The roots of conflict
By Wu Guiyun

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and near Washington, DC, the United States and the Arab and Islamic worlds made it clear that the handful of terrorists should in no way be equated with the Arab nation or Islam. This common stand indicates that neither the United States nor the Arab/Islamic world wanted to complicate further their bilateral relations, which were already intricate and sensitive.

Indeed, the Arab/Islamic world and the West have such a complex relationship that even China has to take account of it while taking into consideration its relationship with the West.

The "Orient"
The concept of the "Orient" has never been clear in the mind of the average Westerner. Modern Westerners' understanding of the Orient mainly came from the writings of Christian missionaries who had worked for religious purposes in the Oriental countries and those writings are not free of unilateral, arbitrary, superficial or biased views.

As late as the second half of the 19th century, "Orient" in the European sense referred to China, India and the Arab nations, while in the long period of the Middle Ages it was no more than the Islamic Arab world, excluding China and India. More important, "Orient" has been more of a cultural term than a geographical one.

It is associated with the Islamic civilization, which is quite different from its Christian counterpart. Even in the 20th century, historians such as Arnold Toynbee still used the phrase "belt of Islamic civilization" in defining the Arab world of West Asia and North Africa. Many Western philosophers also equated Islamic philosophy with Arab philosophy, although it includes Islamic philosophers outside the geographical Arabic world, such as Iranian philosopher Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Pakistani philosopher Mohammed Iqbal. This confusion indicates that from the Middle Ages to modern times, Europeans regarded the Arab and Islamic worlds as a culturally homogeneous political and military force.

The years after World War I saw a clear separation between the two worlds in the eyes of Westerners. Such a change came directly from two facts: on the one hand, as winners of World War I, Britain and France redefined their spheres of influence in the Middle East according to the Paris Peace Treaty, both consisting of separate "Arab nations" that shared the same religious belief and cultural heritage; on the other hand, the 1924 collapse of the Ottoman Empire not only left a historical hotbed for modern nationalism as represented by Kemalism and the rise of modern nationalism and nation states, but also set up a living example for a nationalism that was different from Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islamism and "one nation, one state".

Nevertheless, various nationalist ideologies and movements in the Middle East were genetically connected to Islam, even after the rise of Turkish, Arab and Iranian nationalism. Under this special circumstance, the three invisible factors - religion, nation and culture - became the variables that affected the history of the relations between the East and the West.

In the Middle Ages, no other events exerted a greater influence on the history of relations between the West and the Arab Islamic worlds than the Crusades. The Crusades, also called the wars between "the Cross and the Crescent" by historians, intermittently lasted nearly 200 years with eight expeditions and, in the end, both sides claimed victory.

Wars between states in the Middle Ages can hardly be judged in terms of just or unjust, because it was very common for the powerful states to dominate or invade and annex the weak ones. The Crusades, however, were different to some extent. They consisted of a series of expeditions started in the name of religion by Europe, which was rising from darkness, to check the expansion of the powerful Islamic Arab Empire. They broke out in the 11th century, marking a turning point in the history of relations between the East and the West.

J J Sanders, a Western historian, described the minds of Europeans at the time as follows: the West had remained an area of poverty and ignorance until the 10th century, precariously protecting itself from invaders' attacks from sea and land, while, for four centuries, Islam had been enjoying internal peace and quiet, with no worries except civil wars, and established a splendid and impressive urban culture. Then the situation changed. Trade and business revived, towns and markets boomed, population increased, and arts and science developed on a scale never heard of since the Roman Empire.(1) The Europeans were eager to get back their lost land because the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate Empire (750-1258) and the regime established by the Seljuk Turks' Sudan Kingdom in Asia Minor had already been a threat to the Byzantine Empire. They lacked a just pretext to recover the lost land of the Byzantine Empire. In order to justify the Crusades, the Christians, whose mission was to "save souls", for the first time became a tool in the "Holy War" against the heathens.

