Islam vs. Liberalism in Europe

IntroductionIn the West, Muslilms are regarded with anxiety, mistrust, and fear.Many of us choose not to travel to Muslim coUntties for fear of becomingvictims of temrism. Most Westerners worry about the Muslims' firm gripon the spigot of the world's oil reserves. And in 1991 we convinced ourselvesthat Saddam Hussein represented a threat on par with Hitler.'But Muslims cannot really scare us. After all, it took but a few weeksto vanquish fully the "Butcher of Baghdad," who had up until that timethe world's fourth largest m y . We united in a stalwart international coalitionagainst the Iraqi menace, while most of Saddam's supposed Araballies joined our ranks. We need only to remember the Iran-Iraq war toconsole ourselves with the memory of an internecine inter-Muslimstruggle, something not seen in the West since the Second World War.Granted, each of us can probably recall some personal hardship 1973 and1979 when the Amh or Iranians withheld "our" oil. Now, however, weall realize, along with such economists as Maddison (1982), that theseembargoes merely exacerbated imminent or existing world recessions.More comfortingly, as Issawi (1982) has shown, the great eastwoodflood of petrodollars in the 1970s was eventually channeled back through ...