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there feel the same frustration and tinge of humiliation that many of their most

enraged youth do. And there is a certain respect for the way these violent youth have

been ready to stand up to the world and to their own leaders and defend the honor

of their civilization. When I visited Qatar a few months after 9/11, a friend of mine

there-a sweet, thoughtful, liberal person who works for the Qatari government-

confided to me something in a whisper that was deeply troubling to him: "My

eleven-year-old son thinks bin Laden is a good man."

Most middle-class Arabs and Muslims, I am convinced, were not celebrating the death

of three thousand innocent Americans on 9/11. I know my Arab and Muslim friends were

not. But many Arabs and Muslims were celebrating the idea of putting a fist in

America's face- and they were quietly applauding the men who did it. They were happy

to see someone humiliating the people and the country that they felt was humiliating

them and supporting what they saw as injustice in their world-whether it is America's

backing of Arab kings and dictators who export oil to it or America's backing of Israel

whether it does the right things or the wrong things.

Most American blacks, I am sure, had little doubt that O. J. Simpson murdered his

ex-wife, but they applauded his acquittal as a stick in the eye of the Los Angeles

Police Department and a justice system that they saw as consistently humiliating and

unfair to them. Humiliation does that to people. Bin Laden is to the Arab masses what

O.J. was to many American blacks-the stick they poke in the eye of an "unfair" America

and their own leaders. I once interviewed Dyab Abou Jahjah, often called the Malcolm

X of Belgium's alienated Moroccan youth. I asked him what he and his friends thought

when they saw the World Trade Center being smashed. He said, "I think if we are honest

with ourselves, most of the Muslims all over the world felt that. . . America got

hit in the face and that cannot be bad. I don't want to make an intellectual answer

for that. I'll give it very simply. America was kicking our butts for fifty years.

And really badly. Supporting the bullies in the region, whether it is Israel or our

own regimes, [America] is giving us not only a bleeding nose, but breaking a lot of

our necks."

Just as America's economic depression in the 1920s and 1930s made many normal,

intelligent, thinking Americans passive or active supporters of communism, so the

humiliating economic, military, and emotional depression of the Arab-Muslim world

has made too many normal, intelligent, and thinking Arabs and Muslims passive

supporters of bin Ladenism.

Former Kuwaiti minister of information Dr. Sa'd Bin Tefla, a journalist, wrote an

essay in the London Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on the third anniversary of

September 11 titled "We Are All Bin Laden," which went right to this point. He asked

why it is that Muslim scholars and clerics eagerly supported fatwas condemning Salman

Rushdie to death for writing an allegedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses, that

wove in themes about the Prophet Muhammad, but to this day no Muslim cleric has issued

a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden for murdering three thousand innocent civilians.

After the fatwa was declared against Salman Rushdie, Muslims staged protests against

the book at British embassies all over the Islamic world and burned Salman Rushdie

dolls alongwith copies of his book. Nine people were killedin ananti-Rushdie protest

in Pakistan.

"Religious legal rulings were disseminated one after another banning Salman Rushdie's

book and calling for him to be killed," Bin Tefla wrote. "Iran earmarked a reward

of $ 1 million for whoever would implement Imam Khomeini's fatwa and kill Salman

Rushdie." And bin Laden? Nothing-no condemnation. "Despite the fact that bin Laden

murdered thousands of innocents in the name of our religion and despite the damage

that he has caused to Muslims everywhere, and especially to innocent Muslims in the

West, whose life is much better than the life of Muslims in Islamic lands, to this

date not a single fatwa has been issued calling for the killing of bin Laden, on the

pretext that bin Laden still proclaims 'there is no God other than Allah,'" Tefla

wrote. Worse, he added, Arab and Muslim satellite television channels have "competed

amongst themselves in broadcasting [bin Laden's] sermons and fatwas, instead of

preventing their dissemination as they did in the case of Rushdie's book . . . With

our equivocal stance on bin Laden, we from the very start left the world with the

impression that we are all bin Laden."

Germany was humiliated after World War I, but it had the modern economic foundations

to produce a state response to that humiliation -in the form of the Third Reich.

The Arab world, by contrast, could not produce a state response to its humiliation.

Instead, it has rattled the world stage in the last fifty years with two

larger-than-life figures, rather than states, noted political theorist Yaron Ezrahi:

One was the Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, and the other was Osama bin Laden.

Each achieved global notoriety, each briefly held the world in his palm-one by using

oil as a weapon and the other by using the most unconventional suicide violence

imaginable. Each gave a temporary "high" to the Arab-Muslim world, a feeling that

it was exercising power on the world stage. But bin Laden and Yamani were only the

illusions of power, noted Ezrahi: The Saudi oil weapon is economic power without

productivity, and bin Laden's terrorism weapon is military force without a real army,

state, economy, and engine of innovation to support it.

