Muslim hostility to the West grew from humiliation and Western self-discrediting wars.

Evidence

In our own time this mood of admiration and emulation has, among many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation—a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. In part this mood is due to events in the Western world itself. One factor of major importance was certainly the impact of two great suicidal wars, in which Western civilization tore itself apart, bringing untold destruction to its own and other peoples, and in which the belligerents conducted an immense propaganda effort, in the Islamic world and elsewhere, to discredit and undermine each other. The message they brought found many listeners, who were all the more ready to respond in that their own experience of Western ways was not happy. The introduction of West­ ern commercial, financial, and industrial methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to transplanted Westerners and members of Westernized minori­ ties, and to only a few among the mainstream Muslim population. In time these few became more numerous, but they remained isolated from the masses, differ­ ing from them even in their dress and style of life. Inevitably they were seen as agents of and collaborators with what was once again regarded as a hostile world. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1581

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article and its treatment of dress as class/identity signaling — the Westernized minority differing ‘even in their dress’ is the same mechanism. — connects to: Militants frame mosque destruction as purifying humiliation and unifying their nation. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 414