The Enemy At Home (17 page)

Recently Sheikh Fahd Rahman al-Abyan, a prominent radical preacher, took up the theme of family deterioration in a sermon at a mosque in Riyadh. In America and the West, he said, “it has reached the point where the woman gives the orders, and there is no wonder that the women have become masculine. But what is amazing is that some men have become feminine. These ideas…have caused the downfall of entire societies.” Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, an influential figure who is regularly featured on Al Jazeera, recently focused on the prospect of homosexual marriage and its effect on the traditional family. “There are strong tendencies in the West to destroy the family,” Qaradawi said on his Al Jazeera program. “An example of this is the marriage of men with men, and women with women. Unfortunately some clergymen welcome this and perform these marriage ceremonies. In addition, several Western parliaments have permitted this practice that all religions oppose. They want to make homosexuality seem natural. They want to make this perversion widespread. This is what they want.”
³⁸

Finally, Islamic fundamentalists point out that these trends are openly fostered by America’s popular culture. As a result of American influence, Qutb writes, “Humanity today is living in a large brothel. One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations. Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and the sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts, and the mass media.” Qutb’s followers point to the increasingly blatant materialism, vulgarity, and decadence of American popular culture. The distinctive feature of this culture, they say, is its shamelessness. It is obsessed with sex and bodily functions. It promotes promiscuity and adultery. This is the culture that, according to the ayatollah Khomeini, “penetrates to the depths of towns and villages throughout the Muslim world, displacing the culture of the Koran.”
³⁹

Masoumeh Ebtekar, the highest-ranking woman to serve in the Iranian government, condemns the “degradation” of what she terms the “Hollywood lifestyle” and asks, “Must we all conform to Hollywood’s view of human nature, which mostly stresses what is base rather than noble in humanity?” In a harsher vein, one Islamic radical who lived in California, Majid Anaraki, describes the United States as “a collection of casinos, supermarkets, and whorehouses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere.” Far from feeling inferior to modern America, Qutb argues, true Muslims should feel revulsion and contempt. “The believer from his height looks down at the people drowning in dirt and mud.” Speaking of Western civilization in general, Shariati writes, “Let us leave behind this Europe that always speaks of humanity but destroys human beings wherever it finds them.”
⁴⁰

In a formulation that has become extremely influential among Islamic radicals, Qutb argues that America represents a new form of
jahilliya
—the same kind of barbarism and immorality that the Prophet Muhammad encountered in Arabia in the seventh century. In Qutb’s view the new barbarism is worse because at least the bedouins were ignorant. The bedouins didn’t know about monotheism, they hadn’t yet encountered Islam. By contrast, Qutb argues, the new
jahilliya
is far worse because it is based on knowledge; it represents “aggression against God’s governance on earth.”
⁴¹
In this view, the United States has willfully rejected Christianity and chosen to celebrate a pagan culture and a depraved system of morality. Qutb concludes that it is one thing for America to degrade itself, and quite another for America to use its wealth and power to impose ruin on the rest of the world.

Islam, the fundamentalists say, is the real target of America’s immoral fury. In the words of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, “The enemies are after Islam, not the official Islam that moves freely in the royal palaces, but the Koranic Islam. These are the committed Muslims that the enemy seeks to destroy, calling them extremists, radicals, and terrorists.”
⁴²
In the view of Muslim fundamentalists, the reason for America’s hostility is quite simple: the Muslims are the last of the true believers. Of all the monotheistic religions, only Islam continues to maintain its hold on its members. Most Jews and Christians are only nominally religious, and at best, their religion takes up one part of their existence. But for Muslims all over the world, even today, Islam remains central to their lives. As the fundamentalists see it, Islam represents the last bastion of monotheism in a pagan world. No wonder, they say, that the U.S. has gathered up all its forces to destroy Islam. If Islam falls, the rule of Satan on earth will be achieved, and its name will be Planet America.

