الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

specifically political in nature and not cultural. Second, the violent expression of this fury is the activity of a small minority of Muslims. Therefore, the claim that this fury is directed against the West and Western culture is patently false as is the assertion that it is “Islam” that is the author of violent acts. The clarifying principle in this analysis is that the anger and the violent acts themselves are political responses to political transgressions. This suggests that the complaints are rational and are conducive to rational solutions i.e. the alteration of American foreign policy. In spite of the gravity of these political complaints, is it possible that America and Muslims may have in common a shared goal of democracy ? This is certainly rhetorically the case, due to the fact that the oppositional politics to the tyrannical regimes of the Middle East are clothed in the language of democracy. What Americans and Muslims share in common is the verbal desirability of this goal, but their implementation and understanding of this concept differs significantly. For example, the extravagant American democratic intent(e.g. the democratic far ?) is clothed in the rhetoric of freedom while in historical practice it has used it consistently to spread American power and hegemony. In fact, neoconservative intellectuals quite openly speak of American imperial liberalism i.e. the use of military force and extended military occupation in order to achieve democratization(e.g. Stanley Kurtz, “Democratic Imperialism: A Blue Print” http://policyreview.org/apr03/kurtz_print.html ) Muslim political leaders are able to confirm this same process at work presently in the Middle East. This can be termed a policy of “democracism” that is, the use of the ideology of democratization in order to achieve imperial domination and control. The resistance to this policy by Muslim leaders leads to misleading conclusions by American policy makers and supporting American academic opinion that Islam is indeed resistant to democracy. Thus what Western critics term “illiberal democracy” i.e. the grudging formality of democratic practice in the absence of internalized constitutional principles is possibly at least partly due to anti-imperialist

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