Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 15, 2002

Worth repeating

Wyche Fowler, former U.S. senator from Georgia and later the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was the first Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for the new School of Public and International Affairs on April 4. He discussed the U.S. “war against terrorism,” with particular reference to his experience in Saudi Arabia. Some excerpts:
“Saudi Arabia is a very strange place. It is, in the true sense of the word, unique. It is unique in its culture, it is unique in its religion, it is unique in its faith in that religion. But it is a country that is desperately trying to modernize, desperately trying to reform its institutions of government, its relationship to the world economy--but at the same time to maintain its traditions. And therein lies the rub. If I have a thesis today, it is this: What we are seeing that alarms us in that part of the world and has the possibility of being global is not a clash of civilizations. . . . It’s not, in my opinion, a clash of religions. . . . My thesis is that what we are seeing is a battle--if not a war--between the modernist segment of Arabic Islam and the extreme form, those who would reject all Western ideas, all democratic institutions, and try, crazy as we think it is, to reconstruct a seventh-century society on the basis of some kind of political Islam. We, and the rest of the modern world, must do everything we can to empower the modernists in making a gradual transition to our world, our time. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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