Back on 9/11/01, I'd just begun an interim year at the Unitarian Society of Germantown, Philadelphia. On the morning of the 9/11 disaster, I was early for a Joseph Priestley District meeting at our Lancaster UU Church. Arriving early in town, I had a cup of coffee at a charming old drugstore on Main Street and then drove onto church for the meeting. By the time I arrived, many of my colleagues were there glued to a TV set. The hijackers had already crashed one of the Trade Center buildings, and I was in time to witness the deadly assault on the second building. The whole thing was surrealistic until the reality and horror of the tragedy sunk in. I drove back to Philadelphia realizing that the only possible sermon I could preach that following Sunday came out of a question from a colleague, "Why do they hate us so?" This was a heartfelt question on many people's lips. Honestly, the question did not surprise me, but how to answer and on what basis?
Bin Laden is the central villain of the piece and his terrorist fellow-travelers who are as resentful of Saudi Arabia with its ill-gotten oil wealth as with the Americans and British eager to protect the sources and resources of the world oil market. There were terrorist attacks on Arab and African soil, as you may remember, before the terrible event of 9/11 came about. Bin Laden and his ilk were appalled. First, by what they perceived to be the betrayal of Islam by such conservative kingdoms as Saudi Arabia as the alien presence of western countries on Arab soil. Arab memories are perhaps longer than ours. Not all Arabs are extremist like Bin Laden, but Islam, as a culture, remembers the Christian crusades - eight of them from the 11th to the 13th centuries - where the Christian armies of the Middle Ages in trying to repossess the Holy Land despoiled Arab territories, ravaged and pillaged Arab lands and left a millennial legacy of lingering resentment. But Arab peoples who do not share Bin Laden's fanaticism, nurture much of the same historic hostility. The second major resentment among them was stirred by the colonial powers, principally Britain and France, who colonized Arab lands, as protectorates of course, but really as quasi-colonies. Britain actually created the country of Iraq which had never existed before and installed it with a king of its own choosing. The third great resentment was watching the armies of Patton, Montgomery, and Rommel treating Arab lands as a European killing ground. I think it's fair to say that all these memories have created a terrible legacy among ordinary Arabs, and, ah, yes, the final resentment was the creation and recognition of Israel on Arab/Palestinian soil which could yet be the straw that frustrates all the best intentions!
Some people feel all this justifies profound Arab resentment against the West, with its burgeoning sophisticated economies, the United States being its great standard bearer, but we say, "forgive and forget." There are many Arabs open to the defusing of the current hostilities and the healing of old resentments; though, as we know from Iraq, the whole desire for a peaceful settlement of differences has to do not only with a growing good-will and shared economic interest, but in truly facing the profound historical differences that separate Islam from the West. We need to face a deeper issue still that is grounded in religion. Ever since Karl Marx, many people have pooh-poohed the importance of religion. What matters is economic self- interest. There's some truth to this, but if we are to move forward beyond Danish cartoons, in the name of free-speech, we must understand that we have a potential and actual culture clash of seismic proportions at the center of which is the religious question and we must understand it better!
This came home to me very personally at the time of the first Gulf War prosecuted by the President's father against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. I felt that it wouldn't be a comfortable time being a Muslim in American with such growing anti-Muslim feelings. I invited a new young Imam to lunch the week before he was to bring members of his own congregation and preach about Islam. He knew I was a Unitarian, and he was pleased to find in the dictionary that Unitarians believed in only one God! I left the matter there! I pointed out that there were Unitarians who considered themselves free thinkers, agnostics, atheists, but felt themselves bound together by the respect for reason, conscience, and tolerance. The three great principles of historic Unitarianism, and for that matter, the three great principles of the American and European Enlightenment which nurtured science, civil society, and religious tolerance. My new friend said, "You mean that people really believe such things"? I was a little aghast! Islamic people are not without reason, conscience, and tolerance, but they are trumped by Islamic law and religious authority. Reason, conscience, and tolerance cannot stand by themselves separate from religious authority. Islam is closer to the catholic spirit of the Middle Ages than it is to modern western society steeped in science, technology, and the secular spirit. We can't go back on this. Perhaps Rudyard Kipling was right, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet". Our mandate, as thoughtful western people, is not to sit in judgment, but to review our own prejudices with regard to Islam. Bin Laden has demonized the West, particularly America, but we are often co-dependents in this mutual demonization. We are pathetically unaware of the negative shadows we present to the non-western world. The shadows of greed, surviving neo- colonialism, and non-Islamic centered geopolitics. I think we must cultivate a genuinely ecumenical religious spirit and profound self-examination. The world is far too small for religious bigotry of any kind.