(4 of 5)
Anti-Western, and specifically anti-American, sentiment in Iran is therefore not surprising or irrational, whatever irrational forms it has taken. The deep social anger at the Shah and the U.S. that supported him has assumed an air of fanaticism in its Shi'ite expression. Shi'ites, who make up 10% of Islam, tend toward a passionate, activist religious life and flirtation with martyrdom (they have been known to commit suicide accidentally by bashing and mutilating themselves in mourning for their founder, Husain, the slaughtered grandson of the Prophet). Shi'ites also prefer charismatic leaders: they are forever parading the portrait of the Imam Khomeini.
The special ferocity and condensation of the will that are evident in the Iranian revolution owe much to this tendency toward the cult of personality. (One ironic aspect is that Khomeini may not, strictly speaking, be a very good Muslim at all. He not only condoned the violation of Islam's protection of foreign emissaries, but also made inflammatory, groundless claims about the American responsibility for the Mecca attack. He has deliberately fomented violence, which the Koran forbids.)
The distinction between Sunnis and Shi'ites is, according to some scholars of Islam, much greater than that between, say, Roman Catholics and Protestants. It is one of the most basic of many differences that make it not only inadvisable but impossible to generalize about Islam as if it were a single, coherent bloc. Just as the Communist world includes antagonists (U.S.S.R. and China, Viet Nam and Cambodia), the Islamic world is very much fragmented. Morocco and Algeria are fighting in the western Sahara. The Middle East is a psychodrama of the paranoiac fears entertained by Arabs for one another. North and South Yemen were at war earlier this year. Moderate Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Jordan fear a radical trend that might become uncontrollable. It is important to notice that for all the incendiary mobs that have eddied around American outposts in the past few weeks, none has ever got out of control of the governing authorities; when the government said stop, the rioting stopped. That suggests that the mobs might be viewed more as a form of demonstrative Muslim rhetoric (dangerous and expensive rhetoric, of course) rather than as any tidal force of history.
Furthermore, the world of Islam extends far beyond the Middle East. The largest single concentration of Muslims in the world exists in Indonesia, where there is virtually no Islamic out cry against the West or America. Says former Malaysian Premier Tunku Abdul Rahman: "It is a shame to think that Iran, one of the progressive Muslim countries, has, literally speaking, gone to the dogs."
One inexhaustible source of anti-Americanism in Muslims is U.S. support of Israel and the question of a Palestinian homeland, issues that blend with the Third World prejudice against the privileged. But, says French Sociologist Jacques Berque, "any hopes or fears that the entire Muslim world will unite against the West amount to a romantic vision of pan-Islamism."