Fareed Zakaria: Explaining the Supposed Root Cause of Terrorism
On the morning of September 11, 2001, millions made their way to work, mechanically hustling through the crowded streets of New York City. Businessmen, accountants, and stockbrokers cursed with tunnel vision did not blink an eye at beggars, street performers, or even the freshly roasted nuts sold in carts that can be sniffed out from two blocks away. But on September 11, 2001, the tunnel vision curse was broken. For once, everyone looked up. Everyone looked at the same dark sky that hovered over the country for days; the same dark sky that still hovers over the country. Nearly 3,000 lost to an act of hate; an act of devastation. Americans eagerly pointed fingers and made assumptions of the Arab World. Patriotism and a sense of community were at an all time high, as “Never Forget,” was the slogan coined to honor those involved in the attack. Fareed Zakaria has never forgotten. Fifteen years after the attack, Zakaria still answers the most asked question about terrorism: Why do they hate us? A mere month after 9/11, when the sensitivity of the event was far from worn off, Zakaria published a timeless piece in Newsweek titled, “The Politics of Rage: Why do They Hate Us?” Through the analytical article, he explained the animosity of the Arab World toward America. As a public intellectual who serves the world as a journalist specializing in foreign affairs, he aims to explain the hate behind terrorist attacks in terms the average American can understand without hindering his ideas. With the accessibility of his articles and the fresh opinion they provide, Zakaria challenges Americans to think farther than its borders. Zakaria does the unthinkable and changes the domestic outlook on foreign affairs, most notably doing so after 9/11 when he clarified that terrorism is rooted in the resistance of modernization in the Middle East rather than in religious affairs, making him one of the most influential public intellectuals of modern history.
Born in Mumbai, India to an Islamic scholar father and a newspaper editor mother, Zakaria came from an enriched background of intelligence and secular knowledge. After attending Yale College, he went on to earn a Doctorate of Philosophy in Government degree from Harvard University, where he directed research on foreign affairs. Following his research project, Zakaria transitioned to journalism, following his mother’s footsteps, and became a managing editor for Foreign Affairs. His resume boasts with multiple journalistic endeavors at Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, and more. Currently Zakaria hosts CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square and writes a column for The Washington Post. He also published five books on multiple topics including education, politics, and history. Despite Zakaria’s success in political journalism, it is not his resume that defines him as an intellectual, but it is his ideas. As University of Southern California professor Stephen Mack said, “our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is — and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it” (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals”). Mack calls for a shift in thinking when conceptualizing the public intellectual. Thus, an intellectual’s influential duties to society should be placed higher than how many books, theses, or articles a public intellectual must write to keep their intellectual status. In other terms, if the idea of quality over quantity becomes superior, then public intellectuals will never disappear.
Zakaria’s intellectual quality, specifically in his piece “Why do They Hate Us?,” has continued to be one of his most influential and studied works despite the hundreds of other articles he published following. Fifteen years after the story went national, the problem of Anti-American sentiment in the Arab World persists and Zakaria’s thoughts on why the hatred exists are still relevant. Zakaria argues that the Arab World resists modernity in fear of Americanization. Thus, while the West and Asia continue to grow economically, socially, and politically, the Middle East is paralyzed in their outdated ways. The idea of a fear of modernity challenged the American thought post-9/11 that the attack was religiously driven. To argue his point, Zakaria looked at the past 30 years — now the past 45 years, stating that era is critical to the study of terrorism. By looking at the specific era of time, Zakaria discards the elongated history of the Arab World, which he finds irrelevant to the subject. As a public intellectual, his ability to pinpoint the year turmoil in the Middle East began is astounding, and makes his pieces concisely accurate.
To explain the sentiment of the Arab World, Zakaria introduces their top influencers, or as he says, “the rulers.” In the 1950s, Egypt was the dominant Arab nation and was ruled by Gamal Abdel Nassar. Nassar, the closest person the Arabs had to a Westernized ruler, had plans for the modernization of Egypt that the rest of the Middle East followed. Nonetheless, “It failed. For all their energy these regimes chose bad ideas and implemented them in worse ways. Socialism produced bureaucracy and stagnation. Rather than adjusting to the failures of central planning, the economies never really moved on” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”). Following the failure of Nassar’s attempts to revolutionize the Arab World begins the 30-year period Zakaria focuses on. Dictators took control of Middle Eastern countries and the political, social, and economic stagnation of the region persists today, but has arguably gotten worse since the 9/11 attacks.
In his article, Zakaria portrays pre-Nassar ruled Egypt as the Arab leader of intellectual, artistic, and cultural advancement. The post-Nassar era left the country struggling to publish just over 300 books a year. Although their struggles go far beyond a severe lack of social advancement, Zakaria points out that Egypt is still in a better position than their Arab neighbors.
“Syria has become one of the world’s most oppressive police states, a country where 25,000 people can be rounded up and killed by the regime with no consequences…In 30 years Iraq has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries — with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing — into a squalid playpen for Saddam Hussein’s megalomania. Lebanon, a diverse, cosmopolitan society with a capital, Beirut, that was once called the Paris of the East, has become a hellhole of war and terror. In an almost unthinkable reversal of a global pattern, almost every Arab country today is less free than it was 30 years ago. There are few countries in the world of which one can say that” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”).
The stagnant turmoil left the struggling countries to follow corrupt monarchs and dictators, who created places of violence and oppression without justice. In return, Arab citizens became less free, a backwards trend that even countries in Africa have avoided.
