Middle East or seeking education and jobs in the West. The fact that Islam is a highly egalitarian religion for the most part has also proved an empowering call for people who felt powerless. At the same time it means that no Muslim really has the authority to question whether someone who claims to be a proper Muslim is one.
The fundamentalists, from Sayyid Qutub on, have jumped into that the void. They ask whether people are "good Muslims. And here we come to the failure not simply of governments but intellectual and social elites. Moderate Muslims are loath to criticize or debunk the fanaticism of the fundamentalists.
Like the moderates in Northern Ireland, they are scared of what would happen to them if they speak their mind. The biggest Devil's bargain has been made by the moderate monarchies of the Persian Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi regime has played a dangerous game. It deflects attention from its shoddy record at home by funding religious schools madrasas and centers that spread a rigid, puritanical brand of Islam--Wahhabism. In the past 30 years Saudi-funded schools have churned out tens of thousands of half-educated, fanatical Muslims who view the modern world and non-Muslims with great suspicion.
America in this world view is almost always evil. This exported fundamentalism has in turn infected not just other Arab societies but countries outside the Arab world, like Pakistan. During the year reign of Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the dictator decided that as he squashed political dissent he needed allies.
He found them in the fundamentalists. With the aid of Saudi financiers and functionaries, he set up scores of madrasas throughout the country. They bought him temporary legitimacy but have eroded the social fabric of Pakistan.
If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world. Muslim elites have averted their eyes from this reality. Conferences at Islamic centers would still rather discuss "Islam and the Environment" than examine the dysfunctions of the current regimes. But as the moderate majority looks the other way, Islam is being taken over by a small poisonous element, people who advocate cruel attitudes toward women, education, the economy and modern life in general.
I have seen this happen in India, where I grew up. The rich, colorful, pluralistic and easygoing Islam of my youth has turned into a dour, puritanical faith, policed by petty theocrats and religious commissars. The next section deals with what the United States can do to help the Islamic world. But if Muslims do not take it upon themselves to stop their religion from falling prey to medievalists, nothing any outsider can do will save them.
If almost any Arab were to have read this essay so far, he would have objected vigorously by now. You speak of long-term decline, but our problems are with specific, cruel American policies. While the Arab world has long felt betrayed by Europe's colonial powers, its disillusionment with America begins most importantly with the creation of Israel in As the Arabs see it, at a time when colonies were winning independence from the West, here was a state largely composed of foreign people being imposed on a region with Western backing.
The anger deepened in the wake of America's support for Israel during the wars of and , and ever since in its relations with the Palestinians. The daily exposure to Israel's iron-fisted rule over the occupied territories has turned this into the great cause of the Arab--and indeed the broader Islamic--world. Elsewhere, they look at American policy in the region as cynically geared to America's oil interests, supporting thugs and tyrants without any hesitation.
Finally, the bombing and isolation of Iraq have become fodder for daily attacks on the United States. While many in the Arab world do not like Saddam Hussein, they believe that the United States has chosen a particularly inhuman method of fighting him--a method that is starving an entire nation.
There is substance to some of these charges, and certainly from the point of view of an Arab, American actions are never going to seem entirely fair. Like any country, America has its interests. In my view, America's greatest sins toward the Arab world are sins of omission. We have neglected to press any regime there to open up its society. This neglect turned deadly in the case of Afghanistan.
Walking away from that fractured country after resulted in the rise of bin Laden and the Taliban. This is not the gravest error a great power can make, but it is a common American one.
Scott Fitzgerald explained of his characters in "The Great Gatsby," "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed things up and creatures and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness But it has been careless. Yet carelessness is not enough to explain Arab rage. After all, if concern for the Palestinians is at the heart of the problem, why have their Arab brethren done nothing for them? They cannot resettle in any Arab nation but Jordan, and the aid they receive from the gulf states is minuscule.
Israel treats its 1 million Arabs as second-class citizens, a disgrace on its democracy. And yet the tragedy of the Arab world is that Israel accords them more political rights and dignities than most Arab nations give to their own people. Why is the focus of Arab anger on Israel and not those regimes?
The disproportionate feelings of grievance directed at America have to be placed in the overall context of the sense of humiliation, decline and despair that sweeps the Arab world. After all, the Chinese vigorously disagree with most of America's foreign policy and have fought wars with U.
