"Anti-Americanism" in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History

Ussama Makdisi

"I think that anger in the Arab street is real. It is produced by a number of different factors. But in the end, what matters is not whether they hate us or love us—for the most part, they hate us. They did before. But whether they are going to respect our power." With these words addressed to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Martin Indyk, then executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and later one of the architects of the failed Middle East policy in the Clinton administration, dismissed the history of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. "The antipathy towards the West that is likely to follow this war," added Indyk in a prepared statement he also submitted, "has long been present in the Arab world. It cannot be resolved through accommodation."1 Indyk's assumption that "they" hate "us"—and that the reasons for it are essentially immaterial and obscure—has appeared elsewhere in the recent discourse of American policy makers and pundits, as if Arabs and Americans have always been and will always be doomed to a relationship of mutual antagonism.	1
In contrast, this essay turns to history to answer the oft-asked question"Why do they hate us?" It offers a brief, synthetic, interpretive account of Arab and American interactions over the past two centuries. I recognize from the outset the limits of generalizing about 280 million Arabs, living in a host of Arab countries, each with its own tradition and history. Nonetheless, I seek to place the rise of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world within a historical and political context often neglected, misunderstood, or ignored by proponents of a "clash of civilizations" thesis.2	2
Anti-Americanism is a recent phenomenon fueled by American foreign policy, not an epochal confrontation of civilizations. While there are certainly those in both the United States and the Arab world who believe in a clash of civilizations and who invest politically in such beliefs, history belies them. Indeed, at the time of World War I the image of the United States in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire was generally positive; those Arabs who knew of the country saw it as a great power that was not imperialist as Britain, France, and Russia were. Those Americans who lived in the region—missionaries and their descendants and collaborators—were pioneers in the realm of higher education. Liberal America was not simply a slogan; it was a reality encountered and experienced by Arabs, Turks, Armenians, and Persians in the hallways of the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University of Beirut), Robert College in Istanbul, the American College in Persia, and the American University in Cairo. But over the course of the twentieth century, American policies in the region profoundly complicated the meaning of America for Arabs.	3
Among the vast majority of Arabs today, the expression of anti-American feelings stems less from a blind hatred of the United States or American values than from a profound ambivalence about America: at once an object of admiration for its affluence, its films, its technology (and for some its secularism, its law, its order) and a source of deep disappointment given the ongoing role of the United States in shaping a repressive Middle Eastern status quo. Anti-Americanism is not an ideologically consistent discourse—its intensity, indeed, its coherence and evidence, vary across the Arab world. Yet to the extent that specifically anti-American sentiments are present, never more obviously so to Americans than in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is imperative to understand their nature and origins.	4
Benevolent America . . .