When the Byzantine army suffered heavy losses from the Abas army at the end of the 11th century, Alexius I, the Byzantine emperor, decided to beg the pope for help, stating that the threat to the empire was a threat from heathens to Christian belief and appealing to the European Christian kingdom and the Roman Vatican to organize a united crusade to fight through the "pilgrim's passage" from Asia Minor to Jerusalem in Palestine and finally "liberate" the Holy Land, which had been under Arab control for 400 years since the Arab army conquered it in 638. Christians in Jerusalem had enjoyed freedom of religious belief under Muslim domination and they often went to churches and holy places. Pilgrims from other places continued to visit Jerusalem, although the importance of the Holy Land at that time could not be compared to its present status, as only 117 pilgrims visited it in the 11th century.(2)

At the same time, Judaism, which had long been considered heresy by the Christians, was freed to some extent under the guidance of Islamic policy of "let there be no compulsion in religion". Jews, who had been exiled by Christians, were allowed to come back to their homeland and were given the religious right of self-administration, and those who had been forced away returned and prayed before the sites of the City of David and Solomon's Temple on Mount Moriah. Following the spirit of religious tolerance, Arab Muslims called Christianity and Judaism "revelation religions", and their worshippers "People of the Book". "People of the Book" were lower in status than Muslims, who worshipped Allah, but they were allowed to live peacefully with Muslims and their daughters were even allowed to marry Muslims.

Arabs built two mosques on Mount Moriah to memorialize the Muslim military victory. They are the present al-Aqsa Mosque and Mosque of Omar, the latter named after Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab. No religious conflict - let alone a "clash of civilizations" - was reported in Jerusalem while people of different religions lived together there from the Arabic Muslim's conquest of the Holy Land until European Christianity's First Crusade in 1096. Much-told stories of peaceful co-existence of different believers continued before the First Crusade, which fundamentally changed East-West relationship patterns. Several centuries' peaceful co-existence was "destroyed by a series of Christian holy wars against Islam and left an unvarying heritage of distrust and misunderstanding".(3)

Europeans launched the holy war against Islam for three reasons. The first reason was that the rise of Islam was the greatest historical event in the Middle Ages. The social reform movement with the initial mission to unify the Arabian Peninsula under the religious banner gradually created the Islamic civilization believing in Allah and his messengers and then established the Arab Empire of the Caliphate covering parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. Its existence and rapid expansion had threatened the security of the Byzantine Empire.

The second reason was that the pope was struggling with the Roman emperor for supreme power in Europe, although he had ceased to be the symbol of spiritual unification after the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches. Pope St Gregory VII, therefore, promised military assistance when the Byzantine emperor begged for help, and his successor Pope Urban II took action when the emperor begged again. In 1095 the decision was made at the Council of Clermont to launch the crusade.

The third reason was the economic factor behind the religious craze. The pope was Europe's nominal spiritual leader, but the war required military and material support. At that time, Genoa, Pisa and Venice were all sea powers and had had trade contact with the East for a long time. A holy war would be a shortcut for them to make business contacts with the affluent East and the highly civilized Arab world, since the trade route through Asia Minor was far from safe. The support from the three maritime powers became an important non-religious factor in the Crusades.

Historically, the negative effects of the Crusades were largely represented by two aspects: the cultural tradition and the spiritual mentality, the particularity of which was that this war had been described and defined as a holy "religious war" in Eastern and, especially, in Western literature. There is a golden rule in the history of war that barbaric wars are always linked to divinity as "just causes". Wars are sanctified and enemies demonized. Because religion is considered the source of truth, goodness and beauty and the highest spiritual symbol, therefore closest to the soul, fanning religious mania would result in the loss of human reason. The transcendentalism of religious values is prone to drive man to extremism, because a war against "evil" in the name of God, "the transcendent Being", seems to show devotion and, therefore, to be naturally just and reasonable.

A Western scholar argued that two customs of Christian culture had been used in the war: pilgrimage and holy war. The former is an important way to show one's devotion to Christianity, where one's spiritual and physical sins are cleansed and one's soul saved. There is no loser in a holy war because the winner is awarded glory, spoils and admission to heaven, while the dead are respected as martyrs, who are awarded cheap tickets to heaven.(4)

Another Western scholar said, commenting on the European Church's anti-Islamic propaganda, that when the cross arrived at the borders of West Asia with an organized army and a large military budget, it only fanned anti-Islamic hatred, and that the centuries-long Crusades were the most disgraceful and disastrous chapter in the history of Christianity.(5)

About Western society's distortion and misunderstanding of Islam, he continued, saying that a glance at the early indigenous literature, from Italy to Britain, shows an enormous amount of inaccurate descriptions of Islam, especially of Muslim customs. Muslims, he said, therefore have good reason to doubt the West's news media and even missionaries' speeches, and the historic accounts in our stories, novels and even textbooks. This is the heritage the Crusades left for Westerners.(6)

To sum up, how to understand the Crusades is a question involving the historical outlook and values of both the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds. Both are extremely devoted to their own religion and their forefathers' bravery and epic stories in the war against "the heathens". Consequently, even the slightest disturbance in East-West relations will stir up unreasonable reactions based on stereotypes.