African states feel the same sense of disappointment and unfairness. But they do not work it into a rage against America. Arabs, however, feel that they are under siege from the modern world and that the United States symbolizes this world. Thus every action America takes gets magnified a thousandfold. And even when we do not act, the rumors of our gigantic powers and nefarious deeds still spread.
This is the culture from which the suicide bombers have come. America must now devise a strategy to deal with this form of religious terrorism. As is now widely understood, this will be a long war, with many fronts and battles small and large. Our strategy must be divided along three lines: military, political and cultural. On the military front--by which I mean war, covert operations and other forms of coercion--the goal is simple: the total destruction of Al Qaeda.
Even if we never understand all the causes of apocalyptic terror, we must do battle against it. Every person who plans and helps in a terrorist operation must understand that he will be tracked and punished. Their operations will be disrupted, their finances drained, their hideouts destroyed. There will be associated costs to pursuing such a strategy, but they will all fade if we succeed. Nothing else matters on the military front.
The political strategy is more complex and more ambitious. At the broadest level, we now have a chance to reorder the international system around this pressing new danger. The degree of cooperation from around the world has been unprecedented. It was the uneven path of globalization, especially in modernizing Arab aristocracies, Zakaria wrote, that stoked the homicidal rage. The Arabs had grasped the wrong end of the global stick, importing the vapidity of Western culture but raising walls against its ennobling influences—a formula for an explosion.
As a result, the people … can look at globalization but for the most part not touch it. The essay echoed across the country in unexpected places.
Rear admirals at the Pentagon made it recommended reading for the troops. Ted Koppel engaged Zakaria in some high-minded chatter. Zakaria and his wife, Paula Throckmorton, a Harvard M. To the feudal lords of the Gulf, Zakaria is like an errant member of the extended family.
Not that Zakaria is eager to trade on his religion with Americans or Arabs. What he hopes does define him—the ideas expressed in The Future of Freedom —is likely to cause the noble Bedouins no end of aggravation.
His book points to the Gulf regimes as the worst examples of rich, authoritarian states that are making no progress toward the kind of meaningful personal liberties that produce lasting economic growth and social stability.
But Zakaria seems drawn to the other invitations he gets: town meetings where he can play politics in an unencumbered West Wing —ish way. And he admits that he likes the taste of that. Could he run for office? One could easily see his column, television work, and whistle-stop speaking as a trial run for an election.
And Zakaria has already proved himself capable of making risky career moves. Precisely when people started to talk about his going into government, he took a job at a mass magazine. Donald Rumsfeld has proclaimed, with his characteristic tactlessness, that while? France and Germany? This is not exactly right. The governments of Central Europe support Washington, but the people oppose it in almost the same numbers as in old Europe.
The Poles are more supportive in some surveys. The administration has made much of the support of Vaclav Havel, the departing Czech president. But the incoming president, Vaclav Klaus? Some make the argument that Europeans are now pacifists, living in a? But then how to explain the sentiment in Turkey, a country that sits on the Iraqi border? A longtime ally, Turkey has fought with America in conflicts as distant as the Korean War, and supported every American military action since then.
But opposition to the war now runs more than 90 percent there. Despite Washington? Or consider Australia, another crucial ally, and another country where a majority now opposes American policy. Or Ireland. Or India. In fact, while the United States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning.
It is also too easy to dismiss the current crisis as one more in a series of transatlantic family squabbles that stretch back over the decades. Some in Washington have pointed out that whenever the United States has taken strong military action? True, but this time it? The street demonstrations and public protests of the early s made for good television images. But the reality was that in most polls, 30 to 40 percent of Europeans supported American policies. In Germany, where pacifist feelings ran sky high, 53 percent of Germans supported the Pershing deployments, according to a poll in Der Spiegel.
In France, a majority supported American policy through much of Ronald Reagan? Josef Joffe, one of Germany? In contrast to it, there was always a center-right that was anti-communist and thus pro-American,? The numbers waxed and waned, but you always had a solid base of support for the United States.?
The cold war kept Europe pro-American. For example, was a time of mass protests against American policies in Vietnam, but it was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Europeans and Asians could oppose America, but their views were balanced by wariness of the Soviet threat and communist behavior. Again, the polls bear this out. European opposition even to the Vietnam War never approached the level of the current opposition to Iraq.
