Transcript

We will talk about— we will talk about Occidentalism, and I suppose just what little I could add before we open it up to everyone— there's enormous talent in the audience, and I'm not going to detain Ian very long— does Edward Said [literary critic and Columbia University professor] fit over— does his shadow, I mean, the late Edward Said book on Orientalism, is this sort of the flipside of Edward's book? Is that the intention?

IAN BURUMA: Well, one of the misunderstandings that title, of course, provokes is that it's meant as a kind of an attack on, or a sort of snide attack on Edward Said. And although attacking Edward Said could be a pleasurable exercise— [laughter]--that's not the way this book was meant. In fact, we agreed that in the midst of some degree of white noise, Edward Said did have one important insight, which was that there was a view of the East, and particularly the Middle East, that was dehumanizing, in the sense that it presented the Oriental as somehow less than morally adult, and voluptuous, and like a child, and had to be sort of taken in hand by the virile and superior West. Now, we're really trying to argue that there is indeed a flipside to this, and that there's an equally dehumanizing view of the West, which is the kind of opposite of the child, the voluptuous child and the cruel child. The West is a kind of a machine, it is a ruthless, money-grubbing, soulless machine that has to be eradicated as a kind of poison in the organic communities that are the ideal of this kind of people who see the West in this light.

AJAMI: Now, [audience member] Bob Graff asked me to ask you, what is Occidentalism, if you were to define this cluster that you are talking about? What are you talking about? Is this anti-Americanism?

BURUMA: No, I think it's a common fallacy, held especially in this country but not only in this country. I think, also, in many other parts of the world, including those parts that are hostile, that the West is the United States or that Occidentalism is really about American foreign policy or about Hollywood movies. It's perfectly legitimate, sometimes even justified, to be critical of American foreign policy, or even have an aversion to Hollywood movies. That's not what Occidentalism really is. Occidentalism is a view of the West which actually goes back much further in history, which is partly the point of our book, than the different problems of American foreign policy, a view of the West that was associated at one time or another with Britain, with republican France, with various ideas in the West. It goes back at least to the counter-Enlightenment, of the West as a ruthless— and these are all code words, of course, of a kind— a ruthless, cosmopolitan, individualistic, soulless, atomized, I think, is the word, alienated civilization, totally dedicated to the pursuit of money and wealth and comfort, but has no spirit, and has a toxic effect on organic spiritual communities. We're talking in fantasies, of course, here, not in terms of geography, or clashes of civilizations that actually exist. So these are fantasies that have a toxic effect on those communities which see themselves as deep and rooted, and so on. There was even a phrase for this, coined by, I think, an Iranian intellectual, about whom you would know much more than me, which is "Westoxification."

AJAMI: Now, this book, I gather was written in Jerusalem, or— I mean, is this the—

BURUMA: Well—

AJAMI: I like to always—

BURUMA: Well, we had to divide the tasks.

AJAMI: Right.

BURUMA: And so, part of it is written in Jerusalem, part of it was written in London—

AJAMI: I'm not asking a Larry King question here. I mean, I'm getting somewhere. [Laughter.]

BURUMA: Yes, well, it was written in the capitals of evil in the eyes of the Occidentalists, of course.

AJAMI: Now, as you were writing this book— this was written in what, fall 2002?

BURUMA: Yes. Because the idea was around, but yes, I have to admit that we were galvanized by the events of 2001.

AJAMI: Right. So this is written in a shadow?

BURUMA: It was written in the shadow of September 11th, yes.

AJAMI: Yes, of 2001.

BURUMA: Absolutely.

AJAMI: Now, in fact, the Islamic parts of the book— I mean, it's not only Islamic, but the issue of Islam, of course, is what will immediately spring to mind. I mean, we're talking about the way these Islamists view the West, is that true? I mean, is that the—

BURUMA: Yes, because that was, of course, the catalyst. And so our argument is that Islamism, which is, of course, a political revolutionary movement, has— is rooted to some extent in the history of the Middle East and even Islam itself, but is actually a modern phenomenon which borrows a lot from Western ideas, European ideas. It's been around for a while and should not be seen as a uniquely Middle Eastern-Arab-Islamic phenomenon. And so we try and give it historical context.

AJAMI: You know, that's the problem— that's the point that causes me some problems, because I think you begin by saying, in fact, that Occidentalism derives from ideas in the West, which is true, an animus toward the city— is that right?--to this big, cosmopolitan, imperial capital, and that it travels to other lands. We know that that's so. But I think when I try to make the connection, for example, you have this, you quote this poem by T.S. Eliot, which has this kind of animus towards the city.

BURUMA: Yes.

