Ever since Islamic fundamentalists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, many Americans have been asking about the terrorists: "Why do they hate us?" But according to renowned journalist and editor Fareed Zakaria, the question Americans should be asking is: "Why did this happen now?"
Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, spoke on Dec. 3 in Battell Chapel as part of "Democracy, Security and Justice: Perspectives on the American Future," a weekly lecture and discussion series established by Yale faculty members Cynthia Farrar and John Gaddis in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Zakaria's lecture was cosponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.
For some, like Osama bin Laden, the terrorist's hatred of the United States can be explained simply as "an expression of the clash of civilizations, part of a great historical battle between Islam and the West," said Zakaria, former managing editor of the influential publication Foreign Affairs.
"Most Muslims seem to disagree," he argued, noting that -- despite some "troubling signs of support across the Arab world" -- all of the 49 Muslim countries of the world have condemned the attacks. Nor are such activities supported by the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, which "like the Bible is a vast, vague book filled with poetry and contradictions," he said.
Although the world's largest Muslim populations are found in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (in that order), it is the nations of the Middle East that "people conjure up when they think of political Islam ... of flag-burning, anti-Americanism," the journalist said. "It is what has happened in those lands that explains much of the hatred."
Back in the 1950s, nations such as France and England were despised in the Arab world because of their association with colonialism, and the Soviet Union represented "godless communism," explained Zakaria, who received his B.A. in history from Yale in 1986. The United States, on the other hand, represented "modernity ... the future," he said.
This was the era when Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt and declared his plans to modernize that nation, a goal echoed by other Middle Eastern leaders of the time. "It seemed to promise new life for the Arab world," explained Zakaria.
"Flash forward to the 1980s," he continued, and the Arab world has undergone a "massive historic regression" and the nations are now all "corrupt, authoritarian, autocratic dictatorships. ...
"In the entire Arab world, it is fair to say, every country within it is less free today, politically and economically, than it was 30 years ago," Zakaria asserted. "The only change tends to be for the worse, so that Saudi Arabia, which was ruled by a royal family, is increasingly becoming a military dictatorship, and Egypt, which is a military dictatorship, is increasingly becoming a royal family."
As a result, in Egypt and elsewhere, it is impossible for the average citizen to start a business, open a social club or run for any meaningful political office, he explained.
In the meantime, the discovery of oil in the region created an extremely wealthy upper class in the Middle Eastern nations. "If poverty has produced its dysfunctions, wealth has produced its own dysfunctions as well," said Zakaria. "It's led to a phony modernization which has its own bizarre consequences," notably wasteful spending among the rich "on a scale that is unimaginable."
The "encroachment" of globalization on the Arab world only underscored this "phony modernization," said the alumnus. "There was nothing indigenous about globalization," he said; it brought only "shiny Western consumer products, but no economic opportunity, no economic growth and no entrepreneurship."
At the same time, "globalization made it impossible for the Arab world to seal out the rest of the world. And when I say the rest of the world, I mean, 'America.' Because America stands at the center of this world of globalization," said Zakaria. The influx of American culture invariably led to "ideological corrosion and clash in the Arab world," the journalist added.
Simultaneously, the demographics of the Middle East began to change, with a "massive" rise in the number of young people, particularly young men, explained Zakaria, noting that about 50% of the population of every Arab society is under age 25. "Most societies have their greatest problems with young men," he said. In fact, he contended, if the United States were to lock up every male between the ages of 14 and 26, "crime would decline by 90% and violent crime would decline by 99%." Historically, he noted, such increases in young men have been connected with great political and social upheavals such as the French Revolution and the counter-culture movement of the 1970s in the United States.
It was these elements -- the lack of political and economic opportunities, the struggle against "a world that seems to encroach upon you and crowd you out" and "millions and millions of young men with literally nothing to do" -- that led to the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, explained Zakaria.
"With the Middle East a political desert, the mosque became the only place where people could meet and Islam became the only legitimate language of political opposition," he said. "Islamic fundamentalism offered a way out, an answer to the extreme disorientation of the modern world. ... It was a pure and simple answer: Reject the modern world -- go back to simpler, purer times."
It is important to remember that while many Islamic fundamentalists have made the United States the target of their hatred, the source of their rage is "local," contends Zakaria. "People in the Middle East and the Arab world hate the regimes they live under, and they point to the United States as the supporter and protector of those regimes. ... In some respects they are right."
The "hardship, poverty, cultural despair and anger" that have inspired the terrorist acts will not go away until "the United States takes on the task of helping the Arab world reform itself" by "supporting Muslim moderates and moderate regimes" and "opposing, discrediting and combating extremist Islam," he said.
"It's not going to be easy; it's not going to be brief, but nothing fundamentally important is," noted the journalist. "If the United States is able to help the Arab world achieve political and economic reform that is real and genuine, it will have accomplished a lot. ...
"It will, of course, have secured its own peace and prosperity, but as so often in the past, America will also have changed the world."
-- By LuAnn Bishop
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