Modern Islam
Modern history had witnessed a worldwide phenomenon of colonial domination and anti-colonialism for national independence. From Islam's point of view, the 19th century was its Dark Age, referring to a political decline, that is, the collapse of the three empires of the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids because of domestic troubles and foreign invasions. At the same time, Islamic regions of West Asia, North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia began to be colonized by Europeans and to suffer losses of sovereignty, land and national dignity.

This humiliating situation caused all anti-colonialism thoughts and movements to be grouped under the name of Islamic revival movements. "Islam is in danger" became the most popular slogan, just as "the Chinese people are at a critical point" was the national anthem of China. "In danger" referred to the sense of crisis in the face of foreign invasion, but this time such a sense was quite different, in both nature and degree, from that aroused by the Crusades, when Muslim peoples were at the summit of their power and facing a challenge from the weak. Now it seemed they were an aged patient trying to defend himself in a fight against a hot-blooded young man.

Harsh reality made Muslims realize that the West's advanced military weapons, political system and way of thinking really made a difference vis-a-vis their cherished Islamic religious culture. They were forced to wonder why the just and kind Muslims were not able to defeat the evil, barbaric European heathens if Allah is always with the people who respect him and do good. The religion guided by Allah contradicted the historical course of events supposedly dominated by Allah, something that drove Muslims into an unprecedented spiritual crisis. Thus a new factor was added to the relations between Islam and the modern West: Muslims began to reflect on themselves and their religion with the hope of defeating the West, including learning from the West to enrich themselves.

Generally speaking, Islam has used four ways to handle the challenges from the West, all of which affect their relations with the West to a certain degree. The first way, a kind of cultural conservative attitude, is to reject and elude. Many pious Muslims still see Western powers as irredeemable heathens who must be defeated through jihad.(7) When they find that their armed forces are no match for those of the West, they turn to rejection and elusion, which, just like jihad, are intrinsic to Islamic tradition. To reject is to deny the assumed advantage of Western notions and systems over those of Islam and refuse to cooperate with Europeans, while to elude means to avoid face-to-face confrontation with them, as the Prophet Muhammad did when he led his followers to a safe place far from the colonizers.

The second way, a pragmatic attitude, is secularism and Westernization, which was employed by Ottoman emperors and Islamic feudal emperors of Egypt and Iran to learn from the West, although they failed to realize their dreams of a powerful nation. The idea of secularism and Westernization here means to learn from the West in military, administrative, educational, economic and judicial affairs while rejecting pan-Islamism, making such learning a private matter rather than a governmental and social behavior. Such top-down system reform, which aims at strengthening central authority rather than sharing power with the people, cannot win the strong support of all social classes. Such political reform, with constitutional monarchy, is bound to failure.

Islamic modernism is the third way to respond to Western challenges. Islamic modern reformism, a worldwide ideological and cultural movement launched by a group of Muslim intellectuals who received their education in the West, started in the latter half of the 19th century and came to an end in the years following World War I. These elites had in common the psychological dilemma of admiring modern Western industrial progress while rejecting to some extent foreign Western culture, although they held different political and ideological views.

Different from the 18th-century Islamic Revival Movement, the 19th-century reformist movement was no longer a "backward-looking" and back-to-tradition movement, but a West-oriented one, which advocated science, reason, education and reform and treated foreign cultures in a much more calm and objective way while being more serious in examining its own culture. The most important contribution of the movement lies in its attempt to seek a common point in East-West communication to introduce new thoughts and ideas from the West to enrich the Islamic world. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani argued that the decline of the Islamic world was rooted in Western colonialism, Eastern autocratic monarchism and conservative religious authoritarianism, and that Islam should be a religion of progress and reform, reason and science, with a strong work ethic. He thought that the Islamic East needed a Martin Luther King, and he himself was regarded by some Westerners as such a figure. Afghani took a dialectical attitude in analyzing both the East and the West, and he thought the West was part of the problem but also part of the solution. It can be argued that the position and the function of modernism lie in the indispensable Islamic theoretical basis it offered for Islamic nations in introducing and absorbing modern science, technology and political thought (constitutional and representative systems of government).

