Whenever they kindle a fire for war, Allah extinguishes it. And they strive to create disorder in the earth, and Allah loves not those who create disorder.—The Koran
The West and the world of Islam sometimes resemble two different centuries banging through the night on parallel courses. In full raucous cultural panoply, they keep each other awake. They make each other nervous. At times, as now, they veer together and collide: up and down the processions, threats are exchanged, pack animals and zealots bray, bales of ideological baggage spill onto the road. Embassies get burned, hostages taken. Songs of revenge rise in the throat.
Are these collisions inevitable? The mutual misunderstandings of the West and the Islamic world have a rich patina of history. Jews, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book," draw much of their faith from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidel." At such moments, the Imam takes on the wild and grainy aspect of a dire Mohammedan prophet by DeMille.
Khomeini may even wish to transcend Iranian nationalism and export his fundamentalist Islamic revival. The prospect of such contagious piety disturbs other Muslim leaders, the Saudi royal family, for example. But it also raises apprehension and a certain amount of bewilderment in the West. When Mahdist Saudi zealots took over the mosque in Mecca last month, the Islamic world displayed a disconcerting readiness to believe Khomeini's incendiary report that the attack had been the work of Zionists and U.S. imperialists. "The Americans have done it again," many Muslims told themselves reflexively. Some Americans have responded by asking with a truculent innocence: "What did we ever do to them?"
If the question is disingenuous, the answers are complex.
The U.S. never colonized Islamic countries, as, for example, Britain and France did. The U.S. has no large Islamic minority and thus, unlike the Soviet Union, has no record of bitter internal relations with Muslims. Besides (as some Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress, a machine overwhelmingly vigorous, profoundly tempting and yet decadent by all the disciplines of the Prophet, has threatened Muslim identity.