AJAMI: Now, from there to Mohammad Atta, the psychopath who led these kamikazes on September 11th, 2001, there's a kind of leap that, I think, is a bit of a stretch for me, because I think this challenge isn't really about an animus toward the city. The Islamic world is heavily and deeply urbanized. As you and Avishai note in the book, I have to be fair to this, and indeed, for example, one of the leaders of this new Islamism that I'm very interested in, [founder of the Islamic terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad] Ayman [al] Zawahiri the man we— you know, the sort of quote-unquote, the number two, the deputy of Osama bin Laden, who really isn't the deputy to Osama bin Laden; he is a more impressive figure than Osama bin Laden, he comes from one of the great aristocratic urban families of Cairo. I mean, this is the Cairene aristocrat. It's not so much an animus towards the city, is it? I mean, how do—

BURUMA: Well, no, I agree, it can be seen as a stretch, and we're not saying that every group of movements that wish to destroy what they saw as toxic about the West would be exactly the same, or shared exactly the same. But there is— I think the animus towards— it's not the animus towards the city, as in the sense of the city being a large number of buildings; it's the animus towards a certain idea of the city. After all, I would argue that the Nazis had that same animus, and at the same time, Hitler, with his favorite architect, Albert Speer, spent many hours over models of their ideal of a new Berlin. But their idea of a new Berlin was not the kind of city that you or I would feel very comfortable in.

And if one includes, say, the Taliban in this Islamist revolutionary movement, consisting of very disparate parts, of course, they certainly have an animus again— to them Kabul is the wicked city. I think the— again, I'm on thin ice with you, but I would imagine that some Islamists in Saudi Arabia would see Riyadh as the wicked city. And so— and many of these people may actually themselves be from cities. It's, of course, not a contradiction. I think that often when one looks at sort of the— [inaudible]--which has violent revolutionary aspirations, it's often against the very class they come from, or the very places they come from, and so on. So, I think that you're right, that not every Islamist activist or holy warrior would have the same ideas about the city as the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia, who were very anti-Phnom Pen, of course, to the point of emptying the whole city and sending everybody to the countryside. But I think certain elements of Islamists certainly do share that.

AJAMI: I mean, the special thought of your book is, in fact, instead of looking at Islamic ideas as Islamic ideas, you talk about the contamination of ideas.

BURUMA: Yes.

AJAMI: In fact, you end up saying that, look, these ideas— the self-doubt about the West, travel to other lands— and other people take them and use them as a weapon against the West. I mean, I think— when I think of Mohammad Atta, when Mohammad Atta was making his brief against the Egyptian regime, his brief against [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak was to say that Mubarak was turning Egypt into McEgypt. Again, this sort of fits in with this.

BURUMA: Absolutely. And also, to make it clear that this is not a question— it's not a [Harvard professor Samuel] Huntingtonian thesis of East versus West, certainly not in a geographical way. To illustrate that point, I'll tell you how the idea came to us, which was during a walk one winter's day, Avishai and I took a walk in Highgate Cemetery in north London and paused in front of Karl Marx's rather hideous tomb. And to annoy the old boy, we put some stones on it because we knew that it would irritate him intensely. [Laughter.] And this led to a discussion about the antagonism of eastern, that is to say Polish and Russian, Jews towards German Jews. And as [political philosopher] Isaiah Berlin described Karl Marx as the typical German Jew, the yeke of all yekes. "His humor was as heavy as his food," I think was one Isaiah's comments. [Laughter.] And Avishai's family comes from part of this divide, and my family, part of my family, from the other. And Avishai was saying the traditional view of the German Jews in the shtetl [towns] was as inhuman, ruthless, efficient, imperialistic, money-grubbing people who had no soul. And this led, really, to further arguments— or not arguments, a further exploration of this theme when I saw parallels in things— with things I'd heard traveling to India and China and Japan, and so on, where you get a very similar juxtaposition of—

AJAMI: See, I have— as you might suspect, I have some political problem with what you're saying. And I want to tease out the— [inaudible]--of what you're saying, because I hear you saying this too shall pass. Right? This too shall pass, this new, virulent strain of Occidentalism, hatred, animus towards the West, hatred of the West, which comes at this time from the Islamic world. It shall pass, because we've seen it before, we've seen it's like before. And that this emanates through these Western sources, so therefore it cannot be terribly toxic; it can't be terribly lethal. See, I take a very different view of this. I think it's a very different kind of challenge. It's brand new. And I think to try— I think there is more comfort in your work than I am—

BURUMA: Than there should be.

AJAMI: Yes. See, I am not comforted.

BURUMA: Well, I'm not so sure I am— feel so comfortable about it either. I think there are new elements about this, which is that, in the case of the Nazis or the Japanese militarists in the 1930s, for example, the enemy was very clear and, actually, rather limited. It was narrowly defined. Horrible though the program of exterminating certain people is, Hitler did not set out to destroy the whole world outside of his own small [inaudible]. I think what is new about the Islamist revolutionaries is that they do see the world outside of the community of pure Islam as they see it as barbaric and savage and something that has to be eradicated. And this is, indeed, an extremely dangerous phenomenon. And it's— I think it is a revolutionary movement. I don't think solving the Palestinian problem, as some people hope, will make this problem go away. So— and we're not sanguine about that. I don't think, even if American foreign policy were guided by sweetness, light, and reason, that would make the problem go away either. I think the problem can only be solved ultimately in the countries that produced this movement itself.

AJAMI: This may be an unfair question. I mean, how do you, you and Avishai— where do you place yourselves politically in this debate about Islamism, the war on terror, the kind of— should we use force? Where— I can't see to be— I'm not able to place you.