FIVE

Innocence Lost

Liberalism and the Corruption of Popular Culture

T
HE ISLAMIC HOSTILITY
to American culture, shared alike by radical and traditional Muslims, raises a simple but disturbing question: are they right? Does Western culture promote immoral values that corrupt people, especially the young? Is American culture now so decadent and depraved that it is a danger to the world, especially to the traditional cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East? If we wish to understand the vehemence of anti-Western feeling among traditional cultures, these questions cannot be ignored. They are critical to formulating an approach to the problem of anti-Americanism around the world. The charge of cultural depravity is one that we should take seriously, not because America needs to persuade radical Muslims to like us, but because America needs to persuade traditional Muslims not to become radical Muslims.

The accusation of decadence against the West is obviously valid in one sense: Western societies (including America) are not reproducing themselves. Western civilization is decadent in the quite literal sense that its people are slowly dying out. Europeans are having so few children that their populations are shrinking. The only way that Europeans are moderating this population loss is through immigration—mainly Muslim immigration. We in the West are accustomed to thinking of our society as strong due to its affluence and technology. But another measure of a civilization’s strength and self-confidence is its desire to perpetuate itself. As Patrick Buchanan writes, “The Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families and faith. Today it is as difficult to find a Western nation where the native population is not dying as it is to find an Islamic nation where the native population is not exploding.”
¹

In this chapter, I examine the charge of decadence, not in the sense of population decline, but in the sense of moral decline. Imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society where unmarried men and women do not shake hands, where modesty and decorum are highly prized, where girls who are not virgins cannot find men to marry them, where homosexuality is taboo and against the law. Economist Deepak Lal relates an episode from a few years ago, when he was staying in Beijing with the Indian ambassador to China: “Beijing was hosting a UN Conference on Women, and the female delegates were housed in a large tent city. One night the ambassador was woken by an agitated Chinese official asking him to rush to the tent city as the Indian delegates were rioting. On getting there he found that the trouble began when some American delegates went into the tents of their Third World sisters and tried to initiate them into the joys of gay sex. With the Indians in the lead, the Third World women chased the American women out of their tents, beating them with their slippers.”
²

My mother, who is in her early seventies, lives in Mumbai and watches a good deal of television. Many of the shows regularly broadcast on Indian TV are American. My mom finds them fascinating and repulsive at the same time. “It’s quite extraordinary how people who have just met each other start taking their clothes off and having sex,” she tells me. “I also find the language to be coarse. Some of it is very disgusting, the things that they talk about.” Confronted by talk-show episodes of the Jerry Springer variety, my mother cannot help concluding that “these Americans seem very weird and abnormal.” I remind my mother, of course, that this is entertainment. Most Americans don’t live this way. My mother’s point is, “Yes, but I’m surprised to see all of this indecency on television. Imagine if someone came into our living room and started talking like that. What would we think of such a person? I would ask him to leave the house! Don’t Americans have any sort of standards?” Her reaction is not unique. One American academic who teaches in Southeast Asia writes about how appalled young Cambodians, who are struggling to survive, must be to confront American TV dilemmas: “My God, did you see the way that Buck looked at Latrice? And isn’t it just sad the way that Skippy is so controlling toward his boyfriend Allan?”
³

We have heard a great deal from critics of globalism about how America is corrupting the world with its multinational corporations and its trade practices. But surveys such as the Pew Research Center studies of world opinion show that non-Western peoples are generally pleased with American products. In fact, the people of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East want more American companies, more American technology, and more free trade. Their objection is not to McDonald’s or Microsoft but to America’s cultural values as transmitted through movies, television, and music. Huge majorities of more than 80 percent of people in Indonesia, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, and Turkey say they want to protect their values from foreign assault. The Pew study concludes that there is a “widespread sense” that American values, often presented as the values of modernity itself, “represent a major threat to people’s traditional way of life.” These sentiments are felt very keenly in the Muslim world. As an Iranian from Neishapour told journalist Afshin Molavi, “People say we want freedom. You know what these foreign-inspired people want? They want the freedom to gamble and drink and bring vice to our Muslim land. This is the kind of freedom they want.”
⁴

