If the West had made Shakespeare “the sole object of our study and the sole guide of our lives,” said Dalrymple, “we would soon enough fall into backwardness and stagnation. And the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing, and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. People grow angry when faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out.”
Indeed, talk to young Arabs and Muslims anywhere, and this cognitive dissonance and the word “humiliation” always come up very quickly in conversation. It was revealing that when Mahathir Mohammed made his October 16, 2003, farewell speech as prime minister of Malaysia at an Islamic summit he was hosting in his own country, he built his remarks to his fellow Muslim leaders around the question of why their civilization had become so humiliated-a term he used five times. “I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation,” said Mahathir. “Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel they can do nothing right...”
This humiliation is the key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. When you take the economic and political backwardness of much of the Arab-Muslim world today, add its past grandeur and self-image of religious superiority, and combine it with the discrimination and alienation these Arab-Muslim males face when they leave home and move to Europe, or when they grow up in Europe, you have one powerful cocktail of rage. As my friend the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said of the 9/11 hijackers, they “are walking the streets of life, searching for tall buildings-for towers to bring down, because they are not able to be tall like them.”
I fear that this sense of frustration that feeds recruits to bin Laden may get worse before it gets better. In the old days, leaders could count on walls and mountains and valleys to obstruct their people's view and keep them ignorant and passive about where they stood in comparison to others. You could see only to the next village. But as the world gets flatter, people can see for miles and miles.
In the flat world you get your humiliation dished up to you fiber-optically. I stumbled across a fascinating example of this involving bin Laden himself. On January 4, 2004, bin Laden issued one of his taped messages through al-Jazeera, the satellite television network based in Qatar. On March 7, the Web site of the Islamic Studies and Research Center published the entire text. One paragraph jumped out at me. It is in the middle of a section in which bin Laden is discussing the various evils of Arab rulers, particularly the Saudi ruling family.
“Thus, the situation of all Arab countries suffers from great deterioration in all walks of life, in religious and worldly matters,” says bin Laden.
“It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our [Islamic] world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Andalusia. Spain is an infidel country, but its economy is stronger than our economy because the ruler there is accountable. In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but there is only obedience to the rulers and prayers of long life for them.”