BURUMA: Well, we didn't— we deliberately didn't want to make this book about policy. So there are no policy prescriptions. And I think that politically, Avishai and I, we don't agree about everything, and if we did, that would be dull. And he's a little bit older than I am, so he tends to be a bit more [inaudible] than I am. And I think, yes— I don't think we take a pacifist view of this. Both of us supported the war in Afghanistan, thought it was— the Taliban were an absolutely legitimate target. Both of us think that where force can be used to protect oneself against this revolutionary movement, it should be used. But that's not to say that going to war with Iraq was necessarily the best strategy. And so, speaking purely for myself, I have no great moral problems with going to war in Iraq. I can see human rights reasons for it. In fact, I can see good reasons for it which were not necessarily those that were given us at the time by the White House. But, if one sees this as a sort of global struggle, not against states, but against the revolutionary movements, which may be small in terms of numbers of people but can do huge amounts of damage because of technology and so on, then going to war with states governed by a brutal, secular dictatorship may not have been the right strategy to pick.

AJAMI: OK, I'm going to read you— there is a nice paragraph— I'm not that terribly lazy, it just happens to be the best paragraph and it's on the back [cover of the book]--[laughter]--because I want you to speak to it. I mean, really folks, I am a professor, that's what I do for a living. So I read everything, and I wouldn't have had that much nerve to come here unprepared. But here is something that I'd like to— I'd like you to comment on it because it does trouble me. The story you've told in this book is not one of a civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it's a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now if we fool with the temptation to fight fire with fire— Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We can't afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then, we would all become Occidentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend. Could you elaborate on that?

BURUMA: When I mean fire—

AJAMI: I don't think we're fighting fire with fire.

BURUMA: Well, I don't mean by that we can't use firearms. I mean, this is obviously a metaphor. And what I mean is that if the U.S. government, or a Western coalition, or the U.N., or whoever it is, tries to defend itself against violent attacks from religious or revolutionaries of this kind, retaliating with forms of violence is legitimate. What I oppose is the idea that we are fighting for Christendom, or that God is telling us what to do in these affairs, or that we should close our— that we should start arresting rather arbitrarily people with Muslim names, or—

AJAMI: Are we doing this, though?

BURUMA: Well, I think it has happened, yes.

AJAMI: I live on the Upper West Side in New York, so my neighbors, as soon as they read this, they will think "Wow, this is another beef against [U.S. Attorney General] John Ashcroft."

BURUMA: Well, the author of a famous book on the Taliban, a friend of mine called Ahmed Rashid, came in to the United States a year or so ago, after 9/11 of course, and for some odd reason flew into Dallas, was immediately arrested, and put in a cell with other people with Muslim names. He said to the local Dallas cops, "But— but— but I have an appointment at the White House tomorrow." [Laughter.] "Yeah, yeah," they said. They kept him for 48 hours. This is not the way to go. I think the—

AJAMI: But that anecdote isn't how we've really conducted ourselves— [inaudible]--

BURUMA: No, no. But the great thing about this country is its openness, and that people always felt that the U.S. represented a hope that, if you went there, you could live in freedom, you could make it or not make it, you could have another try. I think this—

AJAMI: Where else would a Dutchman and a Lebanese be having this argument?

BURUMA: Precisely. Precisely. [Laughter.] And I think this is still true to some extent. But I think that there is a danger of playing on the fear of citizens in the United States and promulgating laws, making things more difficult for foreigners to come here. I don't think fear is the right basis for our strategy in defending ourselves against this extremely dangerous phenomenon. And I think there's too much of that.

I also think there's a danger of— a creeping danger of militarizing American society in a way that is not entirely positive. I don't speak as a sort of European pacifist who believes in a world without armies and so on. But, I think there are consequences we should guard ourselves against, and that's not to say President [George W.] Bush is a fascist or anything of that kind. But I don't think we should be sanguine about the consequences in this country and other parts of the West— [inaudible.]

AJAMI: No, but I think that we jump into— we make societies equal and similar when they're not. I mean, you're saying, for example, that we also have a problem with religious influence on our politics. That surely isn't on the scale of this—

BURUMA: No, of course not.

AJAMI: --of this scale.

BURUMA: Of course not. Mr. Ashcroft is not Osama bin Laden, and I would never say that he was. Of course not. It's not an argument for moral equivalence, and the Bush administration is really on the same wavelength as al Qaeda. That would be an absurd thing to say, even if you were being polemical. And I'm just— we are simply trying to warn against defending ourselves against something that is lethal by doing things that could harm us needlessly.

AJAMI: All right. Now, let me ask you— and I think this should be my last intervention before we open it up to others. It's an affliction that we are all prone to who are— the word suggests— I'm sorry I can't think of another word now— who are intellectuals. And you're much more of an intellectual than I am, because—

BURUMA: Come, come.

AJAMI: --I do foreign policy, and that's not— but is this overly intellectualized. I mean, this is what I— when I read— I mean, there is anti-Americanism. There are these threats that are hovering out there. There is this presence, for example, of the Islamists in Europe. I want to plug a piece I did a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal, which I'd be more than happy to send to all of you— [laughter]--called "The Moors' Last Laugh." "The Moors' Last Laugh." And this goes back, of course, to 1492, when [the last Moorish King of Granada] Boabdil surrendered Granada to [Spanish King and Queen] Ferdinand and Isabella, and then, of course, he wept.

