
Originally Posted by
Council on Foreign Relations
Causes of 9/11:
A Clash of Civilizations?
Were the September 11 attacks part of a clash between Islam and Western civilization?
Osama bin Laden and his terror network see it that way, but most Western foreign policy experts disagree. Al-Qaeda considers its terrorist campaign against the United States to be part of a war between the ummah—Arabic for the “Muslim community”—and the Christian and Jewish West. But al-Qaeda’s extremist, politicized form of Islam represents only one strain within a diverse religion—and a radical one that many Muslims reject as a grotesque distortion of their faith. Many Muslim-majority countries are members of the U.S.-led coalition fighting al-Qaeda. Moreover, al-Qaeda also targets Muslim governments, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that it sees as godless. Many experts therefore say the September 11 attacks cannot be reduced to a “clash of civilizations.”
What is a “clash of civilizations”?
In an influential 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the wake of the Cold War, the main pattern of global conflict would probably be cultural, not economic or ideological. Civilizations, in Huntington’s thinking, are broad groupings organized around language, history, religion, and self-identification. “In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those...along the fault lines between civilizations,” wrote Huntington, who listed eight “major civilizations”—Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African—that might clash with one another.
Does al-Qaeda think it’s engaged in a clash of civilizations?
Yes. Bin Laden openly seeks a clash between Islam and the West. “This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.,” the al-Qaeda leader said in October 2001. “This is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders.” From bin Laden’s perspective, it is a clash that has been under way for centuries, with the Americans as the latest incarnation of the Christian Crusaders—arrogant Western interlopers out to oppress Muslims. In an October 2001 interview on al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel, bin Laden talked about the “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Muslims, bin Laden argues, must reverse a series of humiliations that they’ve endured since the Ottoman Empire, the last Muslim great power, was dismantled after World War I. Al-Qaeda’s 1998 declaration of a jihad, or holy war, against “Jews and Crusaders” urges Muslims to attack “the Americans and their allies, civilian and military,” supposedly as a response to U.S. policies that al-Qaeda feels oppress Muslims: the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia; the backing of U.N. sanctions against Iraq; support for repressive Arab regimes; support for Israel; alleged complicity in Russian attacks on Muslims in Chechnya; and interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, and other Muslim regions that bin Laden sees as attempts to spread America’s empire. These Western policies, according to al-Qaeda, add up to a “clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.”
Do all Muslims see things al-Qaeda’s way?
No. Most Islamic scholars interpret jihad as a nonviolent quest for justice—a holy struggle rather than a holy war. (Bin Laden is not a credentialed Muslim scholar, and most Muslims do not recognize him as a religious authority.) Moreover, mainstream Islamic teachings prohibit the killing of civilians. Islam has a tradition of religious tolerance and moderate leadership, exemplified by the Muslim caliphate’s ninth- and tenth-century rule of Spain and by the pluralism and diversity of the Ottoman Empire. Still, many scholars today worry about the growth of fundamentalism and anti-Americanism in Muslim countries.
Why is anti-Americanism prevalent in many Muslim countries?
For a complicated series of reasons. One key factor, experts say, is that many Muslims live under authoritarian governments lacking democratic institutions that would let citizens openly express grievances and solve problems themselves. Moreover, American support for such repressive regimes as Egypt and Saudi Arabia has sowed widespread bitterness. Many Islamic movements “are anti-Western because the governments they oppose are pro-Western,” writes Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland specialist in Muslim public opinion. Within the Arab world, U.S. support for Israel is also frequently cited as a source of anti-Americanism. On a deeper level, some experts argue, resentment of the United States is a reaction to America’s overwhelming wealth and power, particularly when compared to the economic stagnation and political insignificance of many Muslim states. This disparity leads Islamist movements, which are usually antimodern as well as anti-Western, to blame America for the loss of Islam’s past glory.
Is the West waging a war against Islam?
Western leaders insist they are not, and their choice of partners and policies backs this up. Although President Bush did once refer to the U.S. campaign against al-Qaeda as a “crusade”—a comment he hastily retracted—Bush and other Western leaders have repeatedly said that the U.S.-led coalition is waging war against al-Qaeda’s brand of global terrorism, not against Islam. “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends,” Bush said shortly after September 11. “Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.”
Moreover, several Western military interventions in the 1990s came to the defense of Muslims—from the 1991 Gulf War, which ended the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, to the ill-fated U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia, to NATO’s 1999 war to stop the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims by Christian Serbs in Kosovo. Likewise, the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban has improved the lives of most Afghans.
Does the United States have Muslim partners in the war on terrorism?
Yes. After the September 11 attacks, such key Muslim states as Egypt, the most populous Arab state; Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest shrines; Jordan; and Pakistan supported the U.S.-led coalition in its efforts to topple Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and uproot al-Qaeda. In June 2002, Turkey—a NATO member and a reliable U.S. ally for decades—took command of the International Security Assistance Force, the multinational peacekeeping unit in Afghanistan. Other Muslim countries such as Morocco, Malaysia, and Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim country, have cooperated with U.S. efforts to combat al-Qaeda elsewhere. The United States also provides military and economic aid to many Muslim countries; after Israel, Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
Is a clash between Islam and the West imminent?
Most scholars say such a clash of civilizations is unlikely—both because U.S. leaders aren’t eager to play into bin Laden’s hands and because neither Muslims nor the West are politically unified. The Islamic world is 85 percent non-Arab, and experts say its politics are dominated by self-interested states concerned more with conflicts among themselves than with the West. The long, brutal war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, in which Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and more than a million lives were lost, is hard to reconcile with a picture of Islam as a unified cultural force.
Nor is the West monolithic. Europeans are highly critical of U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding what they see as the Bush administration’s unilateralism, disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and unwarranted drive to invade Iraq.
On all sides, individual states continue to make pragmatic decisions. Moreover, the dividing lines between the West and Islam are increasingly blurred. Through immigration and conversion, Islam is now a growing part of Western societies. An estimated 12 million Muslims live in European Union countries, and between five and seven million Muslims live in the United States. Muslims died in the World Trade Center, and after the attacks the Bush administration and local authorities around the country worked to prevent an anti-Muslim backlash. By 2010, demographers say, Islam will become the second most popular religion in the United States after Christianity.
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