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of dissonance, and loss of self-esteem, that sparks rage, and leads some of them to

join violent groups and lash out at the world. It is also the sort of dissonance that

leads many others, average folks,to give radicalgroups like al-Qaeda passive support.

Again, the flattening of the world only sharpens that dissonance by making the

backwardness of the Arab-Muslim region, compared to others, impossible to ignore.

It has become so impossible to ignore that some Arab-Muslim intellectuals have started

to point out this backwardness with brutal honesty and to demand

solutions. They do this in defiance of their authoritarian governments, who prefer

to use their media not to encourage honest debate, but rather to blame all their

problems on others-on America, on Israel, or on a legacy of Western colonialism-on

anything and anyone but the dead hand of these authoritarian regimes.

According to the second Arab Human Development Report, which was written in 2003 for

the United Nations Development Program by a group of courageous Arab social scientists,

between 1980 and 1999, Arab countries produced 171 international patents. South Korea

alone during that same period registered 16,328 patents. Hewlett-Packard registers,

on average, 11 new patents a day. The average number of scientists and engineers

working in research and development in the Arab countries is 371 per million people,

while the world average, including countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is

979, the report said. This helps to explain why although massive amounts of foreign

technology are imported to the Arab regions, very little of it is internalized or

supplanted by Arab innovations. Between 1995 and 1996, as many as 25 percent of the

university graduates produced in the Arab world immigrated to some Western country.

There are just 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab region today, compared with

the global average of 78.3 per 1,000, and only 1.6 percent of the Arab population

has Internet access. While Arabs represent almost 5 percent of the world population,

the report said, they produce only 1 percent of the books published, and an unusually

high percentage of those are religious books-over triple the world average. Of the

88 million unemployed males between fifteen and twenty-four worldwide, almost 26

percent are in the Middle East and North Africa, according to an International Labor

Organization study (Associated Press, December 26, 2004).

The same study said the total population of Arab countries quadrupled in the past

fifty years, to almost 300 million, with 37.5 percent under fifteen, and 3 million

coming onto the job market every year. But the good jobs are not being produced at

home, because the environment of openness required to attract international

investment and stimulate local innovation is all too rare in the Arab-Muslim world

today. That virtuous cycle of universities spinning off people and ideas, and then

those people

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and ideas getting funded and creating new jobs, simply does not exist there. Theodore

Dalrymple is a physician and psychiatrist who practices in England and writes a column

for the London Spectator. He wrote an essay in City journal, the urban policy magazine

(Spring 2004), about what he learned from his contacts with Muslim youth in British

prisons. Dalrymple noted that most schools of Islam today treat the Qu'ran as a

divinely inspired text that is not open to any literary criticism or creative

reinterpretation. It is a sacred book to be memorized, not adapted to the demands

and opportunities of modern life. But without a culture that encourages, and creates

space for, such creative reinterpretation, critical thought and original thinking

tend to whither. This may explain why so few world-class scientific papers cited by

other scholars come out of the Arab-Muslim universities.

If the West had made Shakespeare "the sole object of our study and the sole guide

of our lives," said Dalrymple, "we would soon enough fall into backwardness and

stagnation. And the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power:

they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the

twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament

of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure

in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem,

and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the

free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry.

They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they

remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very

appealing, and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern

world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other,

is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. People grow angry when

faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out."

Indeed, talk to young Arabs and Muslims anywhere, and this cognitive dissonance and

the word "humiliation" always come up very quickly in conversation. It was revealing

that when Mahathir Mohammed made his October 16, 2003, farewell speech as prime

minister of Malaysia at an Islamic summit he was hosting in his own country, he built

his remarks

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to his fellow Muslim leaders around the question of why their civilization had become

so humiliated-a term he used five times. "I will not enumerate the instances of our

humiliation," said Mahathir. "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry.

Angry people cannot think properly. There is a feeling of hopelessness among the

Muslim countries and their people. They feel they can do nothing right. . ."

This humiliation is the key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned

by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the

most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is

when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme

violence. When you take the economic and political backwardness of much of the

Arab-Muslim world today, add its past grandeur and self-image of religious

superiority, and combine it with the discrimination and alienation these Arab-Muslim

males face when they leave home and move to Europe, or when they grow up in Europe,

you have one powerful cocktail of rage. As my friend the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem

said of the 9/11 hijackers, they "are walking the streets of life, searching for tall

buildings-for towers to bring down, because they are not able to be tall like them."

I fear that this sense of frustration that feeds recruits to bin Laden may get worse

before it gets better. In the old days, leaders could count on walls and mountains

and valleys to obstruct their people's view and keep them ignorant and passive about

where they stood in comparison to others. You could see only to the next village.

