Bush’s tact may have been caused by a short-term desire to rein in attacks on American Muslims (and others mistaken for them, such as Sikhs) in the wake of 9/11. But it also served the longer view of the president and his advisers, who believed that the Muslim world, much like everywhere else, was capable of being improved by exposure to democracy, free market capitalism and individual freedoms. In this regard, Bush’s views were in line with the then-influential “end of history” thesis proposed by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1989. With the end of the cold war, Fukuyama argued, it was only a matter of time before western liberal democracy was recognised everywhere as the best form of government. By the turn of the century, the belief that we were witnessing “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism” was never more widely shared, and it lay behind one of Bush’s professed goals in invading Afghanistan and Iraq: to shepherd the Muslim world towards the universal ideology of liberalism. [...]
A fear and loathing of Islam is the central plank of the nativist populism that has surged on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider Geert Wilders, whose populist Party for Freedom is on course to perform better than any other party in next month’s Dutch elections; he has warned that unless the Netherlands takes strong anti-Muslim measures, the country will be “colonised and Islamised”. The sounding of demographic sirens has become respectable again. Regretting the declining birth rate among native-born German women, the Alternative für Deutschland party leader Frauke Petry has said, “We have to make sure that Germany, as a population and as a nation, does not disappear entirely.” [...]
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were naturally aggressive and bloody affairs, for which the clash theory provided useful cover. To the delight of his supporters in the Bush administration, the septuagenarian Lewis wholeheartedly endorsed the war on terror. It soon became clear that in order to support the invasions you didn’t need to subscribe to ideas about the inevitable victory of universal liberalism – faith in the clash was enough. [...]
In this way, over the 1920s and 1930s the threat and reality of colonisation redefined Muslim relations with the west along lines that anticipated today’s combustible enmity. At the beginning of the century the efforts of the political class in Turkey, Iran and Egypt had been directed at nation building and the consolidation of parliamentary regimes. In the 1920s and 1930s the paramount issue became getting rid of the foreigners or keeping them at arm’s length. Of course the powers objected. Britain and France argued that the mandates were not ready for independence. Reza Shah was toppled by the allies in 1941 for showing partiality to Nazi Germany. And in 1953, in a breach of Iran’s sovereignty that would convince many Middle Easterners of the west’s fathomless duplicity, and CIA and MI5 overthrew Muhammad Mossadegh, Iran’s most successful constitutional politician for half a century, as punishment for his temerity in nationalising the oil industry.
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