We sometimes assume that the Muslim critique applies to American mass culture and are sometimes startled to see that it also applies to American “high culture.” In her best-selling book
Reading
Lolita in Tehran,
Azar Nafisi describes a group of Iranians who gather regularly to discuss “great books.” They are discussing
The Great Gatsby
when a man named Nyazi explodes with the following rant. “This book preaches illicit relations between a man and woman. First we have Tom and his mistress, the scene in his apartment—even the narrator, Nick, is implicated. He doesn’t like their lies, but he has no objection to their fornicating and sitting on each other’s laps, and those parties at Gatsby’s…remember, this Gatsby is the hero of the book—and who is he? He is a charlatan, he is an adulterer, he is a liar…. He earns his money by illegal means and tries to buy the love of a married woman…. This is the man Nick celebrates and feels sorry for, this destroyer of homes. This book is supposed to be about the American dream, but what sort of a dream is this? What kind of model are we setting for our innocent and modest sisters, by giving them such a book to read? The only sympathetic person here is the cuckolded husband, Mr. Wilson. When he kills Gatsby, it is the hand of God. He is the genuine symbol of the oppressed, in the land of the great Satan.”

Interestingly, Nafisi describes the uncomfortable reaction to Nyazi’s barrage on the part of several of the others who enjoyed reading the book. “Perhaps our honorable prosecutor should not be so harsh,” a woman named Vida says. “Gatsby dies, after all, so one could say that he gets his just deserts.” Rejecting the attempt at conciliation, Nyazi replies, “Is it just Gatsby who deserves to die? No! The whole of American society deserves the same fate.” At this point the author herself weighs in, seeking to expose Nyazi’s tirade as unsophisticated. “You don’t read
Gatsby
to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” To this pompous bromide, Nyazi delivers this crushing response: “There is nothing complicated about having an affair with another man’s wife. Why doesn’t Mr. Gatsby get his own wife?”
⁵

The radical Muslim critique embodied by Nyazi is disturbing. It does not attack American culture at its outer limits for “excesses” that can be found in any culture. Rather, it attacks American culture at its best, accusing Fitzgerald of trying to distinguish “good adultery” from “bad adultery” and employing his acknowledged talents to rationalize “good adultery.” Nyazi’s distress is not over the portrayal of the subject of adultery; rather, it is over the fact that there seems to be no moral standard condemning it. This, more than anything else, confirms in his mind the degeneracy of American culture.

Confronted by the accusation that American culture is decadent and immoral, many Americans respond defensively, even angrily. Liberals become especially indignant because they recognize that American popular culture is, for the most part, liberal culture. The values it celebrates—such as openness, diversity, and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality—are liberal values. Libertarians, who are champions of the free market, also become defensive because they are committed on ideological grounds to the view that if the market produced a particular result, it must be wonderful. Even conservatives tend to rush to the defense of American culture because it is, well, American. Some conservatives feel a patriotic duty to uphold American culture, especially against accusatory Muslims.

Consequently the response of many Americans to charges of cultural depravity is to dismiss those concerns as reflecting Muslim hypocrisy or a Taliban-like devotion to censorship and social control. Indeed, the Taliban banned music, television, the Internet, photography, card playing, and even kite flying. Public executions were one of the few permitted forms of mass entertainment. Women were forced to wear the burqa, and there were even regulations prescribing the lengths of men’s beards. The Taliban, however, is hardly representative of the Islamic world or even of radical Islam. While the Taliban’s rules met bin Laden’s approval, they were considered ridiculous and extreme throughout the Muslim world, even by the mullahs in Iran. Of course, the ruling regime in Tehran has produced its own idiocies. At one point Iran had a blind censor who was in charge of reviewing plays and films. The man would sit in the theater or movie house while an assistant described to him the action on the stage or screen, and then he would decide which parts needed to be eliminated. Traditional Muslims ridiculed the censor, but not on grounds of “free speech” or opposition to censorship per se. Rather, the point of traditional Muslims was that the man was in no position to discriminate between what should be allowed and what should be forbidden.

