Even liberal Western-celebrated Muslim intellectuals portray the West harshly.

Evidence

These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamentalist imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters. Few books by Muslim authors published in the 1990s in the West received the praise given to Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy, generally hailed by Westerners as the courageous statement of a modern, liberal, female Muslim. The portrayal of the West in that volume, however, could hardly be less flattering. The West is “militaristic” and “imperialistic” and has “traumatized” other nations through “colonial terror” (pp. 3, 9). Individualism, the hallmark of Western culture, is “the source of all trouble” (p. 8). Western power is fearful. The West “alone decides if satellites will be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them.…It crushes our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products and televised movies that swamp the airwaves.…[It] is a power that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest resources, initiatives, and potentialities. That was how we perceived our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude” (pp. 146-47). … These, to repeat, are not the views of a bearded, hooded ayatollah. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 575

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘natural allies’ framing echoes how insiders’ critiques are weaponized — parallels the reader’s note on viewing one’s own group from the outside in other sources.
• SEED: Angle: when the West canonizes its own critics — Mernissi as a case of Western audiences celebrating a text that fundamentally rejects their values, a form of misprision.