The fourth Islamic way to deal with challenges for the West is nationalism, and national independence movements have influenced East-West relations far more than all the other ways. All three forms of nationalism in the Middle East took shape in the years between the two World Wars, but Islamic nationalism in other parts of the world has a more complicated history, which will not be dealt with in detail here.

Islamic nationalist responses to Western challenges came in two stages: the organization of nationalist parties during anti-colonialism, and their policies toward the West after they achieved national power. Geographically, Arab nationalism takes two forms: eastern Arab nationalism, including Nasserism, which emphasizes the role of the political leader and the revival of socialist nationalism as represented by Iran and Syria, and western Arab nationalism, consisting of Tunisian and Algerian nationalism, which are more closely connected with modern reformism. Of the two, the eastern one, especially Nasserism, has a wider influence.

It should be noted that Arab nationalism is characterized by a common language and a common religious belief but not a united country. To many Arabs, it was European imperialists who should take exclusive responsibility for this abnormal phenomenon. The fight against colonial domination for national independence in the Middle East therefore has always been closely linked to the unification of the Arab world. Some Arabs argue that Europeans owed Arabs the historical debt of not allowing the Arab world to be independent as a unified nation, separating it into political realities instead, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

This is of course only a wish or weak argument by Arab nationalists, because Arab regions in Asia and Africa were relatively independent even during the Ottoman domination. Anyway, the whole of the Arab world except Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia) was carved into spheres of British and French influence, and there was no political sovereign state when the Treaty of Sevres was signed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This historical debt was paid when Britain and France withdrew from the Middle East and Arab states became politically independent. As a major historical event in the relationship between Arab and Islam worlds and the West, it played a decisive role in the separation between form and content of Arab nationalism.

Another characteristic of Arab nationalism is its affinity with Islam, which is partly due to the historical-cultural tradition of the Arab and Islamic worlds and partly the consequence of vicissitudes of religion and of national groups in the modern era.

Two factors influenced Arab nationalism politically and ideologically when it began to take shape in the 1920s. One was the requirement to redefine Arabic nationality in order to free itself from the domination of the Ottoman Empire. Nationalists of the Young Turk Party turned from Pan-Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism, emphasizing non-religious elements such as national language and ties of blood as bases of national and nation state identities, and the rise of Kemalism further strengthened such secularist nationalism. This caused a convulsion among the young Arab nationalists. Arab nationalism, therefore, was hardly influenced by Islam in the early years. It first appeared in Syria and Lebanon in the eastern Arab world in the Revival Arabic Christian Literary Movement, stressing non-religious national identities deeply rooted in Arabic language, literature and history. Some relations of Arab nationalism to European culture can be seen here, though Europeans are considered to be pugnacious heathens.

The political reality after World War I, like a high wall, stopped the Arab nationalists from going along the path of European secularist nationalism, which is the second of the two factors. Britain and France separated the Arab world as individual colonies after the war and thus cut off, linguistically, ethnically, religiously and culturally, the historical relations of Arabs in different areas. Arab nationalists, therefore, tried to restore and strengthen such relations to keep a distance from the West. This resulted in a series of contradictions that have exerted a profound influence on the relations between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West.

Arab nationalism is heading for non-secularization and non-Westernization under the influence of the long-established and firmly rooted Islamic culture, which has produced an impact upon the national consciousness, national psychology, national feelings and the life style of Arabs. These influences have long been imprinted on the Arab history and are indelible from their minds. In the eyes of many Arabs, their religious history is just their national history and, they believe, national prosperity comes from religious prosperity.

In discussing the development of Arab nationalism, an Iranian scholar traced the root of Arabic national unification to Islam and the Koran and thought that cross-tribe Islam endowed ancient Arabs with a decisively meaningful sense of nation and revival. This consists of a common nation, a common language, a common sense of history, and common national feelings of sharing honor and disgrace.(8) Algerians fighting against France for national independence showed similar feelings: "Islamic belief is my religion, Arabic is my mother tongue and Algeria is my motherland".(9) The only difference is that the Arab nationalists had to accept the political reality of separated nation states after national independence while keeping the unification of Arab world as a political ideal. The future of the Arab nationalism depends on the relationships between Arab nations and the relationships between the Arab world and the Western powers. Radical Egypt, Syria and Libya failed in their enthusiastic attempts to unify the Arab world, but the voice for Arab or Islamic unification becomes much louder when it is necessary to unite against Israel or the West.

