Misunderstanding between East and West Begins in Syria (Tishreen, Syria)
Is the clash of Islam and the West a product of American propaganda
to smear the Muslim world as 'terrorist' in nature? For Syria's state-run Tishreen, Muslim
cleric Hussein Ahmed Shahada writes that the two
sides, mutually ignorant of the other, are fighting - this time in Syria - because
of a depiction of Muslims invented by the White House to justify war and
plunder.
It
was not Westernization in itself that has been an object of resistance for
Arabs and Muslims, but a rebellion against the reality of Western slavery in
the form of its brutal political regime. Since the dawn of the Al-Nahda
and the Islamic cultural renaissance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
this fierce Western aggression is what has been behind Arab resistance to Westernization.
In
other words, in light of American domination of today's world, the challenge to
a dialogue of civilizations is not how Islam can come to terms with America,
but how America can come to terms with Islam.
If
recognized as a partner in the building of human civilization, no Muslim would
reject a well-informed global culture and political acculturation, and in fact would
join in the struggle for world peace and human security.
If
one wanted to simplify the logic of Muslim resistance, one could say that the type
globalization rejected by the Islamic world is one of tyranny, which deprives
freedom from peoples and nations and dissolves their cultural uniqueness through
the use of military force. The West's insatiable appetite for forcing Muslims
and non-Muslims in the global South to submit to an American model, a
ready-made excuse for invading the globe in every direction, has been pursued
by tempting them with so-called democracy, reform, and the fight against
terrorism, the combatants of which were recruited behind the closed doors of
the White House.
Posted By
Worldmeets.US
Dozens
of books have been written and hundreds of programs and seminars have been held
dedicated to supporting the notion that there is Islamic terrorism hostile to
the culture and civilization of the West, with the result that issues of mutual
concern to the West and Islam are sidetracked into policies of confrontation
directed at a supposed enemy. Like a red flag waved before a bull, this has provoked
violence in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other targets of American
ambition.
Thus,
the imaginary enemy becomes a real one to haunt the sleep of the West. This
provides a justification for "pre-emptive or pro-active war," as it
is referred to by the panic-stricken American regime, against the danger of
Islamist extremism, which from the Cold War right up to its aggressions against
the oil-rich lands of Islam, was nurtured and fed in American incubators.
In
his book Orientalism,
this prompted Palestinian writer Edward Said to put forward
the view that it was the colonizing West that initiated this clash, which tarnished
the image of Arabs and Muslims and falsified Muslim values and culture, and
which was characterized by violent Western aggression and a focus on the
Islamic world as an exception that countered Western colonial domination.
However,
I disagree with Said insofar as the colonial West was not "Christian"
in the religious, spiritual sense of the word, because it was based on a
political tendency to see modernism as completely removed from any religious or
moral value. It seems to me that the term “Christianity” referred to by Said is
the “zionized” Christianity cultivated by the White
House, which sees American projects of occupation as a starting point for the
protection of Israel. These are people who believe that in keeping with biblical
prophecy, the fulfillment of a "greater Israel" would be a divine
sign of the coming of the Messiah.
What's
happening now is that controversy is being generated that divides the Arab
world into sectarian and ethnic groupings. Through tools like the speeches
given by members of the political opposition in Arab and Muslim lands, a
minefield is being planted with seeds of fragmentation that detonate to the
benefit of a new Middle East empire of Israel. Thus, the truth reveals itself
in scenes of bloody fighting between Muslims and the U.S. administration. So
the poverty, subjugation, tyranny, and occupation Muslim lands and the global south
are merely the expression of a moral values crisis, the sins of which have
implications for the meaning of civilization and humanity.
Until
the Islamic nation regains the objective conditions needed for achieving an Islamic
civilizational alternative, the struggle between
Muslims and the U.S. administration will continue to rage in a jungle of
ignorance, as the two exchange prophecies and counter-prophecies: of a West
about which we in the East know little - other than the picture of its
political claws ripping into the flesh of our occupied lands; and an Islam
about which the West knows little - other than its simplistic image of so-called
“political Islam,” which is a phrase invented by the U.S. administration itself
as a pretext for its new war against the entire Muslim world.
