Analysis Of Bernard Lewis The Roots Of Muslim Rage

In his article “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, Bernard Lewis stated a quote of the former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson “Divided we stand, united we fall”. Jefferson was trying to create the idea of separation of the church and the state, which actually was not purely a new idea. Then he indicates that this separation is date back to the beginning of Christianity, where the church was concerned with religion and state was concerned with politics. And as long as they are two different institutions, conflicts may arise between them over different issues, thus the solutions to these problems result from Christianity only. Lewis indicates that on the other part of the world there are other religious societies, in which both religion and politics

They are so convinced that U.S. stands for freedom and democracy, so why there is hate in Muslim world against Americans? To answer this question, the scholar Bernard Lewis who is considered as one of the fundamentalist in the Occidentalism theory tried to explain the roots of this hatred. But first we need to understand what does Occidentalism mean? - It refers to the stereotyped on the west, and the ideologies of the west, moreover this theory heavily stresses negative constructions of the west about Muslim World (Buruma and Margalit, n.d). Lewis tried to give several justifications for this hatred such like, imperialism, sexism, or slavery, in this paper I will only focus on one of his idea, which is imperialism. I completely disagree with Lewis when tries to ignore the huge impact of Imperliasim in the Muslim world. He wonders if it is because of imperialism then why Muslims don’t hate the Soviet Union instead of US, since according to him the Russian dominate more countries than US does. Here I do not think a well-known scholar like him would disregard the fact that since the end of the World War ll and the end of what so called American isolationism, US started a new foreign policy called interventionism. Based on this idea, therefore I will divide my argument into two parts; First that U.S

In fact American foreign policy has always supported and protected those who could best serve U.S. interests, especially the short-term interests. Moreover, It should be noted that the US interventionism could be divided into two eras, the Cold war 1945-1989 and post-Cold war 1989-91. From 1945 to 1989 “Cold War”, the main justifications of US interventionism were to serve its national interests and to preemptive self-defense, when the US main principle was to contain communist influence abroad. For example, in 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected regime of Mosaddegh and re-established the shah of Iran. The US saw Mosaddegh as a threat to its interest when he nationalized the Iranian Oil and on the other hand US saw the Shah as the best tool to achieve US goals in the region although he was totally corrupted (US military intervention abroad, n.d.). However in the post-Cold war ear, another justifications have been added to the equation, which are humanitarian intervention and democracy. In addition, After the Iranian revolution in 1979, US shifted its foreign policy relations to Iraqi government instead of Iran, in order to fight the new enemy of the US, the Islamic Iran; Iraq was considered as the best ally of the United States in the region, which was clearly witnessed in the Iraqi-Iranian war. During the post-cold war, however, his