"Anti-Americanism" in the Arab World: an Interpretation of a Brief History Makdisi

"Anti-Americanism" in the Arab World:
An Interpretation of a Brief History
Makdisi

This essay turns to history to answer the oft-asked question "Why do they (Arabs) hate us (America)?"
True, you cannot generalize about 280 million Arabs each with its own tradition and history. However, there are certain historical and political contexts that can explain the rise of anti-American sentiment.
The claim: Anti-Americanism is a recent phenomenon fueled by American foreign policy, NOT an epochal "clash of civilizations". * At the time of WW1 the image of the US in the Arab provinces of the OE was generally positive: Arabs saw it as a great power that was not imperialist like Britain, France or Russia. Americans, who lived in the region, to a large extent the missionaries, were pioneers in the realm of higher education. American colleges and universities were established in many places in the ME and many Arabs experienced "Liberal America". * BUT the 20th century American policies in the region complicated the meaning of America for Arabs: Those anti-American feelings stem less from a blind hatred of the US or its values but from a profound ambivalence about America: on the one hand an object of admiration for its films, its technology (and for some its secularism, law, order) and on the other hand, a source of deep disappointment given the ongoing repressive US policy in ME. * In the aftermath of 9/11 anti-American sentiments are present more than ever thus it is important to understand their nature and origins.

Benevolent America
End 18th- Beginning 19th century – beginning of American involvement in the Arab world.
American ships were captured in the Mediterranean and taken captive by Moroccans and Algerians. The negotiations and skirmishes are known as the Barbary wars.
The most famous case: 1803 - the capture of the "Philadelphia" that was on the way to Tripoli and the ransom and release of the American captives in 1805.
The image of Islam in the US during this period crystalized the existing negative Western images of the Muslim and Ottoman world such as: * "Mohammedanism" signified the antithesis of true religion, that is to say, Christianity.

The development of an American-genre orientalism:
19th century U.S. travelers' discourses of the Orient – intensified such perspectives, specifically of Palestine: * a "Holy Land mania" - religious obsession with Palestine that gripped American travelers, artists and writers. * The Arab inhabitants of Palestine were described as dirty natives or impious Mohammedans. * the sacred landscape was often separated from its native Arab inhabitants.

The New England led Missionaries * prejudiced, with feelings of superiority to the natives, they sought to reclaim the lands of the Bible from Muslim and Eastern Christian control. * They were the first Americans to seriously engage with the local population: they wanted to change the Ottoman world, not just to describe or experience it. * Proclaiming the urgent need to save the "perishing souls" of the East. * Religious achievements: almost none. There was some local interest in the evangelical message of the missionaries and in their new unmediated approach to the Scriptures, but usually it fell on deaf ears and was effectively countered by the native churches that warned their communities. * A Maronite Christian was the first Arab convert to Protestantism, but he was imprisoned by the Maronite Church. * Their function as a bridge between cultures: except for introducing religious messages, they also brought with them American manners and customs, clothes, education, and medicine. Simultaneously, they sought to introduce Americans to actual inhabitants, societies, histories, and geographies that were excluded by the exotic discourse of American orientalism. * Arabs were described as "promising objects of missionary endeavor" being a "very talented race" (praised their science, mathematics that were completely different but accurate, Algbra is Arabic, Astronomy, philosophy.. also their rich history, poetry and literature). * the development of modern Arabic printing fonts which set the standard for 19th-century Arabic printing was pioneered by a missionary in Beirut. * Educated elitist locals were impressed by the enthusiasm of the American missionaries and advocated a "modern" nation and to educate their otherwise "ignorant" compatriots. both societies learned from each other. * The rejected evangelical effort was transformed with time into a major project of essentially secular liberal higher education embodied in institutions such as the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. * This conversion from direct proselytization that was openly intolerant of other faiths to more liberal persuasion was fraught with tension. The secularization of the missionary enterprise led to a dramatic increase in Western presence in the non-Western world in the late 19th century. That ascendancy led to a codification of national and racial prejudices from designations of professors, to differential pay scales, to the insistence that only the English language could be a medium of modern instruction-that discriminated against Arabs even as it offered them educational opportunities that they readily grasped. * Students of the Syrian Protestant College-known locally as the "American college" long before it changed its name to the American University of Beirut in 1920 played a crucial role in building a thriving late Ottoman Arab print culture, and its medical graduates greatly contributed to the development of modern health care in Lebanon and the Arab world. Innovative modern education and the absence of American government imperialism in the late Ottoman Empire contributed to the benevolent image of the US in such places as Beirut, Istanbul, and Tehran. * Thousands of Arabs immigrated to America in the late 19th century. * Qasim Amin, the famous 19th-century Egyptian advocate of women's liberation, praised American virtues, specifically the freedom of women in America. As a consequence, women's freedom in the US is much greater than that of European women. * Philip Hitti, a great scholar of Arab history and the founder of oriental studies at Princeton University, was an immigrant to the US. In 1924 he describes America as a young and dynamic country like no other in which people are superior in their qualities and believes in the role of America in revitalizing older Eastern cultures. * Sayyid Qutb (!) 1948 said after traveling to America: America has a principal role in this world in all that requires mind power, in practical matters and scientific research, improvement, production, and management. But still he criticized US materialism, lack of spirit and emotion and discrimination of blacks. For humanity to be able to benefit from American genius they must add great strength to the American strength. * None of these and other Arabs in the first half of the 20th century, initially saw America as an enemy.