What makes Yamanism and bin Ladenism so unfortunate as strategies for Arab influence

in the world is that they ignore the examples within Arab culture and

civilization-when it was at its height-of discipline, hard work, knowledge,

achievement, scientific inquiry, and pluralism. As Nayan Chanda, the editor of

YaleGlobal Online, pointed out to me, it was the Arab-Muslim world that gave birth

to algebra and algorithms, terms both derived from Arabic words. In other words, noted

Chanda, "The entire modern information revolution, which is built to a large degree

on algorithms, can trace its roots all the way back to Arab-Muslim civilization and

the great learning centers of Baghdad and Alexandria," which first introduced these

concepts, then transferred them to Europe through Muslim Spain. The Arab-Muslim

peoples have an incredibly rich cultural tradition and civilization, with long

periods of success and innovation to draw on for inspiration and example for their

young people. They have all the resources necessary for modernization in their own

cultural terms, if they want to summon them.

Unfortunately, there is huge resistance to such modernization from the authoritarian

and religiously obscurantist forces within the Arab-Muslim world. That is why this

part of the world will be liberated, and

406

feel truly empowered, only if it goes through its own war of ideas -and the moderates

there win. We had a civil war in America some 150 years ago over ideas-the ideas of

tolerance, pluralism, human dignity, and equality. The best thing outsiders can do

for the Arab-Muslim world today is try to collaborate with its progressive forces

in every way possible- from trying to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, to stabilizing

Iraq, to signing free-trade agreements with as many Arab countries as possible-so

as to foster a similar war of ideas within their civilization. There is no other way.

Otherwise this part of the world has the potential to be a huge un-flattening force.

We have to wish the good people there well. But the battle will be one for them to

fight and to win. No one can do it for them.

No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general

manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most

respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq

Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim

extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: "Self-cure starts with

self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the

full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture . . . The mosque

used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and

reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical

life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses

prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder

the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have

killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a

universal war cry . . . We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful

fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly,

implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit

all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling

to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and

daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American

schools and colleges."

407

Too Many Toyotas

The problems of the too sick, the too disempowered, and the too humiliated are all

in their own ways keeping the world from becoming entirely flat. They may do so even

more in the future, if they are not properly addressed. But another barrier to the

flattening of the world is emerging, one that is not a human constraint but a natural

resource constraint. If millions of people from India, China, Latin America, and the

former Soviet Empire who were living largely outside the flat world all start to walk

onto the flat world playing field at once-and all come with their own dream of owning

a car, a house, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a toaster-we are going to experience

either a serious energy shortage or, worse, wars over energy that would have a

profoundly unflattening effect on the world.

As I mentioned earlier, I visited Beijing in the summer of2004 with my wife and teenage

daughter, Natalie. Before we left, I said to Natalie, "You're really going to like

this city. They have these big bicycle lanes on all the main roads. Maybe when we

get there we can rent bikes and just ride around Beijing. I did that last time I was

there, and it was a lot of fun."

Silly Tom. I hadn't been to Beijing in three years, and just in that brief period

of time the explosive growth there had wiped out many of those charming bicycle lanes.

They had been either shrunken or eliminated to add another lane for automobiles and

buses. The only biking I did there was on the stationary exercise bike in our hotel,

which was a good antidote for having to spend so much time sitting in cars stuck in

Beijing traffic jams. I was in Beijing to attend an international business conference,

and while there I discovered why all the bikes had disappeared. According to one

speaker at the conference, some thirty thousand new cars were being added to the roads

in Beijing every month-one thousand new cars a day! I found that statistic so

unbelievable that I asked Michael Zhao, a young researcher in the Times's Beijing

bureau, to double-check it, and he wrote me back the following e-mail:

Hi Tom, Hope this email finds you well. On your question about how many cars are added

each day in Beijing, I did some research

on the Internet and found that. . . car sales in [Beijing] for April 2004 were 43,000

-24.1% more than same period lastyear. So that is 1,433 cars added [daily] to Beijing,

but including secondhand car sales. New car sales this month were 30,000, or 1,000

cars each day added to the city. The total car sales from Jan. to April 2004 were

165,000, that is about 1,375 cars added each day to Beijing over this period. This

data is from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Commerce. The city's bureau of statistics

has it that the total car sales in 2003 were 407,649, or 1,117 cars each day added.

The new car sales last year were 292,858, or 802 new cars each day . .. The total

number of cars in Beijing is 2.1 million . . . But the recent months seem to have

witnessed surging sales. Also noteworthy is last year's SARS outbreak, during which

period a lot of families bought cars, due to panic about public contact and a sort

of doomsday-stimulated enjoy-life mentality. And many new car owners did enjoy their

time driving, as the traffic in the city so much improved with a lot of people

voluntarily caged at home, without daring to go out. Since then, coupled with dropping

car prices due to China's commitment to reduce tariffs after joining the WTO, a large

number of families have advanced their timetable of buying a car, although some others

decided to wait for further drops of prices. All the best, Michael.

As Michael's note indicated, you can see China's middle class rising right before

your eyes, and it is going to have enormous energy and environmental spillover. The

Great Chinese Dream, like the Great Indian Dream, the Great Russian Dream, and the

Great American Dream, is built around a high-energy, high-electricity,

high-bent-metal lifestyle. To put it another way, the thirty thousand new cars a month

in Beijing, and the cloud of haze that envelops the city on so many days, and the

fact that the city's official Web site actually keeps track of "blue sky" days all

testify to the environmental destruction that could arise from the triple

convergence-if clean alternative renewable energies are not developed soon. Already,

according to the World Bank, sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world