第 62 页

said Conway. The poor like family photo albums as much as the rich and are ready to

pay for them. The local government also made this women's group its official

photographers for public works projects, which added to their income.

End of story? Not quite. As I said, HP is not an NGO. "After four months we said,

'Okay, the experiment is over, we're taking the camera back,'" said Conway. "And they

said, 'You're crazy.'" So HP told the women that if they wanted to keep the camera,

printer, and solar panel, they had to come up with a plan to pay for them. They

eventually proposed renting them for $9 a month, and HP agreed. And now they are

branching out into other villages. HP, meanwhile, has started working with an NGO

to train multiple women's groups with the same mobile photography studio, and there

is a potential here for HP to sell the studios to NGOs all over India, with all of

them using HP ink and other supplies. And from India, who knows where?

"They are giving us feedback on the cameras and ease of use," said Conway. "What it

has done to change the confidence of the women is absolutely amazing."

Too Frustrated

One of the unintended consequences of the flat world is that it puts different

societies and cultures in much greater direct contact with one another. It connects

people to people much faster than people and cultures can often prepare themselves.

Some cultures thrive on the sud-

392

den opportunities for collaboration that this global intimacy makes possible. Others

are threatened, frustrated, and even humiliated by this close contact, which, among

other things, makes it very easy for people to see where they stand in the world

vis-a-vis everyone else. All of this helps to explain the emergence of one of the

most dangerous unflattening forces today-the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda and the

other Islamist terror organizations, who are coming out of the Muslim world and Muslim

communities in Europe.

The Arab-Muslim world is a vast, diverse civilization, encompassing over one billion

people and stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and from Nigeria all the way to the

suburbs of London. It is very dangerous to generalize about such a complex religious

community, made up of so many different ethnicities and nationalities. But one need

only look at the headlines in any day's newspaper to appreciate that a lot of anger

and frustration seems to be bubbling over from the Muslim world in general and from

the Arab-Muslim world in particular, where many young people seem to be agitated by

a combination of issues. One of the most obvious is the festering Arab-Israeli

conflict, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and East Jerusalem-a

grievance which has a powerful emotional hold on the Arab-Muslim imagination and has

long soured relations with America and the West.

But this is not the only reason for the brewing anger in these communities. This anger

also has to do with the frustration of Arabs and Muslims at having to live, in many,

many cases, under authoritarian governments, which not only deprive their people of

a voice in their own future, but have deprived tens of millions of young people in

particular of opportunities to achieve their full potential through good jobs and

modern schools. The fact that the flat world enables people to so easily compare their

circumstances with others only sharpens their frustrations.

Some of these Arab-Muslim young men and women have chosen to emigrate in order to

find opportunities inthe West; others have chosen tosuffer in silence at home, hoping

for some kind of change. The most powerful journalistic experiences I have had since

9/11 have been my encounters in the Arab world with some of these young people. Because

my column with my picture runs in Arabic in the leading pan-Arab

393

newspaper, the London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, and because I often appear on Arab

satellite-television news programs, many people in that part of the world know what

I look like. I have been amazed by the number of young Arabs and Muslims-men and

women-who have come up to me on the streets of Cairo or in the Arabian Gulf since

9/11, and said to me what one young man in Al-Azhar mosque did one Friday, after noon

prayer: "You're Friedman, aren't you?"

I nodded yes.

"Keep writing what you're writing," he said. And what he meant was writing about the

importance of bringing more freedom of thought, expression, and opportunity to the

Arab-Muslim world, so its young people can realize their potential.

Unfortunately, though, these progressive young people are not the ones defining the

relationship betweeen the Arab-Muslim community and the world at large today.

Increasingly, that relationship is being dominated by, and defined by, religious

militants and extremists, who give vent to the frustrations in that part of the world

by simply lashing out. The question that I want to explore in this section is: What

produced this violent Islamist fringe, and why has it found so much passive support

in the Arab-Muslim world today-even though, I am convinced, the vast majority there

do not share the violent agenda of these groups or their apocalyptic visions?

The question is relevant to a book about the flat world for a very simple reason:

Should there be another attack on the United States of the magnitude of 9/11, or worse,

walls would go up everywhere and the flattening of the world would be set back for

a long, long time.

That, of course, is precisely what the Islamists want.

When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness

that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness

that has produced Britney Spears and Janet Jackson. They do not see, and do not want

to see, the openness-the freedom of thought and inquiry-that has made us powerful,

the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define

it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought

and inquiry are the real sources of the West's

economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change. And the

fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change.

To beat back the threat of openness, the Muslim extremists have, quite deliberately,

chosen to attack the very thing that keeps open societies open, innovating, and

flattening, and that is trust. When terrorists take instruments from our daily

lives-the car, the airplane, the tennis shoe, the cell phone-and turn them into

weapons of indiscriminate violence, they reduce trust. We trust when we park our car

downtown in the morning that the car next to it is not going to blow up; we trust

when we go to Disney World that the man in the Mickey Mouse outfit is not wearing

a bomb-laden vest underneath; we trust when we get on the shuttle flight from Boston

to New York that the foreign student seated next to us isn't going to blow up his

tennis shoes. Without trust, there is no open society, because there are not enough

police to patrol every opening in an open society. Without trust, there can also be

no flat world, because it is trust that allows us to take down walls, remove barriers,

and eliminate friction at borders. Trust is essential for a flat world, where you

have supply chains involving ten, a hundred, or a thousand people, most of whom have

never met face-to-face. The more open societies are exposed to indiscriminate

terrorism, the more trust is removed, and the more open societies will erect walls

and dig moats instead.

