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Muslims have aggressively sought the material wonders of the West, yet are ambivalent in their souls. Berque locates the central dilemma of Islam: If Islam is ever to become an economic and political competitor of capitalism and Marxism, it must embrace a progress that may forever weaken its ethical and spiritual structures, just as other religions have been drained by the secularization of the Western world. So far, Islam has not proved itself a vehicle of social change, a program to confront the modern world.
Still, oil has convinced the Islamic world—or half-convinced it—of its worth and power. The presence of oil in the complicated psychology of anti-Westernism makes the volatility of the Islamic world especially perilous. It is an interesting point of Muslim psychology that the Arabs who grow unimaginably rich off Western payments for oil (and squander their petrodollars on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Rolls-Royces and golden bathroom fixtures) have still in them enough desert asceticism to be contemptuous of the West's energy addictions. So here the old relation is reversed: the West is dependent on the East, and is learning something about the frustration that dependence brings.
In this encounter of East and West, the rage on either side has a way of spiraling up in a murderous double helix: the anger of the Muslims may feed on itself, and the countering anger of the West may further ignite the anger of Islam. So great is the mutual incomprehension that international relations degenerate rapidly to the chaotic psychology of the mob. Although U.S. reactions have been, all things considered, remarkably mild, the Iranian crisis has legitimized among Americans a new stereotype of the demented Muslim. Says University of Wisconsin Historian Kemal H. Karpat: "Khomeini has done more harm to the Islamic image in one month than all the propaganda of the past 15 years."
It should be possible for Americans to preserve an intelligent sympathy for the Islamic perspective without feeling vaguely guilt-stricken by the past. Anti-Americanism—the specific, sharper focus of anti-Westernism—is in some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives it the aspect of a bizarre, dangerous but spiritually trivial cult. To the extent that Muslims support Khomeini, they share in the image of Islam that he has created.
-Lance Morrow