BURUMA: A deeply sad occasion.

AJAMI: Exactly. Exactly. And, in fact, there are these threats that are very concrete, very real. There are military threats; there are threats of insurrection; there are threats of terror, and is this a slightly overly— is this an overly intellectualized view of it, if you will?

BURUMA: Well, it is a book about ideas. I mean, you could also write a book about the proper military response or the sociology of Muslim minorities in Europe. There are all those angles that need to be explored. What we were trying to do was to take the ideas, what is it that fires these people up intellectually in a way—

AJAMI: But did you make them sound too familiar to us, that's the question. Did you over-Westernize them? Did you over-Westernize Mohammad Atta? Did you over-Westernize Ayman Zawahiri?

BURUMA: There is, of course, that danger. And if one— it's true that I think the other extreme is something that we wish to avoid or even to oppose, which is to see these people is simply so weird, they're beyond our understanding.

AJAMI: That's a good point. That is a good point.

BURUMA: That is— and that is something that many people, of course, do feel. And we tried to really balance that by saying we may hate this, and it is hateful, and it is dangerous, but it doesn't mean that it's something that's completely beyond our understanding. And the more we understand it, the more we'll know what to do about it.

AJAMI: Right. Now, of course, in talking about the Islamic world, you and Avishai, you are at one disadvantage which Edward Said did not have. When Edward Said talked about how the West sees the East, he had all Western texts available to him. And I don't want to— I mean, I knew Edward Said, the famous remarks, I was not— I was constantly a target of Edward Said. Edward Said had two demons: [Islam scholar] Bernard Lewis and myself. I'm not rising to his defense, but what's interesting, of course, he knew Western sources. Now, you and Avashi, of course, are looking at this phenomenon to the extent that you are using Islamic material. It's sanitized. It comes to you— you are not reading in the direct— you're not reading the direct fatwa in Arabic. You don't really hear the lethal tones of what people are saying. That's one of my pet grievances, by the way, about a lot of the ways we understand or try to understand the Arabs and the Muslims. We don't really know their languages. So they are very good at— something they're very clever at, many of these Islamists, they're very good at something called taquiyah— dissimulation. They speak one way to the West and one way to their own. But we can never catch them because, of course, we have no Arabists, as such. So, in a way, there is this kind of— when I was reading you, obviously you were sitting in on a conversation that the Muslims were having, but you were hearing them mediated and translated to you. Would that be fair enough?

BURUMA: That may indeed be the case. On the other hand, I don't think one may disagree with a lot of what we've said. I don't think I accept the criticism that we're somehow softening what the Islamists are up to, because if we weren't very conscious of how lethal they are, we wouldn't have written the book. Because, after all, comparison of anything or anybody with the Nazis is usually a cheap rhetorical trick, and one should be very careful about it. But if one even comes close to that, then that does mean you take them very seriously indeed. And so we're not trying to tell our readers, "Don't worry. These— they may sound bad, but, you know, they're not so bad after all." That's really not the message that should come across.

AJAMI: Thank you. Well, I think— why don't I just open it to the rest of you. There is enormous knowledge and interest here. And, I know everyone in the room, of course, but it would be good when you ask the question if you could wait for the mike, and then also introduce yourself, please. I actually do know that this is Ms. [Mia] Bloom. Go ahead.

QUESTIONER: Hi. I was curious to what extent the antagonism from— either emanating from the Islamic fundamentalism or from Saudi Arabia is sort of— [inaudible]-- like an antagonism against innovation, whether you contextualize this as the hatred of the city, as the hatred of modernity and innovation, or whether there's something particular to, not just the West, but to the Americans' interpretation? You know, the example you gave is the McDonaldization. That's not necessarily just Western. That's Western— you know, that's beyond the French and the British experience of colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. That's particularly American.

BURUMA: Yes. I don't think I ever used the phrase McDonaldization, or Coca-Cola-nization. That's more Benjamin Barber's [author of “Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World”] territory. Well, modernity— but it's one of those words that, like fascism, that's always been bandied about without anybody quite knowing what it means. I mean, one of the— the book actually begins with a description of the conference in Kyoto, in Japan, in 1942, barely a year after Pearl Harbor, in which a lot of learned men, professors, and critics, and so on get together to discuss the topic overcoming modernity. And, of course, by modernity, they meant the West, to justify a program of an alternative of the sort of spiritual— a revival of the spiritual East under the leadership of Japan. And there was no real agreement of what they really meant by either modernity or the West. Some said it's— called it this European thing, and talked about the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Others talked about Americanism, which was borrowing a German term, in fact— Amerikanismus, which was around in the '20s and '30s. Others talked about making common cause with the Europeans against the Americans. But it wasn't quite clear what they meant. There was certainly— there was an— although they were sitting in Kyoto, and most of them probably lived in Tokyo, there was a very clear animus against a certain idea of the city with a press and cafe society, and people having different opinions.

