But it is also the case that people in the Islamic world feel that they, for the most part, live in polities and states, in countries, ruled by unpopular regimes all of whom without any exception that I can think of in one way or another—of course, Iraq is an exception—but are supported by the United States.
I mean one mustn’t forget, in the first place, that the Mujahedeen, who preceded the Taliban, sort of the previous incarnation of the Taliban, were supported by the United States as fighters on the side of Islam against the godless communists in the Soviet Union in 1980s. And when their leaders came to Washington—I’ll never forget this as long as I live—and these beared people, to my mind, being a secular person from a part of the world that produces monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, I was horrified that Reagan greeted these people as, in fact, the moral equivalent of the founding fathers, our founding fathers.
You know, it suited the United States to coddle these people, as it has all these years, the government of Saudi Arabia because of its oil, not because of its enlightened policies. And in many people in these countries, there is a healthy secular opposition. There’s women’s movement, there’s human rights movement. So, in all respects, I think one can find not only the elements but the wide currents of modernity inside contemporary Islamic societies.
The question is that they are engaged in a political struggle with people who want to take Islam back to some earlier state. Just as in this country, we have people who want to return—well, we have [Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson and all the hundreds of thousands, millions even, of fundamentalist Christians in this country who want to return us to a puritanical and simpler society.
So that’s the war. It’s not between Islam and the West. It’s between ideas of the past that exist in the West and ideas of the past and of the correct tradition that exists in the Islamic world and indeed everywhere.
Jewish world, look at the struggle within Israel between different interpretations of Judaism. So, I would say it’s really the struggle of interpretations and not the struggle between modernity of the West and the success of America, which most people in the Arab world that I know find very attractive and somewhat at odds with America’s behavior internationally, as a major, as the only superpower on one hand. And people want to, who want to return society to its earlier, pure, less sinful state, I mean that exists everywhere.
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