World War I: America and the Arabs at a Crossroads
World War I - the idea of a benevolent America reached its peak among Arabs: * Educational efforts in the region * Provided aid to Beirut during a terrible wartime famine. * President Wilson's proclamations on self-determination differentiated the US from the European powers in the eyes of the Arab nationalist elite. which had agreed to partition the postwar Middle East much as they had partitioned Africa in the late nineteenth century, with the notable difference that Africa was partitioned openly while the Arab world was carved up secretly. * Balfour Declaration of 1917 * Promised British support for the establishment of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine despite the fact that 90% inhabitants were Arabs. The Arabs were furious and viewed it as European colonialism trying to dispose them of their lands. * The King-Crane commission * Wilson formed a mission to find out what the Arab peoples wanted, which contradicted the spirit of the Balfour Declaration and the colonial wisdom on which it was based. * GB and FR opposed it. Zionist leaders were worried about it, as interviews with natives threatened to expose a fundamental problem of the Zionist project in Palestine: By what right could one create a Jewish state in a land where the vast majority of the indigenous population was not Jewish?! * The final report: 1) Recommended an independent unified Arab state in Syria, Palestine and Lebanon that, if necessary, should be placed under American mandatory control (drawing on a history of American missionary contributions to higher education in the region). 2) Noted that the Arab people declared their trust in the US. They know its unselfish goals (non-colonial) and genuinely democratic spirit. 3) Urged to limit the program for unlimited immigration of Jews, aimed to make Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.

The King-Crane report fell on deaf ears in Washington, London, and Paris. Wilson, who had already committed himself to the Balfour Declaration and to British imperial interests, did not publish the report officially.
In 1920 Palestine became a British mandate formally committed to the terms of the Balfour Declaration. * Outside of some missionary circles, Arabs existed in popular American imagination in silent films and novels, represented as exotic, outlandish, primitive, romantic desert nomads or medieval city dwellers but not as a modern people deserving political rights and ready for independence.

Modern Politics and the Emergence of Anti-Americanism
The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 – here was a direct strategic interest of the US in the Middle East, not in mandatory Palestine or Syria.
US Middle Eastern policy: * Immediate post-WW1 decades – passive * Post-WW2 - far more extensive and direct.
Result: symbiotic relationship b/w American oil companies, US gov't and the emerging Saudi state.
"Cities of Salt" (1984) a novel by Abdel Rahman Munif depicts: * almost overnight conversion of an Arab tribal society into an oil kingdom, that led to corruption and the alienation of rulers that became independent of their subjects and dependent on oil companies and foreign protection. * the historical tensions b/w American racialist paternalism toward Arabs were embodied in the collaboration with the Arabs that was only to explore and profit from oil. * The Saudi state became an oil frontier also for thousands of Arabs from the Levant and migrant workers from South Asia. * The Saudi regime emerged: * on the one hand - dependent on the US and the migrants * on the other hand - emphasizing its "pure" version of Islam (=non-Americanism) to maintain its legitimacy with its own people. * The US still remained a land of opportunity for many Arabs and American oil companies were instrumental for profits of many Gulf Arab states.