Modernity, in the sense of technology, is not what Osama bin Laden is necessarily entirely against, because he's a great user of modern technology, but modernity, in the sense of a kind of society where people have freedom to make their own choices, where they don't have to— they're not— moral or religious rules are not enforced on them, where you can choose what to believe and so on. If that's modernity, then, of course, they're very much against it. I don't think it's just the United States, but I think the United States represents, in the eyes of many people, sort of the ultimate nightmare vision of that kind of modernity, because it's, in some ways, gone further than anywhere else in it. And because of the dominance of American popular culture, including junk food and that kind of thing, that has become the West in people's minds. But, of course, that's— it's a slightly distorted vision.

AJAMI: You didn't ask me, but there's a nice little footnote here, of course. People love— they hate America, but they hate it from Jersey City— [laughter]--and they hate it until it's time to deport them. Then they really don't want to be deported. Some of this—

BURUMA: Absolutely. Also the debate is false.

AJAMI: We fall for them. They tell us, “Oh, I hate the West.” But you say, “All right, it's time to go back to Cairo.” “No, no, no, I love the West.” I mean, it's—

BURUMA: This is one of Bernard Lewis's points. I mean, that it's the seduction of the West which is seen as the great danger. But just one further illustration of how modernity in the West can be used in peculiar ways: after the Russia-Japanese War in 1905, in which the Russians were the first Western nation to be defeated in modern history by an Asian one, [Russian author Leo] Tolstoy described it as the defeat of an Asiatic nation by a Western one. Japan, in that war, to Tolstoy, stood for sort of industrialization, capitalism, individualistic greed, and so on, whereas Russia was Russia with the Asiatic soul, the soulful Russians, and so on and so forth. So, in his eyes, it was the defeat of an Asiatic soul by Western modernity, if you like.

QUESTIONER: Marta Varela, Hunter College. I wanted to ask you about women. Robin Morgan, the radical feminist, has had a reissue of her book, positing a relationship between misogyny and terrorism. Also, I quote you the military intellectual, Ralph Peters, who said that the single accomplishment of the 20th century was the incorporation of women into the professional classes. So is your concept of Occidentalism inclusive of this type of misogyny, which, for many of us, stands out as one of the central reasons to oppose it?

BURUMA: Absolutely, particularly in the chapter written by my co-author on Islamism specifically and the roots of Islamism. The position of women, of course, is a key issue there. That kind of extreme religious intolerance— and you saw the example in Afghanistan on the Taliban and where that can go— is, of course, utterly hostile to women. And I think, probably, it would be true to say that all groups that see the West in this light that we describe would not tend to be sympathetic to feminism.

QUESTIONER: My name is Kenneth Bialkin. I get the drift about their hating us for being the West. But there's a particular species of hatred that's especially virulent and especially parochial to Islam, and that's anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is driven primarily today by the Islamists in Europe and elsewhere. Is anti-Semitism merely a species of what you see as the opposition to modernism, or is it a subset, or is it something different? Or does it stand on its own base as a justification of hatred?

BURUMA: Well, I'm glad you asked that question, because I think that's an example of something of a toxic idea that did come from the West. Islamic movements, however radical in the past, were never particularly anti-Semitic. I mean, the Jews and people of the book, they were second-class citizens perhaps. It was better to be a Jew in Baghdad for most of its history than it was to be a Jew in Kassel or Warsaw. And I think this particularly lethal kind of anti-Semitism that we see now in Islamism is a result of the 1930s and of World War II, when Europeans, specifically German, anti-Semitic propaganda was picked up there.

Now, that's one— to answer your question directly, I think anti-Semitism is also a key component of the kind of Occidentalism that we describe, because if Occidentalism is partly the result of communities that feel humiliated by a superior power that has claims to universal solutions— let's say Germany when they were confronted by Napoleon's gendarme, and all of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of imposing standards— universal models on weaker communities. This led to, of course, romantic notions of blood and soil and nativism. It could be harmless in the sense of fine poems and so on, but it could also become more lethal. And who are the ones who are usually associated with universal ideas and atomism, individualism, and so on in the modern age, if not the Jews? Which is why, of course, the Jews were both blamed for Bolshevism and for capitalism— both universal ideas supposedly imposed on deep organic communities. And so I think that— and apart from that, of course, the Jews are also associated with the wicked city, with money, with all those things. And again, I stress we're talking about fantasies here. The average shtetl Jew in the 19th century never saw very much money, let alone was very interested in universal ideals. So anti-Semitism is absolutely at the core of a lot of what we describe.

QUESTIONER: My name is Henry Grunwald. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you on the description of your chair at Bard. I think the combination of human rights, democracy, and journalism is quite remarkable and, to me, bracing. My question is much simpler: Is there a cure for Occidentalism and, if so, what is it?