Changing world
The political situation in the Middle East changed dramatically and profoundly after World War II as part of the changes taking place worldwide. The strategic position of the Middle East became even more important for the West. Because of oil and the geographical importance of the area during the Cold War, those who got control of the Middle East would gain a strategic advantage.

But this time the leading actors changed: the United States, which had achieved much more power during World War II, replaced Britain and France as the new master; the Soviet Union, another superpower in the world, sought its own role in the area. Relations between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West to a great extent began to swing between the attitudes and policies of the two superpowers. National interests were maintained throughout the Cold War ideological clash and, thus, the Arab/Islamic world became separated. The pro-American group, represented by Saudi Arabia, established a conservative monarchic or emirate system, while the pro-Soviet nationalist group, led by Egypt, practiced Arab nationalist or socialist systems.

Both the Islamic and the Arab world were coated with Cold War politics, which meant that conservative Islamic nations tried to pursue their national interests by alignment with the United States and radical nationalist nations managed to secure national security by means of a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. As a result, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president at that time, held control of the Arab League and the king of Saudi Arabia established the Islamic World League to compete with Egypt. The third Arab-Israeli War of 1967, however, not only relaxed the contradictions between the nationalist group and the religious group, but also changed the relationship between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West with the United States as its leader. This is the first serious crisis between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West.

There has been much discussion in China about the third Arab-Israeli War. I would like to deal with two aspects that have been ignored.

The first aspect regards Egypt's "change of direction". Nasser was regarded as a hero among Arabs and a political leader with much prestige before the 1967 war, and even the United States and the West, his enemies, considered him to be the greatest figure in modern Arab history. His prestige and his Arab nationalism suddenly waned when the Arab world, with a much larger population and richer resources, was defeated by Israel, a tiny country. The humiliating losses of land and sovereignty darkened Arab nationalism. A signed article in the journal of Motherland of Egypt, titled "Defeat makes the turning point", argued that the fundamental reason for defeat was the national leader's "departure from the classics and rebellion against orthodoxy" against the will of Allah. Nasser sided with such an argument to deny his own responsibility, claiming that it was "the hand of Allah" that defeated Egypt and other Arab nations. This indicates that Egypt was experiencing a serious "belief crisis".

Anwar el-Sadat, who succeeded Nasser after his death, practiced a pro-US policy against the Soviet Union: it was actually a "changing of direction", that is, adopting a pragmatic pro-Americanism to replace Nasserism. Another interpretation of the "changing of direction", which was largely ignored by the whole world, was that the revived Muslim Brotherhood tried to replace Nasserism by the old Arabic fundamentalism to fill the spiritual vacancy in the mind of Egyptians. The Arab world has only two leading flags: nationality and religion; the flag of religion needs to be hoisted if that of nationalism is lowered. Fundamentalism, therefore, quickly became a phenomenon with international wallop. It is not only the banner of religious opponents of the Egyptian and other Arab governments, but also an organized social force against the United States and the West.

The sudden rise of fundamentalism in the Arab world changed the nature and pattern of the relationship between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West, and Western policies toward the Arab world changed accordingly. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan and post-revolution Iran are still on America's list of "anti-US" nations, but the "Islamic threat" from the fundamentalists has joined the potential anti-US group. The "Islamic threat" mainly refers to the threat from "general Islam", non-governmental and inclined to run wild, though including fundamentalists who have already come to power (Iran and Sudan). This acknowledgement in the fields of national security and strategic interests in the United States and the Western powers was presumably made after the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and has produced a double standard in their foreign policies. Secular Iraq was on the list, but religious Saudi Arabia was not.

