Islam vs. Liberalism in Europe

Abstract

Introduction
In the West, Muslilms are regarded with anxiety, mistrust, and fear.
Many of us choose not to travel to Muslim coUntties for fear of becoming
victims of temrism. Most Westerners worry about the Muslims' firm grip
on the spigot of the world's oil reserves. And in 1991 we convinced ourselves
that Saddam Hussein represented a threat on par with Hitler.'
But Muslims cannot really scare us. After all, it took but a few weeks
to vanquish fully the "Butcher of Baghdad," who had up until that time
the world's fourth largest m y . We united in a stalwart international coalition
against the Iraqi menace, while most of Saddam's supposed Arab
allies joined our ranks. We need only to remember the Iran-Iraq war to
console ourselves with the memory of an internecine inter-Muslim
struggle, something not seen in the West since the Second World War.
Granted, each of us can probably recall some personal hardship 1973 and
1979 when the Amh or Iranians withheld "our" oil. Now, however, we
all realize, along with such economists as Maddison (1982), that these
embargoes merely exacerbated imminent or existing world recessions.
More comfortingly, as Issawi (1982) has shown, the great eastwood
flood of petrodollars in the 1970s was eventually channeled back through ...