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A Monopoly on Anti-Westernism?
Examination of Muslims in other societies also matters because it touches on
another mantra of those predisposed against Islam: that Islam is fundamentally
anti-Western. The truth is that most of the world has found reasons over time
both to admire, and to hate, the West. Anger at the West is hardly a Muslim
monopoly—although the specific conditions of the Global War on Terror in the
first decade of the twenty-first century happen to have induced a particularly
strong period of anti-Americanism among Muslims. It will eventually pass. But
anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism can flare up again, as it has in the past in
other cultures, such as Chinese or Latin American.
Thousands of books have been written on the subject of anti-Western
thinking—essentially asking “Why do they hate us?”—and simplistic answers
are routinely offered. The crux of the debate is really, do “they” hate us for
things that the West has done? Or do they hate us for reasons that reflect their
own confusion, jealousy, and lack of understanding? Whom do we blame,
ourselves or them, for not liking us?
The question is unanswerable. More accurately, it deserves multiple answers.
These questions lie at the heart of this very book. On the one hand, “they”—
Muslims and others—do indeed hate us because of what we have done to them:
invasions, colonies, empire-building, wars, coups, political, economic, and
cultural domination, seizure and exploitation of resources, arrogance, lack of
concern, failure to respect and understand non-Western cultures. We have heard
these arguments before and there is a great deal of truth to them.
For those Americans who are uncomfortable in acknowledging any legacy of
ongoing destructive and damaging US actions against the rest of the world, the
temptation is to reply, “That’s right, blame America.” So we then search out self-
serving and comforting answers: they “hate us for our freedoms,” they envy our
wealth and our way of life, they prefer to blame the West rather than taking a
hard look at themselves and their own shortcomings, And all of these arguments
contain grain of validity as well. But they basically don’t tell most of the story.
Whatever the roots of anti-Westernism may be, the phenomenon still remains
a problem for the West and the United States. How does all this fit into Islam’s
view of the world?
A combination of admiration, respect, fear, and anger characterizes the views
of most developing nations toward the modern West and especially the US. The
West is admired for its surge of economic and political development beginning
in the sixteenth century. But it was specifically the West’s technological and

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military advancements that were responsible for thrusting the West out into the
habitat of other civilizations.
So how broadly shared are the components of anti-Western feeling, then?
Could a broad front of anti-Westernism ever coalesce to any meaningful degree
against the United States? Are we moving into a world now better defined as
“the West and the Rest”? These, too, are all abstractions. There are many
“West”s out there, often at war among themselves for most of history. Similarly
there are many “East”s, many “Islam”s, and of course many “Rests of the
world.” Such terms really aren’t useful until they coalesce into some kind of
specific, meaningful political force capable of changing things that matter to us
here and now.
These days some kind of ad hoc coalition of “the Rest” against “the West,” or
against the United States, is already partly in evidence. The Muslim world today
—galvanized, radicalized, unsettled, unnerved, and overwrought from the Bush
administration’s Global War on Terror—presents a greater degree of self-
conscious “solidarity” than it probably ever has before in history. Perhaps that
kind of emotional solidarity cannot be directly exploited by any single state, but
it can produce turmoil, periodic terrorist actions, and strong foot-dragging
against US goals at the international level. The imperial visions of the Bush
administration, explicitly propounded by neoconservative strategists, and softer
forms under Clinton, generated further anti-US feeling throughout most of the
rest of the world—in the Muslim world, Russia, China, and Latin America. And
even if these forces could never coalesce into a coherent military threat against
the United States, they can easily focus on thwarting American global strategy;
indeed, they already have. Their passive-aggressive attitudes alone sharply
limited the Bush administration’s influence and blocked its ability to get things
done.
Thus, the more we think about “Islam’s bloody borders,” the more we find
we are really talking about a complex set of phenomena and events: preservation
of cultural communities from external onslaught, shared resentments against
aspects of aggressive Western actions, and the effort of states to homogenize
their populations. To single out Islam as somehow the operative factor in
community conflict is to turn a highly selective microscope on some specific
cases of world conflict at this particular moment in history. To believe that such
anti-Western impetus would not be present if there were no Islam is naive. Three
of the four other civilizations we will look at here—Russia, China, and India—
all have deep roots of anti-Westernism in their own right. Muslims fit into those
patterns to one degree or another.
First, we will turn to Russia in some detail, a pivotal state in our story. It

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matters perhaps more than any other of these three states: Russia directly
inherited the jaundiced Byzantine worldview of the West and intensified it, it
came to include a very large number of Muslims inside its own borders, and it
has thrashed around over the centuries about the best way to deal with them
under imperial, then Communist, and then post-communist governments.
Finally, Russia is still intimately involved with the Middle East, which in some
ways represents a shared distrust of Western actions.

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CHAPTER SEVEN