BURUMA: That's probably the hardest question of the evening. It's very hard for the following reason— that I think there are— at the moment, there are two main sources of the Islamist version of Occidentalism. One is the revolutionary movement in the Middle East itself, and there I share the analysis of some of the more thoughtful neo-conservatives who say, ultimately, the only solution is to have open and democratic societies there. That would, in the long run, get rid of a lot of the animus that is the basis for this movement. The other source is the disaffected, unassimilated Muslim minorities in Europe. And there to say, well, what they need is more open politics, more democracy, more secularism, and so on is clearly not the solution, because it's one of the things they're rebelling against. If you think the examples— and I once read it, I think, in The New York Times, a very good article about two brothers of Pakistani origin who grew up in the midlands of Britain and suddenly found— not found themselves— suddenly were found in Afghanistan amongst the Taliban. Now, these two boys had grown up like other British kids— taking drugs, having girlfriends, all the rest of it— and suddenly heard the siren— not the siren call perhaps, but the voice from the mosque, and decided they were going to embark on the holy war. Now, in a way, to say what they needed was more democracy, secularism, and openness is not the answer, because they wanted somebody to tell them what was good and what was evil, and what was a higher cause to sacrifice your life for, and all these things which democracy is not very good at dealing with. After all, democracy does not pretend to give us the meaning of life or give us a higher cause to sacrifice our life for, or anything like that. And there the problem is how to assimilate these minorities, make them feel that they are part of the societies where they are born and bred in, and without necessarily making them feel like they've lost the culture of their parents, although, to some degree, that is an inevitable consequence of emigration.

So, I think I would say the solution— it will have to be political eventually. It will have to mean more democracy for all of us. But the problem of minorities in Europe is not necessarily solved by that glib answer.

AJAMI: Maybe the story ends badly.

BURUMA: It could end badly.

AJAMI: Maybe we have 1.2 billion Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco. They are overwhelmingly young. We know their birth rates. I mean, that's what Sam Huntington's— the strongest part of his logic was the youth bulge, the youth of the Islamic world, that it will never work out for these societies, and that maybe the prognosis is not terribly good, because even these communities you're talking about, the Muslims in Europe— by one reckoning, they're 15 million, but another, I think, more accurate, 30 million— that even modern life does not tame that radicalism, that animus that they bring. It actually even magnifies it. It was— need we say?--it was in Hamburg.

BURUMA: Is the speaker entitled to ask a question?

AJAMI: Yes. [Laughter.]

BURUMA: I'd like to ask you a question, and I know there's not a clear answer to it. To what extent is this a Muslim problem, and to what extent is it an Arab problem? Because, in Indonesia, for example, the fundamentalist parties lost heavily in the elections. So I don't think that there's a huge potential for a religious revolution in Indonesia. In Iran, I doubt if there's a lot of animus any more, or enthusiasm for further religious revolution. I mean, they've shut their world in a way, and the clerics are deeply unpopular. In Malaysia, there's no revolution at hand. So, it could be that there's an Arab problem.

AJAMI: You're absolutely right. That's why I once wrote the book called "The Arab Predicament" when I was much younger. And, of course, we know that— I mean, you're absolutely right. The 19 [hijackers] who flew into the [World Trade Center] towers and crashed into the Pentagon were not Afghans or Pakistanis. They were Arabs. And one of the reasons we went to Iraq on that expedition, whatever one thinks of it, was directly and indirectly motivated by this reckoning that they were Arabs, that there is a particularly Arab problem. And when you try to even slice it thinner, that it's a particularly Egyptian and Saudi problem. And there may be an interesting analysis of this. So, it is an Arab malady. But given the influence of the Arabs in the Islamic world, if you will, and their strategic location and their mastery— because the text is theirs— that's— it's really the text is theirs, then it does have these reverberations. But you're absolutely on the mark.

In the back, just to make sure that we're covering all geographies.

QUESTIONER: I'm David Braunschvig. You have two passing allusions to Turkey in your book. The last one is on the last page where you cite the Turkish experiment as one well worth noting— and perhaps linked to your statement on Arab versus Islamic. I'm curious to have your view on that experiment. Is it promising? Is it likely to yield even stronger antagonism? Is it something that will be ultimately challenged? And, is it indeed the case that Islam is not— [inaudible]--and, in that sense, something that is different from your discussion and analysis of Islamist totalitarianism?

BURUMA: Well, by the experiment, we meant, of course, an Islamic party being elected and being in government. And I do think, probably, in the process, if it's going to work at all, of democratization of societies with Muslim majorities, it probably— it will be most effective if Muslims can actually be part of the political or democratic process as Muslims, and therefore have parties that represent them as Muslim parties. I see nothing wrong with that. In the same way that in my native country— and it is not longer true now— but when religion was really the main thing that identified people— not only religion, but the different sects of Protestantism and Catholicism— everything in Dutch society is organized along these religious lines, whether it was broadcasting companies for radio or football clubs or political parties. They all have— they were formed around their religious denominations. And that actually kept people from going at each other's throats, in that they had democratic, political representation of their— by parties that shared their religious beliefs. And I think that may be the most effective way to make democracy work.

And, I think, the other Turkish experiment, which is sometimes hailed by people as a wonderful thing— namely that of [founder of the secular Turkish Republic Kemal] Ataturk, or in Persia by [Mohammad] Reza Shah [Pahlavi]--of forcing modernity on people by seeing everything that's traditional or religious as somehow backward and therefore has to be eradicated, I think that's the wrong way to go, because that really sowed the seeds of a lot of the extremism that we see today.

