The first source of difficulty about the Middle East problem is the name itself. The geopolitical name for the people of this region of the world was an American invention. It captures a particular point in history when American might was beginning to surpass and gradual supplant European hegemony in the region. At the height of their power, the British called the region the Near East. It is an appropriate choice of words for a British strategist. Not so for an American naval officer Mahan who chose the currently dominant term, the Middle East. Since the political fortunes of the superpowers of the world have almost always influenced the course of events in this part of the world, secular and religious thoughts assume importance depending on the ruling intellectual and material forces in command. During the medieval ages when religion was a better tool to mobilize Europeans, the term crusade and other similar words from the Muslim side reverberated in the firmaments of medieval debates. This understanding would explain why Europe used religious terminology at one point in its encounter with the peoples of the area, but at another time spoke more frequently in secular terms. The fight between Arabs and Israelis grew out of the long period of the Westernization of the Semites. What I am saying here is that the development of Jewish communities in Europe over the last thousand years plus and the more recent intimate engagement of the Arabs in Western European societies have combined to create the roots of their current conflict. Both the Jews of Israel and their Arab political foes are the products of European influences. One developed Zionism as an intellectual, social and political movement to resolve a pestering problem of Anti-Semitism and the challenges to Jewish presence in Europe. On the other hand, Arab nationalism was developed in response to European colonization of their lands and the cultural penetration of their minds.

What is striking to some of us is the fact that the long separation between the European Jews and the Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East since their fairly harmonious coexistence in the Iberian Peninsula before the 1492 expulsion has in some quarters beclouded any memories of love and goodwill between these two Semitic groups. The logic and rationale of European nationalism were internalized by the ideologues of Zionism and Arab Nationalism and their common fears and dreads are the mainsprings of their animosity and violence. Much of the intellectual argument in defense of these two ideologies up until the 1970's before the outbreak of the October War was secular in content. That war could now be remembered as the turning point in the choice of words of certain elements in Israel and the Jewish World on the one hand, and in the Arab and Muslim world on the other. It is not strange now for scholars and journalists to remember the 1973 war as the October War, the Yom Kippur War, or the Ramadan War. Your choice of words would be largely determined by your opinions on or attitudes toward the Israelis or the Arabs. The religiously minded or the politically motivated might well be consciously or unconsciously inclined to use one of these three names. Because of this trend of events since the development of secular nationalism for the Israelis and the Arabs, the secular and the religious ideas are now competing for primacy in the mental estates of the Arab and the Israelis. While these two political forces compete for real estates, the Israeli and the Arab, particularly the Palestinian, are vying for continuing American and Western favors in the fortifications of their mental estates. As a result of this strong quest for American political support, the political climate in the West will continue to affect their physical and mental worlds immeasurably. In light of this reasoning, one can here argue that the prevalence of secular nationalism and secular vocabulary during the Cold War and the avoidance of religious complications between the Arabs and the West at that time cannot be ignored by all of us.

But if religion was downplayed during that period in so far as American relations with the Arabs and Jews were concerned, the climate of opinions changed during the 1970's, as I argued above, and the Iranian Revolution helped escalate that tension. This is where the Arab-Israeli contest became fertilized in a religious womb made in Iran. The gradual drift towards the articulation of the Arab/Palestinian cause in religious terms among the religiously minded Arabs benefited from the growing failures of the Palestinian Liberation Movement and the intended and unintended consequences of the Saudi/Western cooperation in Afghanistan to reverse the gains of the Soviet Union in the early 1980's. This is why the use of the terms Islam and Islamism created strange bedfellows in the Middle East. And of the problems Israelis, Arabs and the West faced today, most of the difficulties are the results of intended and unintended consequences of the respective decisions to support or not to support the message of Islamism. During the Cold War the Saudis were found reliable and steadfast as custodians of the Holy Shrines of Islam and for this and other related reasons they could mobilize the Islamic World on behalf of the U.S. and her allies. This love affair between the West and the Saudis worked well so long as oil was forthcoming and not threatened and the Qur'an could be the Great Bridge of Monotheism that could unite the Muslims and the West in their campaign against the Communists. This strategy worked well until the glue began to unravel. What unraveled the glue of collaboration? It was the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iranian Revolution. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan helped empower the religious groups in their political agitation against the communists. This new climate in local and global politics created the conditions for Islamic fundamentalist groups to stretch their wings within the Muslim World and against the West.

Related to these developments are the political circumstances that combined to make the Arab political experience of this last century unique. During the Cold war, as I have argued elsewhere, the Arabs were the only people who had to fight three cold wars. The Americans had their war against the communists; the Israelis had to grapple with the Cold War between America and Russia in addition to the Arab-Israeli wars; and the Arabs had to deal with the two cold and hot wars known to the Israelis in addition to the Arab Cold War between the royalists and the Anti-royalist Nasserites and Baathists. Because of this unique Arab situation we can see how religion and secular ideologies proved useful in the contest of wills in the Arab world. The battle between the radical secular Arab forces and the royalists took place in Arab lands, but the supporters of the contestants came from far and wide.

In concluding this brief response to this question that could be a book unto itself, let me summarize by making the following statement. First, the language of politics in the Middle East will remain religious in Arab societies so long as religious vocabulary is more potent and socially empowering than the secular. Similarly, religious language would hold sway as long as politics does not allow the spirit of democracy as we know it in the West to inspire and galvanize the local peoples of the Arab lands. Democracy is not the panacea that can cure all political ills in the Middle East. However, unless and until the demands of people in this physical world (Dunya) are taken out of the hands of unelected and dictatorial rulers chances are the war of words would translate into the violent wars and the lives of many people in that part of the world would be jeopardized. Until I am concerned scientifically convinced by a powerful sociological argument, I am inclined to believe that no human institution has any special ecological preference or geo-socially favored environment to germinate and grow. Since all humans have the same DND, their religious preference should not necessarily be pegged to any DNA combinations. The people of the Middle East are also affected by the forces of modernity and globalization. For this and other related reasons, I suspect they too would sooner or later choose the path of democracy, elections and political transparency as America and other democratic nations in the world have done. Religion and secularism must work out a modus vivendi as Europe did after years of religious violence. If we are going to defeat the terrorists we must beat them in three domains, namely, in the hearts and minds of the Middle East people, in the work place and in the malls and market places of that region.

These triple conditions have a lot to do with the politics of the belly, the politics of the head and the politics of the soul.