On the one hand, the United States tries to market its own values by exerting pressure on many countries under the pretexts of human rights, religious freedom and so on. Meanwhile, the US government has been "protecting" its political Arab "allies" with great care so as not to put them in trouble in terms of democratic politics, human rights, principles or values, and so forth. The starting point of the US double-standard policy is the firm intention to avoid "a second Iran" in the Middle East. As a matter of fact, this means countering an "Islamic threat". More important, the anti-secularist, anti-Westernization, "Islam is the solution" attitude of fundamentalism is mainly concerned with the political reality in the Middle East rather than being directed against the West. This indicates that the relationship between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West has gone beyond the level of national relationship and into the fields of ideology and values. Although it does not belong to the communist system in open opposition to Western capitalism, Islam has invited Western enmity since it represents a value of "no East, no West, but only Islam".

If the third Arab-Israeli War marked a turning point in the relationship between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West, the subsequent rise of the Islamic revival movements and fundamentalism marked another. The Arab world had held different views from the Islamic world in their attitudes to the West, but no Arabs denied Islam and vice versa. This situation has changed. Many Arab leaders now consider fundamentalism a threat, just as the West does, and the radical fundamentalists regard pro-US Arab leaders as "traitors" who should be physically destroyed. Sadat, the Egyptian president, was shot dead by Muslim terrorists. What's more, the Islamic attitude toward the West has also changed: while the earlier Islamic reformists admired and tried to learn from the West, the fundamentalists consider it the "root of all evil" and associate all pain, setbacks, failures and desperation with it. This phenomenon was derived from the losses suffered in attempting to modernize the Arab and Islamic worlds, and it will continue to put Arab nations into trouble as they participate in the process of globalization.

Crisis
The relationship between Arab and Islamic worlds and the West saw its second crisis when the Gulf War broke out in 1990s. The most serious consequence of the war for Arab nations was the ultimate division of the Arab League, and the greatest influence it brought to the Islamic world lies in its stimuli to the Islamic extremists and the violent terrorists.

The Gulf War was the first large-scale war with profound influence since the end of the Cold War, and also the first large-scale US military involvement in the Middle East. Much has been said about the causes, nature, process and consequences of the war. What I want to argue here is that the terrorist threat to world peace was much smaller when the Gulf War ended than it is today and even the United States, which has been always looking for "new enemies", did not treat terrorism as a major enemy, fixing its eyes on "rogue states" such as Iran and Iraq, and the potential threats coming from nuclear proliferation. Since the Gulf War, however, an explosion occurred under the World Trade Center complex in New York City in 1993; later a series of US interests, at home and abroad, came under terrorist attack; and then September 11, 2001, shocked the whole world. These terrorist attacks made the United States realize that non-governmental terrorism under a religious banner had become a threat to its national security and to its strategic interests. The US State Department included 16 religious organizations on its 1994 list of 49 world terrorist groups. Those religious terrorist organizations were mainly extremists in the fundamentalist ranks in the Middle East.

America's second reaction to those terrorist attacks has been the "Islamic threat" theory, one among various "threats" inspired by academic circles, in which Samuel P Huntington and Bernard Lewis are leading scholars. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order and Lewis's The Roots of Muslim Rage are representative works in this body of literature. These books are not only about the theory of a "clash of civilizations"; they reflect a sense of crisis in American national security. This trend indicates that relations between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West have gone through a new crisis after the Gulf War and that the war increased feelings of distrust, even hostility between the concerned sides, instead of resolving the crisis. "Arab world" and "Islamic world" here do not refer to the world of all Arab nations and people and all Muslims, because the Gulf War has forever separated Arab nations, Arab people and Islam into different schools of thought and groups. As far as this question is concerned, it should be noted that what matters most is not the attitudes of Arab governments to the war and the leader of the coalition, the United States, but those of ordinary Arab people.

Even some Americans admit that US policy-makers often "equate positions of the Arab and Islamic governments with those of the people"(10) and, therefore, make mistakes now and then. Take the Gulf War for example: the United States won the support of 12 Arab governments, barely half of the Arab nations, when building the multinational force, but how Arab Muslims viewed the US military actions and presence in the Persian Gulf area had not been taken into consideration. It was just this question that later profoundly influenced the relations between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the United States.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had a much better understanding of ordinary Arabs, paid much attention to the "politics of war" from the very beginning, and his government issued by way of the Grand Mufti, the authoritative interpreter of the Islamic law, a 57-page fatwa titled "Islamic Decree upon the Gulf War". The fatwa discussed the fundamental principles of war and peace in the name of Allah, severely condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and claimed that a Muslim nation could seek help from non-Muslim nations when the enemy was much stronger. In short, both US military involvement in the Gulf area and US military presence in Saudi Arabia were interpreted as just and in accordance with Islamic law.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, issued, according to the inspiration of "no coalition with heathens" (Koran 5:51), another fatwa, a "folk decree" as opposed to Mubarak's "official" one, and condemned those Arab leaders who allied with the United States as "traitors", as agents and tools of "the Cross", and called on "soldiers of Allah" to overthrow them with "jihad" and revolution.(11) The Gulf War was neither a religious war nor a "clash of civilizations", and the inspiration of Allah could not help Saddam win this military conflict. Instead of making a right or wrong judgment, what I mean is that the post-Gulf War years saw a strong anti-US sentiment, unreasonable and enthusiastic, that interpreted religion, nation, culture and historical tradition in a way that encouraged the struggle against the United States, and equated the United States with "the Crusade".