AJAMI: While the mike is coming, I just want to record my strong objection to this one, because I'm a devoted Kemalist. I very much believe Ataturk was right. And when Ataturk said, "For the people, despite the people," that was great. [Laughter.] You know, it's a governing method I think we should all try. I think Ataturk understood that if you fall through Islam, you fall through a trap door. And, in fact, I think the journey out of Islam that Ataturk did was brilliant. And to the extent that the Muslim world now has forgotten this, I think it's really— they will pay dearly for it. Sorry.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible.] The president of the World Bank was quoted this morning in the press to the effect that the world spends 900 billion [dollars] a year on armament and 300 billion [dollars] a year on subsidizing very wealthy farmers and $56 billion a year on development, and that if we reversed those numbers, that would be the best way to take care of terrorism. Is the solution in that direction, or is it in the political area such as with growing support in the Muslim/Arab world to the monarchies and the dictatorships, democracies, such as we have in Egypt?

BURUMA: These are all policy questions of which I was rather afraid, but I suppose I should have expected them here.

AJAMI: We're all like policy fanatics here. [Laughter.]

BURUMA: I do think— are lower military budgets the way to fight terrorism? Well, I don't think— lower military budgets may be a good thing in itself, but I don't think that that would necessarily help us in our struggle against terrorism. Supporting the regimes that are most hated by the religious extremists— there is certainly something to be done, and I think we have been under the illusion— or we— I don't speak as the magisterial we here, but the people who govern us— have often been under the illusion, I think, that if only we sell enough arms to the Egyptians or others, somehow we have tremendous leverage, and they'll do what we tell them to do. I think that is an illusion, and people happily get the arms and still do whatever they want to do. And so there must be some way of keeping a greater distance from regimes that do inflame these passions. And there, I think, the policy should be rethought.

AJAMI: To follow on that point— I mean, I know you don't want to wade into policy, but let me try my luck. Now, we invest $2 billion a year in the Egyptian regime. And in Egypt, the political life has been simplified by this man, this officer, Mubarak, and it's the Islamist and the regime. So we've invested now 60 billion [dollars] or so, give or take a few billion, in the regime of Hosni Mubarak. We even gave Mubarak recently that rarest of honors, a trip to [President Bush’s] ranch in Crawford, right? [Laughter.] Now, is the investment in that regime an investment in modernism?

BURUMA: Well, I'm skeptical about this. But then, what you just said reminded me a bit— I mean, the Kemalist sentiment reminded me a little bit of a remark of a rather disgusting man in Poland, Jerzy Urban, who used to be the spokesman, I think, for the last communist government and now makes money on soft porn. He once said when he was still working—

AJAMI: I feel I'm in good company. [Laughter.]

BURUMA: And he once said, when he was asked why he could possibly support the communist regime— work for the communist regime, especially after 1981 and Solidarity [Polish trade union movement], and he said, "Well— " he said, "it's either communism or it's the Black Madonna of Czestochowa." [Laughter.]

AJAMI: Right.

BURUMA: And it's not really the either-or. It doesn't have to be. It's not Muslim fanaticism or the strongman in the military uniform. I think bringing Islam into the democratic process will neutralize those elements that both you and I abhor. And I think maybe that's where we differ, but more policy.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible]--I wonder if, in your analysis, there's room for another, what I consider, seminal idea, that the cause of the Occidentalism lies in the increasing rate of social change which is generated in the West and which affects all underdeveloped countries equally, so to speak, and that explains why, in response to that great wave of technological innovation, people are recoiling, and some of them are recoiling violently?

BURUMA: Well, yes. Again, I'm a bit skeptical about that, because this sort of enormous social change, which is undoubtedly a fact and pushed along by global corporate capitalism— all these things we know about— if that were the real or the main source of suicide bombers and religious extremism and so on, you would expect it to happen in Bangkok and Shanghai and Seoul and places like that. And it doesn't happen there. It happens in places which are actually much slower to change, and backward in these things. The influence of McDonald's and IBM in places like Kabul is very limited— or Riyadh for that matter. And so, I'm not so convinced by that argument. And it— possibly in Egypt there is more of that sort of thing. And, again, the traditional mixture of the sort of lumpenproletariat of unemployed, educated people hanging around with too much time on their hands and poor people can be very lethal. And I think there is a lot of that in the Middle East. But I don't think you can really blame it on global capitalism or social change engendered by Hollywood culture or anything like that. I think it's a little bit of a red herring.

QUESTIONER: Yes, Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. We started with Edward Said, and I thought we might come back a little bit. I noticed that his name appeared nowhere on the book but in the jacket cover. And I'm wondering if you might want to speculate about what he would have thought of this book, and whether he might have considered it another instance of Orientalism, a kind of rhetoric and approach to the East that justified and perhaps even invited Western control and domination.

BURUMA: I fear he might have jumped to that conclusion without having read the book. [Laughter.]

AJAMI: Also, his response, since I was a victim of many of his attacks, would have been unprintable. [Laughter.]

