A further mechanism for the imposition of American values is the rule of U.S.-supported dictators like Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, and Abdullah in Jordan. These dictators typically restrict or even eliminate Islamic laws and rules, replacing them with Western laws and institutions. In this way, the ayatollah Khomeini said, “they strive to annihilate Islam.” Khomeini gave the example of the shah’s decision in 1976 to abolish the Islamic calendar and replace it with a secular calendar. The Islamic calendar dates time from the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in the year 622 of the Christian era. The shah instituted a new calendar based on the supposed date on which Emperor Cyrus established his monarchical rule over ancient Persia. Khomeini also condemned the shah for getting rid of sharia rules regarding marriage and divorce, and extending voting rights in local elections not only to women but also to non-Muslims. Khomeini was most vehement in castigating the shah for decriminalizing alcohol, gambling, and adultery, noting that “Islam makes no provision for the orderly pursuit of these illicit activities.”34
The general charge that fundamentalists make against despots past and present is that in exchange for U.S. military and political support for their regime, they open up their countries to the polluting influences of American social institutions and popular culture. Fundamentalists charge that in every case, the United States seeks to strengthen those forces that are operating in the Muslim world to secularize the society, destroy the family, corrupt the children, and degrade the culture.
Here, then, is the heart of the radical Muslims’ case against America and the West. Fundamentalists portray America as a nominally Christian but de facto atheist society. Although people in America call themselves Christian, Qutb writes, their actions prove that they are indifferent to God and that their real religion is materialism. In this respect, “The materialistic outlook on life is the same in Communism and in the civilization of the West.” Moreover, Qutb says, even when Americans do go to church it is usually for social display or to meet members of the opposite sex. Protestant preachers, he writes, are mainly entertainers who put on all kinds of circus antics to attract listeners and then measure success by how many people come marching down the aisle.35 Qutb is especially revolted by the fact that in America religion has been driven out of public life and has nothing to do with the institutions of government. So the de facto atheism of the people is reinforced by the de jure atheism of the laws. As a consequence of the American doctrine of separation of church and state, Qutb writes, “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and his rule on earth is suspended.”36
The best indication of American depravity that Muslim fundamentalists point to is the collapse of the traditional American family. Qutb writes, “If free sexual relationships and illegitimate children become the basis of a society; and if the relationship between man and woman is based on lust, passion, and impulse, and the division of work is not based on family responsibility and natural gifts; and if the woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children; and if, on her own or under social demand, she prefers to…spend her ability working for material productivity rather than in the training of human beings, because material production is considered more important, more valuable and more honorable than the development of human character, then such a civilization…cannot be considered civilized, no matter how much progress it makes in industry or science.”37
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
L
iberalism and the Corruption of Popular Culture
THE 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.
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