c. 2003 Religion News Service

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia _ The dry, hilly landscape of the Arabian peninsula bordering the Red Sea is known as the Hijaz. This, the cradle of Islam, is the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad and the home of Mecca and Medina.

As a trading hub and the epicenter of successive waves of Islamic expansion over 13 centuries, the Hijaz has served as a fulcrum of sorts for struggles between Muslim lands and the West.

Sixteen months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, relations between the West and the Islamic world that radiates from this arid region are once again at a critical point, many analysts say.

A series of attacks on U.S. citizens in the Middle East in recent weeks and a tide of anti-Americanism are raising fresh doubts about the potential for rapprochement between the West and Islam.

The factors responsible are many. They include U.S. support for both Israel and repressive Arab regimes, economic distress in Arab states and friction between modernity and traditional Islam.

The U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf, at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has received little attention from Washington, appears to be adding especially combustible fuel to the flames of militancy and public anger.

“What many people in this region view as the humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the West comes down to the Palestinian question,” said Taher El-Masri, a former prime minister of Jordan. “Until you change that situation, talk of war in Iraq will only fan more hatred of America and more extremism in the Arab street.”

The findings of a major international public opinion poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and published last month highlight this churning frustration.

According to the survey, which was based on interviews with 38,000 people in 44 countries, the image of the United States has suffered a major blow in the Middle East from a sense that Washington is ignoring the region’s problems and targeting Muslim countries in the war on terrorism.

Discontent with America has increased around the globe, but the Pew survey found that “true dislike, if not hatred, of America is concentrated in the Muslim nations of the Middle East and in Central Asia.”

This has been particularly true in two countries that have played important roles in the U.S.-led war on terrorism: Turkey, where the number of people offering a positive opinion of the United States has dropped by 22 percentage points in three years, and Pakistan, where it has fallen by 13 points.

Among the Muslim countries surveyed, only the people of Mali and Uzbekistan supported the American war on terrorism. In Egypt and Jordan, two key U.S. allies, eight of 10 people surveyed opposed it.

Recent interviews in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia found palpable frustration in nearly every arena of public life over American foreign policy.

In Damascus, Syria, merchants in the old city market complained bitterly about Washington.

“We are against U.S. policy because it is against Arabs,” said Muhammad Samir Boukai, a 38-year-old electronics salesman. “It is not fair the way America treats the Palestinians. And now this war on Iraq _ it is too much!”

In Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, opposition to a war against Iraq was nearly unanimous _ echoing the Pew study, which found that 80 percent of Turks oppose the use of military bases in their country to support a U.S.-led assault on Baghdad.

“I could understand the war in Afghanistan,” said Ismail Kursuncu, who sells knives at Istanbul’s downtown fish market. “But the United States still hasn’t proved that Saddam poses a threat to anyone other than his own people. This is crazy.”

Anger at the United States has erupted in a number of recent attacks overseas. In some cases, such as the killing of U.S. service members in Kuwait and a U.S. diplomat in Jordan, the attacks have been aimed at official targets. But the recent slaying of a nurse in Lebanon, who was also a Christian activist, and the shootings of three Baptist missionaries in Yemen seem to indicate a growing desire to strike out at any American.

“This should surprise no one,” said Abdul Salam El-Majali, a former Jordanian prime minister who helped negotiate several Israeli-Palestinian accords during the 1990s. “As long as American policy shows a disregard for the frustrations of the Arab world, this kind of militancy will continue, or even increase.”

The slaying of the Christian activist and missionaries also raises the specter of a conflict with increasingly religious overtones. “There is a danger,” said El-Majali, “that this could spiral into a much broader conflict between the Islamic world and the West.”

The Bush administration has tried hard to prevent this. President Bush has repeatedly stated the United States is “not at war with Islam,” and the Department of State has launched a massive public relations campaign that features Arab-American success stories.

But the history of strife between the West and the Islamic world casts a long shadow across the modern Middle East.

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The conflict has existed since the days of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, who united the warring tribes of the Arabian peninsula and converted them to the faith. During the century that followed his death, Arab soldiers conquered a vast empire that stretched from Afghanistan in the east to Portugal in the west.

This first, massive advance of Islam was halted in the year 732 at Poitiers, France, but it continued elsewhere _ mostly in the east, through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and much of Southeast Asia.

The spread of Muslim rule produced a violent backlash in Europe, where religious and political leaders responded with a series of Crusades that are still remembered vividly in the Arab world for their bloodiness.