But as the world gets flatter, people can see for miles and miles.

In the flat world you get your humiliation dishedup toyou fiber-optically. I stumbled

across a fascinating example of this involving bin Laden himself. On January 4, 2004,

bin Laden issued one of his taped messages through al-Jazeera, the satellite

television network based in Qatar. On March 7, the Web site of the Islamic Studies

and Research Center published the entire text. One paragraph jumped out at me. It

is in the middle of a section in which bin Laden is discussing the various evils of

Arab rulers, particularly the Saudi ruling family.

"Thus, the situation of all Arab countries suffers from great deterioration in all

walks of life, in religious and worldly matters," says bin Laden.

"It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy

of one country that had once been part of our [Islamic] world when we used to truly

adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Andalusia. Spain is an infidel country,

but its economy is stronger than our economy because the ruler there is accountable.

In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but there is only

obedience to the rulers and prayers of long life for them."

The hair on my arms stood up when I read that. Why? Because what bin Laden was referring

to was the first Arab Human Development Report, which came out in July 2002, well

after he had been evicted from Afghanistan and was probably hiding out in a cave

somewhere. The Arab authors of the report wanted to grab the attention of the Arab

world as to how far behind it had fallen. So they looked for a country that had a

GDP slightly more than that of all twenty-two Arab states combined. When they ran

down the tables, the country that fit that bill perfectly was Spain. It could have

been Norway or Italy, but Spain happened to have a GDP just slightly larger than all

the Arab states together. Somehow, bin Laden heard or read about this first Arab Human

Development Report from his cave. For all I know, he may have read my own column about

it, which was thefirst to highlight the report and stressedthe comparison withSpain.

Or maybe he got it off the Internet. The report was downloaded from the Internet some

1 million times. So even though he was off in a cave somewhere, he could still get

this report, and its humiliating conclusion, shoved right in his face-negatively

comparing the Arab states to Spain, no less! And when he heard that comparison,

wherever he was hiding, bin Laden took it as an insult, as a humiliation-the notion

that Christian Spain, a country that was once controlled by Muslims, had a greater

GDP today than all the Arab states combined. The authors of this report were themselves

Arabs and Muslims; they were not trying to humiliate anyone-but that was how bin Laden

interpreted it. And I am certain he got this dose of humiliation over a modem at 56K.

They may even have broadband now in Tora Bora.

And having gotten his dose of humiliation this way, bin Laden and his emulators have

learned to give it right back in the same coin. Want to understand why the

Islamo-Leninists behead Americans in Iraq and

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Saudi Arabia and then distribute pictures on the Internet with the bloody head of

the body resting on the headless corpse? It is because there is no more humiliating

form of execution than chopping off someone's head. It is a way of showing utter

contempt for that person and his or her physical being. It is no accident that the

groups in Iraq who beheaded Americans dressed them first in the same orange jumpsuits

that al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear. They had to learn about

those jumpsuits either over the Internet or satellite TV. But it amazes me that in

the middle of the Iraq war they were able to have the exact same jumpsuits made in

Iraq to dress their prisoners in. You humiliate me, I humiliate you. And what do you

suppose terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in his audiotape released on

September 11, 2004, the third anniversary of 9/11? He said, "The holy warriors made

the international coalition taste humiliation . . . lessons from which they are still

burning." The tape was titled "Where Is the Honor?"

As I said, however, this frustration and humiliation is not confined to the Islamist

fringes. The reason why the Islamo-Leninists have become the most energized and

pronounced opponents of globalization/ Americanization and the biggest threat to the

flattening of the world today is not simply their extraordinary violence, but also

because they enjoy some passive support around the Arab-Muslim world.

In part, this is because most governments in the Arab-Muslim world have refused to

take on these radicals in a war of ideas. While Arab regimes have been very active

in jailing their Islamo-Leninists when they can find and arrest them, they have been

very passive in countering them with a modern, progressive interpretation of Islam.

This is because almost all of these Arab-Muslim leaders are illegitimate themselves.

Having come to power by force, they have no credibility as carriers of a moderate,

progressive Islam, and they always feel vulnerable to hard-line Muslim preachers,

who denounce them for not being good Muslims. So instead of taking on the Muslim

radicals, the Arab regimes either throw them in jail or try to buy them off. This

leaves a terrible spiritual and political void.

But the other reason for the passive support that the Islamo-Leninists enjoy-and the

fact that they are able to raise so much money through

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charities and mosques in the Arab-Muslim world-is that too many good decent people

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.