The Cold War intensified US suspicion of the populist secular Iranian and Arab nationalisms to be potentially destabilizing forces in the ME: * Iran: * nationalized the British-dominated Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 the CIA organized the overthrow of the nationalist PM Mohammed Mossadeq. * Then, the US supported the dictatorship of Reza Shah Pahlavi, ignoring the tremendous popular disaffection with his rule. * As late as 1978, J. Carter praised "the great leadership of the Shah, which had turned Iran into an island of stability". The US (with Israeli advisers) helped the Shah establish SAVAK, the internal security agency that rounded up and tortured political prisoners. * Keddie, about the 1979 Iranian revolution: "American policies in Iran led to a marked increase in anti-American feeling". * Egypt: * A similar process, American disliked Nasser and his secular Pan-Arab nationalism, whereas the Arab world saw him as a charismatic leader and an authentic voice for Arab aspirations. * The Americans portrayed him as dangerously ambitious. They were led by the cold-war logic that posed a danger of the alleged Soviet intrusion into the ME. * Nasser's 1955 decisions to seek arms from the eastern bloc and the 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal were viewed as destabilizing to pro-Western regimes in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq. * 1958 Iraqi monarchy fell - 14,000 American troops were immediately sent to a Lebanon embroiled in civil conflict. They were sent to support the pro-Western regime of Camille Chamoun and also to signal U.S. determination to stave off perceived radical Arab nationalism and Soviet expansionism.
This support of conservative autocratic regimes fostered a 1st round of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world. It was similar to the anti-Americanism evident in Latin America and Asia, where the US often sided with dictatorships in the name of fighting Communism and radical nationalism.
This anti-Americanism was not characterized by hatred of America or American things, but by a relatively new identification of American power as a force for repression rather than liberation.
Nasser expressed it in 1958: America fought colonialism as we fight colonialism.... How do they deny us our right to improve our condition just as they did theirs? why they do not respect the will of the peoples of the Arab East?
The secular anti-imperialist rhetoric now regarded the US government as a representative of the historic force of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, and as a power holding the Arab world back from its rightful post-colonial place.
This secular criticism of America was not based on "clash of civilizations" theory, but on a historic clash between the reactionary forces of imperialism and the progressive forces of revolution. US supported regimes, such as the shah's against supposedly more progressive ones.
BUT criticism was tempered by the fact that the US as a nation remained a promised land for many, a source of admiration for still more.