The religious nature of the conflict was made clear by Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade in 1095. According to a history of that era by British scholar Karen Armstrong, Urban deemed it a Christian duty to “exterminate this vile race from our lands.”

The dominance of Islam in the Middle East, Asia and northern Africa ebbed and flowed through the following centuries, but it began a sustained decline with the rise of European colonialism in the 1600s. By the end of World War I, vast stretches of the Muslim world were under European control.

That changed in the two decades after World War II, as Islamic states gained independence. But power was seized quickly by Westernized elites, who pursued _ in many cases _ a relentlessly authoritarian course.

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In recent decades, frustration with the repressive regimes of the Arab world, coupled with anger over U.S. support for Israel, has deepened a well of anger at the West that is religious and militant in nature, experts say.

The most extreme example is Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, which has committed itself to expelling the Western “infidel” from Muslim lands and once again establishing Islamic rule from northern Africa to southeast Asia.

“When is the United States going to wake up and realize that they are breeding a generation of people that hates America?” asked Nabil Sukkar, a Syrian economic analyst. “The whole conflict between us comes from U.S. foreign policy, but Americans do not want to see it that way.”

If blame for East-West tensions is placed by some at the United States’ door, others argue that Arab leaders are at least as responsible for the current state of affairs.

“Arab and Muslim hatred of the United States is not just, or even mainly, a response to actual U.S. policies _ policies that, if anything, have been remarkably pro-Arab and pro-Muslim over the years,” wrote Barry Rubin, a Middle East expert, in a recent edition of the magazine Foreign Affairs.

Instead, Rubin contended, this anger stems from Arab leaders’ strategy of criticizing the United States to distract attention from serious domestic problems.

Chief among those problems, many analysts say, is the near total lack of democracy in the Muslim world. Despite small experiments in countries like the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, authoritarianism is the rule.

The major exception is Turkey, which has provided something of a model for Islamic democracy in recent decades. Observers say the recent electoral victory of a party with Islamic roots could add to the appeal of the Turkish example.

“Up until now, the presumption has been that Christian countries can become democratic and Islamic countries cannot,” said Soli Ozel, a professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University and editor of the Turkish edition of Foreign Policy magazine. “The evidence for this has been simple: Most Muslim countries happen not to be democracies.”

If Turkey’s experiment is successful, however, “it is possible that the stigma that the world puts on Muslim countries will be gone _ and, at the same time, it could provide greater opportunity for Muslim countries to develop as democratic, capitalist nations. That would be a huge weight off everyone’s shoulders.”

Arab nations have also fallen into dire economic straits in recent decades despite rich energy resources, tourism potential and a history of thriving commerce.

Recent studies show the region has been plagued by slow growth, a lack of foreign investment and a rise in population that have driven unemployment figures into double digits in many places.

According to the United Nations Arab Human Development Report 2002, the gross domestic product for all Arab countries combined in 1999 stood at $531.2 billion _ less than that of a single European country, Spain, at $595.5 billion.

Analysts attribute most of the Arab world’s economic woes to an unwillingness to embrace the forces of globalization.

“If these countries do not integrate more into the global economy, then we are going to see an increase in frustration and misery for a lot of people,” said Rodney Wilson, an economist at the University of Durham in England. “And there are connections between things like slow economic growth and terrorism.”

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Becoming more competitive in global markets will take more than simply lowering the barriers and reforming the financial institutions that shield Arab economies, however. It will require widespread changes in education systems, experts say.

Here in Saudi Arabia, for instance, recent studies have shown a heavy focus on rote learning of religious texts, at the expense of science, math and language instruction that could provide workers for a high-tech economy.

The Saudi curriculum “simply does not offer the kind of critical thinking skills that you need. It is heavily invested in memorization, and it’s not even good at what it does,” said Eleanor Doumato, a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and author of “Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam and Healing in Saudi Arabia.”

Doumato, who recently conducted a study of religious texts used in Saudi schools, said religious instruction accounts for 35 percent of classroom time in elementary school, and only slightly less in middle school. In high school, four hours of religion a week is required for everyone _ and for those who choose a traditional “religion track,” it is nearly all they study, she said.

Until governments from Riyadh to Cairo deal with these kinds of domestic issues, many analysts say, rapprochement between the West and the Islamic world will be difficult to achieve _ even with a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate or a softening of Washington’s policies toward Muslim states like Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“Various public relations efforts, apologies, acts of appeasement or policy shifts will not by themselves do away with anti-Americanism,” concluded Rubin in his article published in Foreign Affairs. “Only when the systems that manufacture and encourage anti-Americanism fail will popular opinion also change.”

DEA END HASSELL