Current Affairs For long after its birth, the United States was scarcely noticed in the Islamic world. Even while its early missionaries offered Presbyterian enlightenment, and its merchants monetary gain, the new Republic aroused little comment in Arab newspapers of the time.
Known initially by an Arabicised form of the French, Itazuni, its inhabitants were described in an 1833 textbook as tribes who came from England and "freed themselves from the grasp of the English . . . This country is among the greatest civilised countries in America and, in it, worship in all faiths and religious communities is permitted".
A century later, Bernard Lewis tells us, an Egyptian civil servant was sent on a two-year study mission to the United States and was horrified by the experience. The state of Israel had just been established and had won its first war against the Arabs - some of whose leaders had been closely allied with Nazi Germany. At the same time the world was just becoming aware of Nazi genocide against the Jews, and American public opinion was tilting strongly in favour of those who were seen as Hitler's victims in the Middle East.
The civil servant was one Sayyid Qutb. Without his experience of shock and awe in America, he might well have returned to the Egyptian ministry of education and died a natural death, instead of being hanged in 1966, charged with plotting the assassination of President Nasser. What distressed Sayyid Qutb was not just American support for Israel but the whole American way of life - its materialism (in contrast to Islamic spirituality) and its addiction to sexual promiscuity. To attract clients, he noted, Christian ministers hold dances and dim the lights: "The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone," he wrote, "the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust." Imagine!
Sayyid Qutb became the inspiration of Islamic fundamentalism, the writer-activist and rebel who translated gut feelings into timeless certitudes for a new and potent radicalism. It is that radicalism which today defines the Western image of Islam as a culture intolerant of dissent and inimical to pluralism.
It was the same Prof Bernard Lewis who wrote in 1996: "Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy as the fundamentalists themselves would be first to say: they regard liberal democracy with contempt as a corrupt and corrupting form of government."
Today, a few years short of his 90th year, the tone of this Princeton academic is softer and his focus on the radical core sharper. "Most Muslims are not fundamentalists," he writes, "and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such."
The current process of regime change in Iraq is part of a monumental experiment in political engineering, charged with risk and potential for the transformation of a vast region of turmoil and resentment into a zone of peace - or at least pacification. It is clearly a plan to establish once and for all who is master in the oil-rich sheikdoms and caliphates which power the industrial world. As Lewis says, "a new American policy has emerged in the Middle East . . . Its main aim is to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemony - of a single regional power that could dominate the area and thus establish monopolistic control of Middle Eastern oil".
The goal is to restructure the Middle East in the Western democratic image. If elections are not held soon the region may implode in tribal and religious resentment; if they are held too soon the same groups may vote for the wrong leaders.
Lewis traces the satanisation of the US through the fortuitous and - as it turned out - unfortunate connections made between later disciples of Sayyid Qutb and the totalitarian movements of national socialism and Soviet communism. (The latter made a strange bedfellow for religious fundamentalists and anti-materialists.) Nasser's arms agreement with Russia in 1955 was a gift to expansionist Soviet ambitions. Had it not been for American determination, writes Lewis, "the Arab world would at best have shared the fate of Poland and Hungary, more probably that of Uzbekistan".
Perhaps this is overstating Soviet competence and under-estimating the power of the Islamic radicalism which would later show its anti-communist resolve in Afghanistan. The teaching of Sayyid Qutb blended with an older, and ultra-radical, activist movement to produce the modern cocktail of Saudi Wahabbism.
By a freak of history, the Saudi family won control of the holy places of Mecca and Medina and, a year later, in 1933, made a fateful agreement with Standard Oil of California. At a stroke, the world's oil and the world's angriest sect were brought together. Lewis underlines the message: "Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil and therefore its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom, peddling their own peculiar brand of Christianity."
Bernard Lewis shows himself again to be a master of his material, a graceful essayist and a shrewd analyst of the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and religion.
Paul Berman, a US journalist of more racy prose and more opinionated judgment, covers much the same material in his analysis of the ideas and politics of Islamic fundamentalism. He shows how Islamic nationalist movements during the last century made the fatal error of mixing elements of Sayyid's Marxism and Baath nationalism into a totalitarian mess, thinking that communism and national socialism were the source of Western strength.
Sayyid Qutb is at the centre of this book also, with an excellent chapter linking his ideas through the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, just as in Saudi Arabia later, Berman writes, "America's beneficiaries turned out to be America's worst enemies".
"The world is full of back-stabbing sons-of-bitches," he concludes. "Such is the lesson of history."
Berman draws together - somewhat dubiously and imprudently - some threads linking a variety of authoritarian movements to make a point about contemporary Islamic fundamentalists. Bolsheviks, fascists, Spanish Falangists, Nazis - and now Islamic fundamentalists - all share the illusion of being "a people of God" in a manichaean struggle against evil, all anticipate the overthrow of Satan in a new world order for a new millennium. This is scary stuff. It does not need an Islamic fundamentalist to point out that some of these same threads of history are woven into the crackpot religion which informs foreign policy within the Bush administration.
Andrew Wheatcroft is an academic historian who examines the sources of Christian-Muslim conflict from the seventh century to the present day, tracing how mutual hatred was communicated in three key areas of contact. Those he has chosen to examine - the Middle East, Spain and the Balkans - provide an interesting range of material, and the section on Christian and Moorish Spain makes for a good read in itself. With 90 pages of notes, however, and a scholarly unconcern for lively copy, this is probably a book to borrow from the library.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror By Bernard Lewis Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 144pp, £12.99
Terror and Liberalism By Paul Berman Norton, 214pp, £14.95
Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam 638-2002 By Andrew Wheatcroft Penguin, 443pp, £20