This was true outside Europe as well. In Australia, for example, a majority of the public supported that country? But today no such common threat exists, and support for America is far more fluid. Center-right parties might still support Washington, but many do so almost out of inertia and without much popular support for their stand.
During the recent German election, Gerhard Schroder campaigned openly against America? Less noted was that his conservative opponent, Edmund Stoiber, did so as well, at one point briefly outflanking Schroder by saying he would not even allow American bases in Germany to participate in the war.
In one respect, I believe that the Bush administration is right: this war will look better when it is over. The military campaign will probably be less difficult than many of Washington?
Most important, it will reveal the nature of Saddam? Prisoners and political dissidents will tell stories of atrocities. Horrific documents will come to light. Weapons of mass destruction will be found. If done right, years from now people will remember above all that America helped rid Iraq of a totalitarian dictator. But the administration is wrong if it believes that a successful war will make the world snap out of a deep and widening mistrust and resentment of American foreign policy.
A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn? What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country? And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us. September 11 was not only the first attack on the American mainland in years, but it was also sudden and unexpected. Three thousand civilians were brutally killed without any warning. In the months that followed, Americans worried about anthrax attacks, biological terror, dirty bombs and new suicide squads.
Even now, the day-to-day rhythms of American life are frequently interrupted by terror alerts and warnings.
The average American feels a threat to his physical security unknown since the early years of the republic. Yet after , the rest of the world saw something quite different. They saw a country that was hit by terrorism, as some of them had been, but that was able to respond on a scale that was almost unimaginable. Suddenly terrorism was the world? Pakistan had actively supported the Taliban for years; within months it became that regime? A few months later it toppled a regime 6, miles away?
It is now clear that the current era can really have only one name, the unipolar world? A hundred years ago, Britain was a superpower, ruling a quarter of the globe?
But it was still only the second or third richest country in the world and one among many strong military powers. The crucial measure of military might in the early 20th century was naval power, and Britain ruled the waves with a fleet as large as the next two navies put together. By contrast, the United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together yes, all countries.
And it will do so devoting 4 percent of its GDP, a low level by postwar standards. American dominance is not simply military. The U. Japan, Germany and Britain? With 5 percent of the world? If you look at the indicators of future growth, all are favorable for America. It is more dynamic economically, more youthful demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of the world. It is conceivable that America?
Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that the world has not ganged up on America already. Since the beginnings of the state system in the 16th century, international politics has seen one clear pattern? Countries with immense military and economic might arouse fear and suspicion, and soon others coalesce against them.
It happened to the Hapsburg Empire in the 17th century, France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany twice in the early 20th century, and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century.
At this point, most Americans will surely protest:? But we? But historians tell us that all dominant powers thought they were special.
Their very success confirmed for them that they were blessed. But as they became ever more powerful, the world saw them differently. When the chosen people grew too strong,? The rightful cause at length became the wrong.? Has American power made its rightful cause turn into wrong? Will America simply have to learn to live in splendid isolation from the resentments of the world?
This is certainly how some Americans see things. And it? Scratch an anti-American in Europe, and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to have an article published in The New York Times,? But there lies a deep historical fallacy in the view that? After all, U. America has been the leading world power for almost a century now. By the United States was the richest country in the world.
By it had decisively intervened to help win the largest war in history. For 10 years thereafter America accounted for 50 percent of world GDP, a much larger share than it holds today. Instead countries joined with Washington to confront the Soviet Union, a much poorer country at best comprising 12 percent of world GDP, or a quarter the size of the American economy. What explains this? To answer this question, go back to When America had the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of alliances and multilateral institutions.
They formed the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system of economic cooperation and dozens of other international organizations.
America helped get the rest of the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and private investment. Not least of these efforts was the special attention given to diplomacy. Consider what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt? Roosevelt was a sick man, paralyzed from the waist down, hauling 10 pounds of steel braces on his legs. Traveling for 40 hours by sea and air took the life out of him.
He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies? Marshall, Eisenhower? And he certainly could have summoned the others closer to him. But FDR understood that American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair share of glory in the war. He brought China into the United Nations Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country properly represented within a world body.
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