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Why are Arabs unable to criticize themselves?
In an article in Opinion Journal, Fouad Ajami reflects on the troubled Kingdom of Jordan, with its moderate monarchy and its anything but moderate people, who, after having supported the terrorists in Iraq, are furious that those same terrorists have now attacked Jordan:
Once more, we are face to face here with the phenomenon of Arab denial, an unwillingness on the part of broad segments of the peoples of Arab lands to own up to the harvest of their own history, and to acknowledge their own creations. We have seen this before, a cynical belief—unstated but powerful all the same—that the terror should play out on foreign soil and spare the populations that spawn it. How else can we explain the anger of Jordanians that Zarqawi had struck his own birthplace? In an unwritten pact with that prince of darkness, Zarqawi was to hit other lands and spare his own.It seems to me that Ajami is making the same kind of mistake about Islam that Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Roy, and other establishment scholars keep making. Despite differences in detail, what these scholars have in common is the assumption that the dysfunction and hostility rife in the Muslim world are symptoms of sociological factors. Thus Ajami sees Arabs’ and Jordanians’ “innocence,” their “unwillingness to own up,” as a cultural or psychological trait stemming from Arab history, ethnic folkways, and ingrained habits and beliefs, all of which he finds regrettable, but which he also implicitly assumes could be altered through a managed change of attitude. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that this Arab mentality of innocence is stems from the unchanging laws of Islam itself, particularly the law of jihad which says that all non-Muslims are at war with Islam and must be either converted or killed. For Islam, there is no standard of morality apart from Islam itself, which determines all right and wrong down to the tiniest detail. If you are a Muslim, you are good, and all evil is by definition non-Islamic. How many times have we heard Muslims say that if a Muslim man commits an evil act, that shows he’s not really a Muslim? Muslims are thus incapable of criticizing themselves, not because of their “culture,” but because of the quasi-totatitarian nature of their religion which is the very source of their culture. Obviously a little attitude adjustment, facilitated by helpful Western democrats, is not going to bring an end to this “closed-circle” mentality that has been part and parcel of the Islamic community since its inception. It can only end—let us speak plainly—if Muslims cease being Muslim. But there is no force on earth that can make them do that. Therefore the only thing for us to do is to have as little to do with them as possible. It is really just common sense. What do you do with people whose way of thinking is utterly alien from your own, and with whom you cannot get along on a decent, mutual basis? You avoid them, right? We have no trouble understanding this simple idea on an individual level. Why is it so hard for us to understand it on a civilizational level?
However, I don’t mean that it’s hard for us to understand it. I mean that it’s hard for liberals, neoconservatives, and mainstream “conservatives” to understand it—because it would require them to give up their dream of a single, democratic, equal world. Email entry |