In violence over anti-Muslim video, a new world disorder
Welcome to our new world, where no one is in control – neither the West of its social media nor Arab rulers of their liberated subjects. This is a combustible mix that goes beyond the recent anti-Muslim video to the overall message of Western-shaped globalization.
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Sending warships, loaded with weapons, to the region can’t undo what Facebook and YouTube, loaded with messages, have done.
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No military retaliation, or further violent attacks on diplomatic outposts, can erase the reality that what is sacred for America (freedom of expression, including sacrilege) and what is sacred for the Muslim world (their faith) are clashing values now contending on the same virtual terrain.
The issue goes beyond the most recent dissing of the Muslim faith to the overall message of Western-shaped globalization.
While it is true that the American creed respects all faiths, it is also true that those who hate Islam or respect nothing can also express themselves. Good faith and bad faith get equal billing in our democratized media culture.
Years before Osama bin Laden conceived of the assault on the Twin Towers in New York, Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar and former ambassador to Great Britain, grasped the mentality of siege gripping the Islamic world. After an extended trip through the remote villages of the Afghan-Pakistan border where the Taliban got its start, he reported that pious Muslims sense “there is no escape now, no retreat, no hiding place, from the demon” of the Western media, which he called "storm troopers" of the West. They feel, he wrote, “the more traditional a religious culture in our age of the media, the greater the pressure on it to yield” to the faithlessness and secularism of global civilization emanating from the West.
Mr. Akbar imagined that “it must have been something like this in 1258 when the Mongols were gathering outside Baghdad to shatter forever the greatest Arab empire in history. But, this time, the decision will be final. If Islam is conquered, there will be no coming back.”
Managing some semblance of stability in this new, out-of-control world is going to take some deft statesmanship. The West is not about to give up its defense of freedom of expression – whether Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” or the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video. Muslims, militant or mainstream, are not about to give up the defense of their faith and its messenger.
Along with the advent of democracy in the Arab world, this is a new reality we will all have to live with. Let’s not pretend that this conflict isn’t real.
Nathan Gardels is editor-in-chief of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of Tribune Media Services. He is co-author with Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy of “American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age.”
© 2012 Global Viewpoint Network/ distributed by Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor.
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