الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @ Civilization or Political: The Reality of the Present Tension between the Muslim World and the West

package, enforced throughout the world in the name of the modern, for cultural and value-related diversity is not only an inherent feature of the world community but also a recognized feature of American and European societies themselves. Tensions and conflicts, on the other hand, are mainly of political and economic origins. Although Islam, as a religion and historical experience, is providing the repository of Muslim oppositional discourse, it is the American and, generally speaking, western policies that are the subject of opposition. It was the American military presence, not the American oil and computer engineers, which first engendered Saudi objections in the 1990s. Arab and Muslim forces opposed to the western policies towards the Palestinian question and to the occupation and destruction of Iraq are perhaps the same forces that struggle for democracy and human rights in the Muslim world. However, it would be wrong to underestimate the influence of the western imperialist legacy on the making of the Muslim psyche. Except for two or three countries, almost the whole of the Muslim world fell under western imperialist control during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The British and American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are reviving not very old memories of foreign domination, while the French nostalgia for the age of imperialism is unleashing the anger of those who lost fathers and grandfathers in the Algerian struggle for liberation. This whole situation is further complicated by the pain associated with the reconstruction of consensus in Muslim countries. Without the existence of consensus on the foundations of state and society no stable system of governance can emerge and no nation can prosper. But as modern European history has shown, the construction of consensus is not necessarily the function of peaceful debating, but rather an outcome of long and protracted power struggle, nationally and regionally. With the western forces’ unceasing meddling in the internal affairs of Muslim countries, no such

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