Does the U.S. understand the Muslim world?

Social justice news
October 2001

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Pax Christi USA calls for a "healthy tension" between faith and citizenship
Some responses and resources related to September 11 attacks

Does the U.S. understand the Muslim world?
As the U.S. government grows increasingly confident that Osama Bin Laden's Al Qa'edah network executed the September 11 attacks that left thousands dead and the rest of the country grieving, many Americans are astonished at the anger and hatred embodied in such terrible acts and surprised to discover support for them among people in the Muslim world.

Dr. Aminah McCloud, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and an American who has lived in several countries in the Muslim World, says Americans must look to the conditions in the specific countries individual members of Al Qa'edah came from to begin to understand them.

"We're two groups masked from each other," she says. "People need to have an interest in who they are and what life is like there."

When we talk about the Muslim World, what exactly are we referring to?
The Muslim World consists of communities of Muslims living in countries from Morocco to Russia. If we concentrate on the Middle East, that itself is a very vague term. The Muslim world is wherever Muslims form the majority population. Most Muslims live outside the Middle East unless you include the Indian subcontinent.

When the west refers to the Middle East, we are usually speaking of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. On occasion we include the subcontinent.

What is the standard of living like in these countries?
The standard of living depends on whom and where you are. Colonial powers who administered the region destroyed a lot of agriculture by forcing the people to stop feeding themselves and start feeding the empires. They've only been gone 25 to 30 years, so these countries are in the process of building up their agriculture again.

There are still large consortiums of craftsmen and some business but not the kind of dot-com business in America. There is manufacturing and American companies are hiring a lot of child labor and women labor for factory work in Middle Eastern nations.

There is definitely a class divide. At the top level people can be enormously wealthy. These are people who had land before the Americans and the Europeans came in, and in some cases, they were able to keep it. There are also the supporters and associates of the colonizers who were given land that was taken from others.

Then there is a kind of middle class, but it's not as large as the middle class in the United States. These are teachers, government workers, and some very renowned craftsmen.

But there's a huge mass of folk who live below the poverty line. These people are largely unemployed, they work the land, and they live in villages.

I have no words to describe the places where the poorest members of some of these nations live. The poverty is so desperate you see an American plant hiring at 50 cents an hour and people are lining up for the jobs because they need to work. They need to buy some rice to feed their families.

What would surprise most Americans about the Muslim world?
Despite the poverty, in some ways, the standard of living is better there than here. Crime is much lower, for instance. When I'm there I never worry that I might get shot or stabbed waiting to catch a bus.

They don't have the same industrial style of food production as we have in the West. There I can buy some of the freshest fruit and meat in the world. And there aren't the cancer-causing agents in their food that we have.

The way commerce is conducted is completely different. If I had to choose a place to shop I would go there, because you meet the craftsmen and they invite you to tea. There isn't the disdain of the shop attendant for the consumer that there is here. They're much more personable. They're probably the most hospitable people in the world.

Hospitality is central to Muslim society. People will serve you a meal of all the food they've saved up for a month and won't permit you to say no. They say today is today and not to worry about tomorrow. They don't know how to limit their hospitality.

Why do you think some Muslim people support terrorism?
They're responding to having been stripped of their ability to live. They've been searching for justice from the world's powerful nations for decades, and they've found none. They've gone to the Hague and the UN, they've held tribunals, and then they see the U.S. walk out of the UN conference on racism. America is not always perceived as just in the world.

For these folk, it's not a question of supporting terrorists. Groups that we've called "terrorist" or associated with terrorism often maintain many humanitarian programs in Islamic nations. They've built hospitals and schools after U.S. bombing has destroyed them. These people see the good work that the people we call terrorists have done in their own countries.

The ongoing war with the Iraqi people is another, constant source of irritation to many people—not just Muslims, of course. The United States is bordering on an atrocity to keep people on sanctions forever. The number of innocents we have killed has beyond the imagination.

Many Americans of all faiths are angered by our uncritical support of Israel and the continual killing and imprisonment of so many Palestinians. Muslims the world over are incensed at this support of killing. There is no other faith in the world that has an occupying force controling their holy places except the Muslims living in Israel. This invasion into a sacred space is horrendous and unjustifiable.

I personally don't think the answer to their disputes with the U.S. is to invoke terror, but how do you keep a child from pinching another child? You pinch him to show him how it feels. It's not the best way to teach him, but sometimes it's the most effective. We recoil when we see that on a larger scale, but it's the same everyday stuff. You say a bully will get his someday and you find satisfaction in that.

How might our two cultures move forward from this?
For our cultures to move forward we must stop the stereotyping and then find honest ways to come to know one another for the purpose of stopping injustices. This is not just two cultures. Americans are very diverse, and there are 8 million American Muslims. We must send the best of us overseas and get more accurate movies and texts from over there. We need town meetings, articles, documentaries and for universities to have centers devoted to Islamic Studies.

This is a wake-up all, and once you wake America up, we get really busy. While we won't permit anyone to wreak havoc in our country, we might also figure out the most just solutions to our disputes.—Anne Graber

For more information:
Who are the Arabs?
Middle East Network Information Center
The Middle East/North Africa Internet Resource Guide
Islamic Studies, Islam, Arabic and Religion
Middle East Studies Association of North America
Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services
Dar-Al-Islam
Middle East and Islamic World Film Collections
Amideast
The Middle East Outreach Council
The Council on Islamic Education

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