Although Africa’s social, economic, and political status can be compared to that of the Middle East, Zakaria introduces Africa as a region that is at least trying to revolutionize. Thus his next point, the Arab World’s “failed ideas.” As Zakaria mentions in the previous section of his article, Nassar’s failed ideas left the Middle East with a skewed view of Western modernization — one they now feared as Americanization after Asian countries thrived off of seemingly copying the advancements of major American cities. “This fear has paralyzed Arab civilization. In some ways the Arab world seems less ready to confront the age of globalization than even Africa, despite the devastation that continent has suffered from AIDS and economic and political dysfunction. At least the Africans want to adapt to the new global economy. The Arab world has not yet taken that first step” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”). Until the Arab World acknowledges they must modernize, their affairs will stay chaotic. When analyzing the fear of modernization, Zakaria realizes his American audience who relies on modern technology and Western thinking will not understand the reluctant attitude towards modernization. To clarify, he addresses their attempts to modernize through socialism, secularism, and nationalism — all which have lead to failure. The continuous failures became too frustrating for the region to handle. Ultimately, the Arab World gave up, started viewing modernization as an evil, and kept practicing their old ways.
Zakaria explores America’s modernization endeavors as the opposite of evil — our efforts have been good — lucky, perhaps. So why were efforts in the Arab World so disastrous? Zakaria attributes the failures as a timing issue; a timing issue that ultimately caused terrorism. “Arab societies are going through a massive youth bulge, with more than half of most countries’ populations under the age of 25. Young men, often better educated than their parents, leave their traditional villages to find work. They arrive in noisy, crowded cities like Cairo, Beirut and Damascus or go to work in the oil states” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”). When the young men arrive to the cities, which are significantly more liberal than the small villages, they are off-put and angered by the freedoms of women. Women work, eat in restaurants, and revealed more skin than their counterparts in villages.
With a bunch of distressed young men concentrated together in cities, they turned to mosques. Thus, Zakaria makes the third point of his article titled, “enter religion.” Post-9/11, America was caught up in the religious aspect of terrorism. Frightened to board a plane, sit next to at a concert, or even share the same air as someone who looked remotely Muslim, Zakaria explained the Islam behind terrorism. He explained it simply as an establishment where civilians, specifically the disheveled village-gone-city men, could gain power and voice their opinions. Since the ruling governments in the Arab World shoved citizens aside and wanted nothing to do with democracy, the freedom to share opposition in the mosque was promising. “The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no free press, few pathways for dissent. As a result, the mosque turned into the place to discuss politics…If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”). Zakaria contradicts the American belief that Islam is a religion of hate that teaches followers Anti-Western sentiment. Instead, like many Americans who move out of their small town, fear change, or just need someone or something to look up to, religion was the answer; and in the Middle East, Islam was superior. Thus, Zakaria changes the view of Islam as the “evil” of terrorism and reveals the true “evil” of the Arab World — the stagnant political chaos.
In the concluding section of “Why do They Hate Us” titled, “what to do,” Zakaria shares his insights on how to deal with terrorism as a foreign affair. He suggests America interfere militarily, politically, and culturally. Militarily, the United States needs to declare war to destroy Al Qaeda. Politically, our national security defenses need to not focus on China or Russia, but instead on the real danger of the Arab World. Zakaria says other policy changes are needed as well, including more governmental alliances. Nonetheless, Zakaria says the most important battle will be the cultural component. To target terrorism at its root, the United States along with other modern countries need to influence the Middle East to modernize. “During the cold war the West employed myriad ideological strategies to discredit the appeal of communism, make democracy seem attractive and promote open societies. We will have to do something on that scale to win this cultural struggle” (Zakaria “Why do They Hate Us?”). As public intellectuals realize, history repeats itself. Zakaria understands the successes of discrediting communism, and feels a similar tactic will help get the Middle East out of despair.
In a period of confusion, misinformation, and assumptions spewing rampantly about terrorism and its connection to Islam, it took a public intellectual to uncover the unspoken. Although Zakaria’s analysis of the root of terrorism post-9/11 is just one of his most inspiring pieces, it embodies his thought process as a whole. Zakaria successfully detailed the necessary history for context purposes, outlined the root problem at hand, described what the root problem caused, and then suggested scholarly solutions to fix the problem. The full circle of thought was put into terms the average American could easily understand. Zakaria even quoted one of the most read books of the time, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to explain the American way of life after realizing it is hard to understand life in a Third World region when living in the modernized United States. As a public intellectual, Zakaria knows his audience well and writes to help them grasp a better understanding of foreign affairs, squashing misinformation and confusion.
Nonetheless, like many public intellectuals, Zakaria’s integrity was recently questioned. A plagiarism scandal caused controversy in his written word and ideas he claimed were solely his. Although plagiarism can never be defended or made right, Zakaria still published hundreds of original work that cannot be replaced or diminished. Professor Mack said, “And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy — and they do — it’s simply to keep the pot boiling” (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals). Controversy or not, Zakaria has always kept the pot boiling. He embodies a true public intellectual.
Works Cited
Mack, Stephen. “The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?” stephenmack.com, 14 Aug. 2007. Web. 01 Sept. 2016.
Zakaria, Fareed. “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” Newsweek. Newsweek, LLC., 14 Oct. 2001. Web. 01 Sept. 2016.