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For many centuries Islam was the greatest civilisation on earth - the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavour. Its armies, its teachers and its traders were advancing on every front in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, bringing, as they saw it, civilisation and religion to the infidel barbarians who lived beyond the Muslim frontier.
And then everything changed, and Muslims, instead of invading and dominating Christendom, were invaded and dominated by Christian powers. The resulting frustration and anger at what seemed to them a reversal of both natural and divine law have been growing for centuries, and have reached a climax in our own time. These feelings find expression in many places where Muslims and non-Muslims meet and clash - in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Israel and Palestine, Sudan, Kashmir and the Philippines, among others.
The prime target of the resulting anger is, inevitably, the US, now the unchallenged leader of what we like to call the free world and what others variously define as the West, Christendom and the world of the unbelievers.
For a long time politicians in Arab and some other Third World countries were able to achieve at least some of their purposes by playing the rival outside powers against one another - France against Britain, the Axis (German, Italy, and Japan up to WWII) against the Allies, the Soviet Union against the US. And then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, came a truly radical change. Now, for the first time, there is only one superpower, dominant, however unwillingly, in the world: the United States.
Some Arab leaders try frantically to find a substitute for the Soviet Union as patron and protector of anti-American causes. Others, notably Osama bin Laden, took a different view. As they saw it, it was they who, by the holy war they waged in Afghanistan, brought about the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union. From their perspective, they had dealt with one of the infidel superpowers - the more determined, the more ruthless, the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the soft and pampered US would, so it seemed, be a much easier task.
The reasons for hatred are known and historically attested; the hatred has been growing steadily for many years and has been intensified by the conduct of some of the rulers whom America calls friends and allies and whom their own people see and resent as American puppets. A more important question is the reason for the contempt with which they regard the US. The basic reason for this contempt is what they perceive as the rampant immorality and degeneracy of the American way - contemptible but also dangerous, because of its corrupting influence on Muslim societies. What did the Ayatollah Khomeini mean when he repeatedly called America the "Great Satan"? The answer is clear. Satan is not an invader, an imperialist, an exploiter. He is a tempter, a seducer, who, in the words of the Koran, "whispers in the hearts of men".
Another aspect of this contempt is expressed again and again in the statements of bin Laden and others like him. The refrain is always the same. Because of their depraved and self-indulgent way of life, Americans have become soft and cannot take casualties. And then they repeat the same litany - Vietnam, the Marines in Beirut, Somalia. Hit them and they will run. More recent attacks confirmed this judgment in their eyes - on the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993; on the US mission in Riyadh in 1995; on the military living quarters in Khobar in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the embassies in East Africa in 1998; on the USS Cole in Yemen in October, 2000 - all those brought only angry but empty words and, at most, a few misdirected missiles.
The immediate and effective response against their bases in Afghanistan must have come as a serious shock to the terrorist organisations and compelled some revision of their earlier assessment of American weakness and demoralisation. The US must make sure they are not misled, by the unfamiliar processes of a democratic society, to return to that earlier misjudgment.
Bernard Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. His most recent book is What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. This article first appeared in The Washington Post.
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