Islamist opposition * Autocratic governments of the Arab world and Iran. * Unlike secularists, Islamists their politics were a response to the violation of tradition and envisioned a revival of a pure Islamic state and society. * Whereas 19th century Islamist reformers (e.g. al-Afghani or Muhammad 'Abdu), who had tried to reconcile Islam and the West, the Islamists now regarded the West as representatives of the antagonistic, secular and un-Islamic history, culture, and civilization. * The loss of Palestine and the dispersion of the Palestinians was justified and later ignored by the West. * Egypt - Qutb: * once awkwardly admired certain facets of the US, turned away from it due to its materialism and support for Israel. * Was arrested in 1954 following a failed assassination attempt on Nasser by a member of the MB. Among others he suffered at the hands of Nasser's secret police * was further radicalized, and ultimately advocated a struggle against rulers, including Nasser, an ignorant or jahili culture influential Islamist interpretation of history and politics as an age-old clash of civilizations between "believers" and their "enemies". Qutb did not oppose freedom, but what he saw as corruption, injustice, authoritarianism, and materialism imposed on Muslims by their enemies. (1966 - Qutb was hanged by Nasser) * 1967 Israel's success weakened secular Arab nationalism and so did the 1979 Iranian revolution which incited the Islamist alternative.
Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini – 1979 Islamic revolution * What Qutb (a Sunnite) advocated in Egypt, Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in Shiite Iran. 1979 the shah fell, which led to an intense power struggle between Islamists and secularists and among Islamists themselves also outside Iran. * denouncing American and Western culture, criticizing/ persecuting women, minorities, and Muslim men who did not conform to "proper" Islamic codes of conduct and opposing authoritarian governments. * Khomeini blamed America for supporting the shah's repressive regime. * American hostages (1980) - a dramatic illustration of the situation. * Khomeini: "The most important and painful problem confronting the subjugated nations of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim is the problem of America. America is the #1 enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world. There is no crime America will not commit in order to maintain its political, economic, cultural, and military domination of those parts of the world where it predominates. It exploits the oppressed people of the world by means of the large-scale propaganda campaigns that are coordinated for it by international Zionism. By means of its hidden and treacherous agents, it sucks the blood of the defenseless people as if it alone, together with its satellites, had the right to live in this world. Iran has tried to sever all its relations with this Great Satan and it is for this reason that it now finds wars imposed upon it". * Covert US and Saudi mobilization to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan just strengthened the Islamist anti-American sentiment. 80s and 90s - the US seemed clearly as the regional hegemon, the largest arms seller to the ME, supporter of Israel, and the guarantor of the authoritarian status quo in the Gulf States and since Camp David, in Egypt. * Islamists see the US as a leader of a new crusade, not only with religious connotations but political ideas of occupation and oppression. * The Lebanese Hezbollah - emerged following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which Israel used US weapons and was protected by US diplomatic support as it besieged an Arab capital for 3 months, killing thousands of civilians. Thus they regard the US as a major political enemy but have accommodated themselves to the multi-religious environment of Lebanese politics.

Anti-Americanism and Israel * Palestine is the issue that mostly causes Arab anger at the US. The nature, the depth, and the sheer intensity of Arab anger at the US about the issue of Israel is extreme.

Western perspective - the creation of the State of Israel represented Jewish national redemption, both because of a history of European anti- Semitism (Holocaust) and because of the centrality of the Jewish presence in Christian, particularly evangelical, thought about Palestine.
Arab perspective - Israel never has been and never could have been so understood. Palestine is a land whose overwhelming majority was Arab at the turn of the 20th century and for over a 1000 years before that and Zionism caused the destruction of Palestinian society and the dispossession of its Arab inhabitants.

* As early as 1938 George Antonius (Arab historian) warned the West about the implications of its support for Zionism in Palestine: * The treatment of Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to modern civilization; but placing the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world. It is morally outrageous: persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another (eviction of Jews from Germany cured by the eviction of Arabs from their homeland). * He did understand that the importance of Zionism for Jews cannot be ignored. They have put devoted hopes for many years in building up of the national home, and it would be indeed cruel to disappoint them if there was a way to satisfy them without being cruel to another people. * But the clear logic of facts is: there can be no room made for a second nation

From Palestine transformed to IsraelINJUSTICE * The original uprooting of the Palestinians in 1948 (Nakba catastrophe) + Israel's 1967 military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights = an occupation that remains in full force today. * Successive Israeli governments have steadily confiscated more and more Palestinian land and exiled Palestinians transforming the country's reality into a Jewish one. * Thus, Israel represents for Arabs, a gross injustice and its creation marked the triumph of Western colonialism over native Arabs. * Many foundations for American support for Israel: from evangelical to the secular, from Judeo-Christian alignment to Cold War strategy, from passionate belief in the necessity of a Jewish state to opportunistic appeal to American Jewish voters, and from memory of the Holocaust to a perception of Israel as a small democratic nation surrounded by hostile Arab nations. * For those reasons American financial support for Israel stands at nearly $3 billion a year, making it by far the single largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
The charge: US BIAS ISRAEL * US focus only on Israel's perspective renders its ability to perform its main role as the ultimate mediator and peacemaker. * Arab hostility to Israel is often assumed to be based on age-old or irrational hatreds, anti-Semitism, or antidemocratic Arab sensibility. * While TV stations such as Al-Jazeera show Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation, American TV represents the Palestinian-Israeli conflict largely as Arab violence against Israel and Israeli retaliation against this violence. * Officials have explicitly condemned Palestinian terror against Israeli civilians while remaining largely silent when Palestinian civilians in far greater numbers are killed by Israeli terror. * The dominant view in the Arab world is that American foreign policy regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict is shaped by the pro-Israel lobby, notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). * Even "pro-American" regimes such as Saudi Arabia are embarrassed by their apparent inability to make impact on this state of affairs. * Those not tied to the US, such as Hezbollah believe and declare that America bears responsibility for all of Israel, both for 1948 or in all its settlement policies after 1967. America doesn't pressure Israel on anything while it does so against the Palestinian Authority. * Arabs are also responsible for maintaining this situation: * given the lack of democratic governance in the Arab world the consequent inability of Arab leaders (Arafat) to define the Palestinian struggle for self-determination in terms that will resonate with the American public. * Many Arab regimes and opposition parties have ruthlessly exploited the Palestinian question * Those regimes treat Palestinians and their own citizens callously. * Arabs are deeply divided among themselves on the question of Palestine: how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. * Palestinians' own leadership under Yasir Arafat has successively alienated Arab people after people, beginning in Jordan, going on to Lebanon and Kuwait, both ruining the image and complicating the meaning of the Palestinian struggle within the Arab world. * Many Arab sins: from suppression of democratic opposition, the torture and banishment of insurgents and corruption of state institutions to the cultivation of one-party and one-family rule in Arab regimes (pro-American or not) from Saudi Arabia to Syria.

