Muslims shouldn't blame it all on us

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Western leaders insist we are not involved in a clash of civilisations with the Muslim world. Yet hearing Osama bin Laden's spokesman say his followers are as keen to die as we are to live, seeing religious fanatics turn out for in demonstrations, and noting the Muslim moderates' muted response to terror, we could be forgiven for thinking that we are indeed involved in the kind of cultural conflict predicted by the Harvard Professor Sam Huntington years ago. Governments have a responsibility to avoid inflaming passions, but we shall never understand the hatred much of the Muslim world feels towards the West, or how it may be abated, unless we are honest about its origins.

When we come across brilliant mathematicians, scientists, heart-surgeons, writers or business folk who happen to be Palestinians, Saudis, Afghans, Iraqis or Pakistanis, or encounter the genius of Islam or the Arab peoples - their architecture, their science, their scholarship - we feel in touch with a highly civilised culture. But we do not feel that in the majority of Muslim societies. That is why Muslim immigrants flock to Europe and America - to escape corrupt, authoritarian regimes or societies in thrall to obscurantist, misogynist beliefs. Under the rule of law the talents of the immigrants can flourish, much as the refugees from mainland China flourished in Hong Kong.

What makes Muslim societies so resistant to modernity, and what accounts for the resentment of the West evident even among some of those who benefit from Western freedoms? The fashion is for sorry-saying and there is plenty for the West to be sorry about where Islam is concerned. Christian countries have been guilty of savagery towards Muslims, just as Muslims have towards others. But to explain the World Trade Center attacks on these grounds gives carte blanche for an endless campaign of terror. And though no one denies the trauma of the Palestinian people, it is absurd to say that the poverty and repression from which many Muslims suffer can be attributed to contemporary Zionism.

Hostility to the West goes back much further than 1948, and it is not just religious. The mullahs of Afghanistan and Iran scorn our degeneracy and materialism (though not our medicines or mobile phones), but oil-rich, secular regimes like Iraq share their detestation of the West. The root of their resentment is cultural and historical. Though if Muslim civilisation fell behind hundreds of years ago it was because of intrinsic failings, not just because of a ruthlessly expansionistprofiteering West. Muslim societies, like every other, bear some historical responsibility for their current condition.

America's 17th century English Puritans were fundamentalist bigots too. They preached a deeply undemocratic doctrine of the elect and the damned, the elect being primarily those who wielded theocratic power. They massacred "heathen" Indians, and like many Muslims today they were keen on sexual prohibition, worried sick about the length of men's hair and over-exposed women. But there any parallel with the Muslim world stops. In the 1640s the American Puritans had a law obliging every head of household to teach his wife, children and servants to read and write. They saw men as superior (who didn't?), but women were active partners in the business of life (the so-called "companionship marriage") who could not legally be cursed or beaten and who enjoyed rudimentary rights of divorce and inheritance.

Above all the Puritans encouraged commerce and manufacture. They had no quarrel with science. The Protestant work ethic and the pursuit of knowledge were part of proving yourself worthy before God. And when dogma collided with reality the dogma was ditched. Religious toleration increased. They stopped hanging Quakers and witches, and by the early 18th century an energetic, inventive liberty-loving people began to emerge. The road from religious fundamentalism to prosperity and the beginnings of modern American democracy was remarkably short.

There is a bit of cod history here, but also basic truths. You can argue that the reason not a single democratic regime exists in the Middle East except Israel and Turkey may to some extent be a product of colonialism, but you cannot argue that Muslim societies were on the road towards advanced democratic civilisation when the West cut them off. As for economics, South Korea's income is five times that of Egypt (in 1950 they were close), and where would the thugs who rule Iraq or corrupt Saudi princelings be without their oil? In Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler foresaw a time when backward peoples, "at least as clever as us", would "see into our secrets, understand them and use them to the full". China and India, cultures with every reason to resent the West, are not sunk in sterile loathing, they are edging forward.

Meanwhile, the driving force of Muslim fundamentalists and regimes such as Libya or Iraq is hatred of modernity or hatred of the West. For them our technology - America's flying schools or Saddam's Western-trained experts in biological warfare - is a means of historical revenge. They may gloat over their bloody "victories", like the one in Manhattan, but in the long term their phobias and paranoia will keep them enmired in political primitivism and economic destitution.

Muslim democratic activists and intellectuals, many in exile in the West, know that the answer lies in modernising Islamic cultures without rejecting religion. We must be open about the sins of the past and extend material and political help, most urgently in the Arab/Israeli dispute. But the decision finally to lay aside historic hatreds and to join the great adventure of the modern world can only be made by Muslim societies themselves. Jihads and terror and the rejection of democratic reform and enlightened social mores will indefinitely postpone the day when Islamic cultures can restore themselves to their historic heights, alongside a West that was once their pupil.