Liberal-modernization racism blamed Arab political culture for autocracy while US elites backed dictators
Evidence
Sheehi points to the different approaches Lewis and Zakaria took. He writes that if “Lewis locates the failures of Islam within the barbarism of the ‘Arab mind,’ then Zakaria locates the hate for the West in the failure of Arab political culture and economic organization.” Both are deeply racist positions. Zakaria, a student of Samuel Huntington, argued that the United States should promote free markets and democracy in the Middle East, channeling his mentor’s modernization proclivities. For people like Zakaria, creating pliant, individualistic, consumerist neo-liberal citizens in the MENA region is possibly as important as US control over oil. However, not unlike the Orientalists of the preceding century, Zakaria declared that Arabs have seen the “reverse of the historical process in the Western world, where liberalism produced democracy and democracy fuels liberalism. The Arab path has produced dictatorship, which has bred terrorism.” This is a reworking of Oriental despotism built on the racist essentialization of the Arab other. This is Clinton-style liberal imperialism and liberal racism. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 500
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Zakaria’s modernization-failure frame is a direct modern descendant of the Oriental-despotism racialization theme; ties to the reader’s distinction between liberal-imperial racism (Zakaria) and hard neocon racism (Lewis), which matters for any comparison with European liberal Islamophobias.