* However, the US is still charged with the unresolved basic issue that fuels this struggle (Arab natives evicted from their homes by Zionists, languishing stateless in refugee camps, and still suffering under Israeli occupation) that Arabs from all over the world, still strongly sympathize with the Palestinians as a people for their half century of misfortune and exile from their land. * Whatever good America does in the region (food aid, tech. assistance, edu., bilateral Arab-Israeli peacemaking), is overshadowed in Arab eyes by the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Arabs do not see the US as fair (siding Israel). * This Anti-American sentiment stemming from American support for Israel has been strengthened in the past decade by the American dominated UN sanctions against Iraq following the 2nd Gulf War have led to many deaths of Iraqi civilians (CBS: "half a million children" had died in Iraq as a result of sanctions, asking secretary of state Albright, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it). * Americans see the image of Saddam Hussein and hear about frightening "weapons of mass destruction." * Arabs see Iraq punished and humiliated for invading Kuwait while Israel is endlessly supported despite its far longer occupation of Lebanon, both occupations in clear defiance of UN resolutions. * Arab world view of America transformed: * beginning of the 20th century - see hope in America * mid-20th century – transformed into disillusionment * End 20th century – into outright anger and hostility.
Conclusion
* Most Arabs do not and will not act on this anger at U.S. policy in the region * They do separate what they think of American culture, of Americans, and of American foreign policy. * Yet 9/11 is an expression of immense Arab anger at the US. * Bin Laden is a manifestation of a deeply troubled Arab world beset by Arab government authoritarianism, arise of Islamic fundamentalism, Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands, continuing Palestinian exile, and, finally, by American policies toward the region during and after the Cold War that have done little to encourage justice or democracy. * Osama bin Laden's anti-American perspective is tied to anti secular and illiberal world view; it is fueled by a dangerous self-righteousness that divides the world neatly between believer and infidel, good and evil. But his actions and his vocabulary must be placed in their modern historical and political context if we are to draw any meaningful conclusions from them.

* Modern history indicates that the widespread Arab opposition to America is a sign of the times. It is based on a more recent anger at American policies in the region, especially toward Israel. * Therefore Anti-Americanism: * Is not civilizationally rooted, even if it is at times expressed in civilizational terms. * Doesn’t stem primarily from Islamic philosophy or exegesis, even if it is sometimes so expressed (especially at present). * A way to heal US-Arab relations: 4) Finding a just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that recognizes the equality and the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians. 5) Acknowledgment of both Jewish and Arab histories. 6) Realization by both Americans and Arabs of the interactive process that has shaped Arab attitudes toward the US and vice versa. * This essay has attempted to historicize the evolution of Arab attitudes toward the US, and it is written in the belief that similar attempts must be made to help explain the US and American society to the Arab world. To do so in any meaningful way, however, requires that both Arabs and Americans move away from narratives of innocence and purity whether of religions or of nations.