Moreover, hypocrisy is a charge to which most traditional Muslims, and even some radical Muslims, would plead guilty. Post-Khomeini Iran offers some revealing examples. Journalist Elaine Sciolino was surprised to discover that the ruling mullahs of Iran often exchange dirty jokes in private. One ayatollah is especially famous for his sexual innuendos. Asked why his conversations with his colleagues reflected such an extreme obsession with sex, the ayatollah replied, “Because I do not have any of it.” Sciolino gives other examples where rules and standards are abridged in practice. She notes that dancing, which is forbidden in Iran, is routinely taught under the guise of “exercise lessons.” Sciolino attended a wedding reception at a large villa, where the drinking and revelry were broken up by Iranian police who accused everyone of violating the law. Members of the rock band jumped over the wall into the next garden. The guests took refuge in the house. The bride’s father accompanied the police to jail and agreed to pay a fine. No sooner did the police leave than the bride’s relatives recalled the band, which resumed playing, and the party continued.
⁶

It is a commonplace in traditional cultures that people who espouse high moral standards sometimes indulge in the same wrongs they have publicly condemned. Many Americans took special glee in noting that the 9/11 hijackers went to strip clubs in Las Vegas, where they consumed alcohol and paid for lap dances.
⁷
One of the chief architects of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, reportedly visited the Philippines during the 1990s, where, posing as a businessman and using another name, he socialized in bars with Manila women. Traditional Muslims will acknowledge these lapses while insisting on a public norm that condemns them as lapses. Hypocrisy is not viewed as a major vice in traditional cultures. The reason is that it is considered better to uphold moral standards, while falling short, than to relinquish all standards on the grounds that human beings do not always live up to them.

Muslims may be hypocritical and support censorship, but these facts provide no basis for a defense of Western or American cultural depravity. An accusation cannot be refuted by pointing out that the accuser is guilty of the same offense. Moreover, the Muslims are not guilty of the charge that they launch against the West. Muslim societies can be faulted—I would fault them myself—for being excessively harsh or repressive in the enforcement of their standards. I cannot approve of the kind of censorship that is routinely tolerated throughout the Muslim world. Traditional societies can also be exposed for failing to conform to their own standards. But they cannot be accused of not having standards. Muslim leaders charge that Western culture—and specifically American culture—has no moral norms that it is willing to defend or uphold. In this view, the offenses of Western culture are especially frightening because they have no built-in remedy. Many people in traditional societies regard Western culture as a kind of malady for which there is no antidote or cure.

Some in the West appear to confirm the fears of the Muslims. A few years ago the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated. Newspapers in America portrayed Fortuyn as “right wing extremist” on account of his opposition to Muslim immigration. Fortuyn famously said that immigration should be halted because “Holland is full.” But as Europeans recognized, Fortuyn was no right-winger. Instead, he was a flamboyant homosexual whose argument was that Muslim immigrants were, on account of their religious beliefs, threatening the core values of Holland. In Fortuyn’s view, these core values were legal drugs, legal pornography, legal prostitution, and widespread social acceptance of homosexuality. If Fortuyn was a “conservative,” these were the values that he sought to conserve. Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by the Moroccan Muslim Muhammad Bouyeri, was a friend and admirer of Fortuyn. A foulmouthed man who publicly called Muslims “goat fuckers,” van Gogh was also famous for his sexual promiscuity and cocaine use. Following Fortuyn, van Gogh blasted Muslims for their “primitive” beliefs in contrast with Holland’s “progressive” ideals. Like Fortuyn, van Gogh cherished Holland for embodying precisely those values that traditional societies consider degenerate and immoral.
⁸