The West, the Arabs, and the Real Qaddafi

Benny Morris

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February 28, 2011

I have always believed that the Islamic Arab world was peculiarly resistant to Western ideas and the winds of change that blew in, over the centuries, from France, Britain and the United States. After World War II, Japan and Germany – admittedly conquered – changed; other countries – South Korea, Siam, much of Latin America – gradually bowed before what the West had to offer.

But not the Arab world. Building blocks, social, political, ideological and psychological, of that world – the grip of an absolutist Islam, the desert of vast, uneducated masses, the weight of unreformed tradition, tribal hierarchies and affiliations – all somehow conspired to bar the penetration of all those good ideas that the West has given the rest of the world since the Renaissance or, at least, since the French Revolution: democracy, liberalism, tolerance, individual worth, human rights, egalitarianism (including equality for women and homosexuals), etc.

But Western technological advances – expressed in the spread of television, internet, cheap travel – have at last succeeded, it seems, in carrying these ideas across seas and mountains and breaking down the opaque walls surrounding the Muslim Arab world. Maybe the biblical metaphor of Jericho is apt, of trumpets proclaiming ideas circumambulating the walls and gradually cracking them, until they have tumbled. At least some of the Arabs, the better educated, middle class youngsters, seem to have bought into the message from the West. 

Read the rest of the article on: The National Interest