West finds new enemy in Islam
- From: "Muslim News" <editor_@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Muslim News" <submit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 10:48:18 +0100
The confrontation between the capitalist West and the Communist bloc came to an
end with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Since then,
Western strategists, particularly in the United States, have been looking for a
new “enemy” to take the role vacated by the Communists.
The “candidate” they found was Islam. With its intellectual values and social
vitality, Islam appeared to the West as a tough competitor. Consequently, many
began to look at Islam as a looming “danger” to the West. A state of hysteria
was whipped up against Islam by the media. The famous British writer Fred
Halliday termed this attitude to Islam as “anti-Islamism.” He attributed the
spread of anti-Muslim feelings to the end of the Cold War to the fast-growing
ultraright movements in Europe and America.
A German writer, Gerhard Konselman, published a book titled “Challenge of
Islam.” He issued a pocket edition of the book because he wanted his ideas to
get the widest possible circulation among people. According to Dr. Taib
Taizini, professor of Philosophy at the Damascus University, the German author
sounds an alarm bell to Westerners about Islam in the coming decades. In
support of his theory, he quoted the anti-American demonstrations by Muslims in
Izmir, Dhaka, Calcutta, Lahore and Tehran where American cultural centers were
stoned. He particularly noted the attack on the German Embassy building in
Islamabad. The writer’s final conclusion is that Muslims view the West as their
“permanent enemy.”
The same argument is heard in America. Professor Pierre Puzin of Warwick
University, who published the article, “The Realpolitik in the New World: New
Style for International Security in the 21st Century,” in the American
International Affairs Journal is a noted example.
Dr. Muhammad Abid Al-Jabiri, noted Arab thinker, has reviewed Puzin’s book in a
series of articles in the Emarati newspaper Al-Ittihad. He calls the phenomenon
a struggle between the center and peripheries. He identified the migration from
the South (Arab and Muslim countries) to the North (Europe and America) and the
“clash” between the competing cultural identities as major issues threatening
the world. The immigration from the peripheries poses a serious threat to the
security of the center, threatening its cultural identity, apart from forming
special ranks within it. He also viewed that the clash between identities and
cultures is “quite apparent between the West and Islam,” because of the
contradiction between secular values prevailing in the West and Islamic values
and also because of the historical competition between Christianity and Islam.
He also attributed the clash between the West and Muslims to Muslim’s envy at
the West’s power in addition to geographical reasons.
“The combined hazards of the immigration and the risks of the clash of
civilizations provide an insight into the magnitude of the social cold war
between the center and the edges, particularly between the West and Islam,” the
writer noted.
Such books and studies have, undoubtedly, prepared the ground for the spread of
anti-Muslim ideological and cultural concepts. Rulers, policy-makers and
generals in the West are also, mostly, influenced by such ideas while defining
Western relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
Samuel Huntington was not the first to advance the theory of the clash between
Muslim and Western civilizations. Konselman’s book appeared in 1980 and Pierre
Puzin’s article in 1991. Both of them served as bases for Huntington’s theory,
which is more provocative and aggressive.
Source: arabnews
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