The founders of al-Qaeda are not religious fundamentalists per se. That is, they are

not focused simply on the relationship between themselves and God, and on the values

and cultural norms of the religious community. They are a political phenomenon more

than a religious one. I like to call them Islamo-Leninists. I use the term "Leninists"

to convey the utopian-totalitarian vision of al-Qaeda as well its self-image. As

al-Qaeda's chief ideologist, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has put it, al-Qaeda is the

ideological vanguard, whose attacks on the United States and other Western targets

are designed to mobilize and energize the Muslim masses to rise up against their own

corrupt rulers, who are propped up by America. Like all good Leninists, the

Islamo-Leninists are certain that the Muslim masses are deeply dissatisfied with

their lot and that one or two spectacular acts of jihad against the "pillars of

tyranny" in the West will spark them to overthrow the secularizing, immoral, and

unjust Arab-

395

Muslim regimes that have defiled Islam. In their place, the Islamo-Leninists, however,

do not want to establish a workers' paradise but rather a religious paradise. They

vow to establish an Islamic state across the same territory that Islam ruled over

at its height, led by a caliph, a supreme religious-political leader, who would unite

all the Muslim peoples into a single community.

Islamo-Leninism, in many ways, emerged from the same historical context as the radical

European ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fascism and

Marxist-Leninism grew out ofthe rapid industrialization and modernization ofGermany

and Central Europe, where communities living in tightly bonded villages and extended

families suddenly got shattered and the sons and fathers went off to the urban areas

to work for big industrial companies. In this age of transitions, young men in

particular lost a sense of identity, rootedness, and personal dignity that had been

provided by traditional social structures. In that vacuum, along came Hitler, Lenin,

and Mussolini, who told these young men that they had an answer for their feelings

of dislocation and humiliation: You may not be in the village or small town anymore,

but you are still proud, dignified members of a larger community-the working class,

or the Aryan nation.

Bin Laden offered the same sort of ideological response for young Arabs and Muslims.

The first person to recognize the Islamo-Leninist character of these 9/11

hijackers-that they were not fundamentalists but adherents of an extreme, violent

political cult-was Adrian Karatnycky, the president of Freedom House. In a November

5, 2001, article in the National Review, titled "Under Our Very Noses," Karatnycky

makes the following argument: "The key hijackers... were well-educated children of

privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political

oppression." And none of them seem to have been raised in a particularly

fundamentalist household. Indeed, the top 9/11 operatives and pilots, like Mohammed

Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who shared an apartment in Hamburg, where they both

attended the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, all seem to have been recruited

to al-Qaeda through cells and prayer groups-after they moved to Europe.

396

None of these plotters was recruited in the Middle East and then planted in Europe

years in advance by bin Laden, notes Karatnycky. To the contrary, virtually all of

them seem to have lived in Europe on their own, grown alienated from the European

society around them, gravitated to a local prayer group or mosque to find warmth and

solidarity, undergone a "born-again" conversion, gotten radicalized by Islamist

elements, gone off for training in Afghanistan, and presto, a terrorist was born.

Their discovery of religion was not just part of a personal search for meaning. It

went far beyond fundamentalism. They converted Islam into a political ideology, a

religious totalitarianism. Had the 9/11 hijackers been students at Berkeley in the

early 1970's, they would have been Trotskyite radicals. "To understand the September

11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile of the classic revolutionary:

deracinated, middle class, shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin

in Zurich; or of Pol Pot or Ho Chi Minh in Paris . . . For them Islamism is the new

universal revolutionary creed, and bin Laden is Sheikh Guevara," writes Karatnycky.

"Like the leaders of America's Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang,

Italy's Red Brigades, and Japan's Red Army Faction, the Islamic terrorists were

university-educated converts to an all-encompassing neo-totalitarian ideology."

My friend Abdallah Schleifer, a journalism professor in Cairo, actually knew Ayman

al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's number two and chief ideologue, when al-Zawahiri was a young

doctor on his way to becoming a young neo-Leninist Muslim revolutionary. "Ayman was

attracted from the time he was a teenager into a Utopian vision of an Islamic state,"

Schleifer told me on a visit to Cairo. But instead of being drawn to the traditional

concern of religion-the relationship between oneself and God-al-Zawahiri became

drawn to religion as a political ideology. Like a good Marxist or Leninist,

al-Zawahiri was interested in "building the Kingdom of God on earth," said Schleifer,

and Islamism became his Marxism-his "utopian ideology." And where Mohammed Atta meets

al-Zawahiri is the intersection where rage and humiliation meet the ideology that

is going to make it all right. "Ayman is saying to someone like Mohammed Atta, 'You

see injustice? We have a system-a system, mind

you, a system-that will give you [justice], not a religion, because religion gives

you inner peace.' It doesn't necessarily solve any social problem. But [al-Zawahiri]

is saying we have a system that will give you justice. You feel frustration? We have

a system that will enable you to flower. The system is what we call Islamism-an

ideological, highly politicized Islam, in which the spiritual content-the personal

relationship [with God] - is taken out of Islam and instead it is transformed into

a religious ideology like fascism or communism." But unlike the Leninists, who wanted

to install the reign of the perfect class, the working class, and unlike Nazis, who