A new trend, as an important symptom of this kind of Gulf War syndrome, developed in Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Islamic world. In September 1992, a religious political opposition faction submitted a document in the form of a memo to King Fahd for an all-around democratic reform and a change of the pro-US policy. The petition bore the signatures of 107 religious leaders, including Safar al-Hawali, the president of an Islamic college at Mecca. Safar al-Hawali was reported to be the author of the "al-Hawali tape", in which he criticized King Fahd for allying the country with the United States, the "Eblis", against "Muslim brothers" during the Gulf War, and claimed that "if Iraq had occupied Kuwait, then America has occupied Saudi Arabia. The real enemy is not Iraq. It is the West" after the war.(12)

Two explosions occurred against American military bases in Saudi Arabia soon after the petition was rejected. Two organizations, the Islamic Reform Movement of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Tiger, claimed responsibilities for the attacks. The two organizations called for all "Crusaders" to withdraw from Arab territories and demanded that Saudi Arabia put an end to the monarchical system. Osama bin Laden, who was closely connected with the religious political faction, was deprived of his Saudi nationality and exiled.

These events indicate that Islamic extremists, who are conservative but politically radical, have turned from dissatisfaction toward the king's policies to violent terrorist activities against the military presence and role of the United States, Saudi Arabia's ally, after the Gulf War. The turn from ideological and cultural rejection to violent terrorism by the religious conservatives indicates a new stage in the relationship between the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West. Religious extremists and terrorists are in no way the representatives of the Arab and Islamic worlds, but they are related, religiously, ethnically, culturally and historically, to these two worlds.

Such a phenomenon tells the United States that invisible forces, not only world powers and national policies, have their roles to play in maintaining national security and that anti-terrorism requires sincere close international cooperation, not only advanced military forces. It also tells the Arab and Islamic worlds that Arab nations and people should view their relationship with the West as a dynamic process rather than a static situation and that Islamic culture has to become an open system to adjust to the ongoing trends of modernization and globalization.

Notes
(1) J J Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam, London 1965, Routledge.
(2) Sayyid Fayyaz Mahmud, A Short History of Islam , trans by Wu Guiyun, Jin Zhijiu et al, Beijing 1982, Chinese Press of Social Sciences.
(3) J L Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, trans by Wu Guiyun, Wang Jianping et al, Beijing, Social Science Literature Press, p 50.
(4) As above, p 51.
(5) Sayyid Fayyaz Mahmud, A Short History of Islam , trans by Wu Guiyun, Jin Zhijiu et al, Beijing 1982, Chinese Press of Social Sciences, p 230.
(6) As above, p 230.
(7) Wu Guiyun, Modern Islamic Movements , Beijing 1994, Chinese Press of Social Sciences, pp 11-20.
(8) Wu Guiyun and Zhou Xiefan, Modern Islamic Thoughts and Movements, Beijing 2000, Social Science Literature Press.
(9) As above, p 20.
(10) J L Esposito, as above, p 300.
(11) Muhammad Khalid Masud, B Messick and A S Powers (eds), Islamic Legal Interpretation Muftis and Their Fatwas, Harvard University Press, 1996, p 298.
(12) J L Esposito (ed), Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism or Reform , Lynne Rienner 1997, Boulder, Colorado, p 60.

Other recent articles from Heartland include: 

Another China: The awakened giant 

America's journey to holy war 

The false triangle 

Managing the US-China-Russia triangle

(© Heartland. Translated by Jiang Yajun. This version has been edited by Asia Times Online. To subscribe to Heartland, please email cassanpress@sina.com)