QUESTIONER: Gary Sick. Edward Said— the power of what Edward Said offered was his percu, that he saw something that other people didn't see. And it seems to me that basically, as time went on— and the fact that Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami became bete noire for him was not so much that this was a concept or an idea, but that it was something that was, in fact, being listened to in the halls of power, that this was being translated into policy and into institutions and into approaches, attitudes toward another part of the world. And I wonder if you see in this— because I think it's crucial— if Occidentalism as a concept, as an idea, is simply isolated in certain very poor places, or whether it also has a transmission belt that carries it into the halls of power, and whether it's the Arab world or any of the major governments who might, in fact, give it meaning otherwise, whether you have thought about it.

BURUMA: Yes. I mean, in the sense that Nazism, of course, did precisely that, and became the reigning ideology of the state. Frankly, I think the likelihood of one of these revolutions— but, again, I'd like to know what Fouad thinks— the likelihood of these revolutions succeeding in the Middle East and actually having states run by the likes of Osama bin Laden at the moment— the chances don't look so great, which is maybe why they tend to lash out at America, and the West, and the Western symbols, and so on as a kind of spasm of frustration, in a way, in the way that the radical left in the West and in Japan in the '60s and '70s became ever more vicious in its tactics the more marginalized they felt they were becoming. And, I think, there may be— vicious may be the way it is right now. The problem is that small, marginalized groups can do so much more damage than they used to be able to do. They can also cause a great deal of political damage in the Middle East by inspiring all kinds of people in the wider societies that are perhaps less marginal. So I don't see it yet as, sort of, something that's going to lead to wars— well, we already have a war between states— but is going to lead to more wars between clusters of states against other clusters of states. I think that's unlikely. I think it is a new phenomenon in that sense.

AJAMI: I agree with you, Ian. And, by the way, you're getting the hang of it. You have become a policy person in the last hour— [laughter]--that we have— I mean, Ian is absolutely right. These Arab regimes are not going to be overthrown by these Islamists. That's why they hit us. There is a man who was quoted— one of these Egyptian Islamists— he lives in London of course, like all Islamists, good Islamists live in London, of course. And he says, "The Arab world grew dangerous to me. I came to London"— right? So, in fact, we are their target, because they cannot defeat Mubarak. They can't really defeat the House of Saud. And the lesson of these dictatorial, despotic governments in the Arab world is that they will win— in a showdown with the Islamists, they will win. All the Syrian Islamists are in Europe. Why? Because [former Syrian President] Hafez Assad destroyed everything. He devoured the green and the dry. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the decision to head West, to fly West, was a recognition of that cruel balance of force between the regime and the Islamists. I think we've come— there's one more question which we will— by all means, please. There you go.

QUESTIONER: David Speedie, Carnegie Corporation. Dr. Buruma, I'd like to press you a little bit more on the issue this gentleman raised on global capital spread, because my question was also about globalization. It's not specifically covered in your book, but it so happens that yesterday, in this very building, one of the main contemporary proponents for globalization defended the phenomenon on largely economic and material grounds. Most of the discussion— hardly any of the questions— were on spiritual and moral questions. You do, in your book, refer in the Occidental city discussion to the disenfranchised youth lying around in Western-style clothing and fast food and so on, and at the other end of the spectrum, the elite feeling that this is the new imperialism. I would argue that if globalization is inevitable, it will carry with it this two-sided coin of humiliation. And that is, perhaps, the most significant and disturbing phenomenon that you seem to be— where globalization and Occidentalism may come in a sort of unhappy marriage.

AJAMI: Thank you. I had been hoping actually that we could have a whole meeting without uttering the word globalization. My hopes have been betrayed. [Laughter.] So with this— quick—

BURUMA: OK, a quick answer to that. I think that— I'm not sure globalization, in itself, or global capitalism leads to humiliation. I think when it comes to societies where, actually, a lot of people in the elite and elsewhere begin to benefit from it, which does happen, you don't have this problem. It's in societies where they don't benefit from it, and they usually don't benefit from it because their governments don't allow them to benefit from it, because they are dictatorships of one kind or another; they're anti-capitalists, very often. Those are the kind of societies where you get this sense of humiliation, not because of the American corporations, but because of local political conditions which make it impossible for people to benefit from anything like that.

AJAMI: Ian, on behalf of everyone, really, I just want to thank you. [Applause.]

(C) COPYRIGHT 2004, FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE, INC., 1919 M ST. NW; SUITE 220; WASHINGTON, DC - 20036, USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ANY REPRODUCTION, REDISTRIBUTION OR RETRANSMISSION IS EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED.

UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION, REDISTRIBUTION OR RETRANSMISSION CONSTITUTES A MISAPPROPRIATION UNDER APPLICABLE UNFAIR COMPETITION LAW, AND FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE, INC. RESERVES THE RIGHT TO PURSUE ALL REMEDIES AVAILABLE TO IT IN RESPECT TO SUCH MISAPPROPRIATION.

FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE, INC. IS A PRIVATE FIRM AND IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. NO COPYRIGHT IS CLAIMED AS TO ANY PART OF THE ORIGINAL WORK PREPARED BY A UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT OFFICER OR EMPLOYEE AS PART OF THAT PERSON'S OFFICIAL DUTIES.