As recent attacks in Iraq have set in the minds of Americans and, no doubt, of residents of the Middle East, an abysmal mutual gap of understanding still plagues relations between the Islamic world and the West. The history of cultural conflict is lengthy:
In 1999, Arabs and Muslims called for the closure of the Burger King in Maale Adumim, the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank. When the Israeli franchisee refused to close shop, groups called for an international boycott of the burger giant because the outlet was sited on what the executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem dubbed “stolen land.” (Israel seized the land in 1967’s Six-Day War.) The restaurant was closed on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, and followed Jewish, but not Muslim, dietary laws. Burger King Corp. shut down the franchise later that year.
Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, wrote in a Townhall.com guest commentary that “One distinctive feature of Western analysts is that terrorists’ explicit goals are often ignored, and instead their actions are misread as reactions to Israel, third world poverty, or American unilateralism.”
And, in 1997, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a speakerbox of hyper-nationalism and intolerance, blasted “unethical” Western interference in the so-called Islamic revolution: “This ethical quagmire will … engulf the present Western civilization and wipe it out.”
During a speech given to students at Georgetown University just a few months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, former President Bill Clinton faulted certain Middle East regimes for misperceptions about the West: “In the complex combustible mixture of a lot of these countries, a lot of the governments allow people to go into the mosques and demonize us, and demonize the West and demonize Christianity and demonize Jews, because as long as they do that, they think they’re shifting the heat of popular distress off of the governments.”
As with many problems, from the personal to the planetary, the essence of hashing out misunderstanding is communication.
Clinton agrees.
“We need to do a better job of getting the facts out,” he said in the same Georgetown speech. “Most Muslims in the Middle East, I guarantee you, don’t know (that) the last time we used our military power was to protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.”
But citing simple communication and open arms as a panacea has all the effectiveness of a public service announcement on C-SPAN 2; anyone who thinks differently is shortsighted or has a rhetorically indefensible bone to pick.
Even in the modern world of the superconnected and the media-aware, most international communication flows through several major mass media outlets. The relative merits of this arrangement aside, the soundbyte-oriented format of cable news — CNN and Al-Jazeera alike — is ill-suited to conveying subtleties necessary for cultural appreciation. And with neither the Israel-Palestine conflict nor the Iraqi occupation showing signs of sunny news, even widely accepted cultural tolerance often seems too bullish a goal.
Rather than propose a comprehensive policy solution — which is clearly outside the scope of this editorial, anyway — we suggest a more microcosmic response: Learn more about Islamic language and idea and the context of those ideas. Read through Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat,” or thumb through “A Thousand and One Nights.” If you’re reading this and you’re a resident of the Middle East, read through Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” or Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.”
This is no end in itself, and almost certainly won’t in itself stop catastrophic cultural conflict. But knowledge is a place to start.
As James Madison sagely observed, “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”