It is ironic that the United States and the Middle East have so much to say about one another, and yet know so little about each other. Americans rarely study the Middle East in depth in school, and the media rarely goes beyond the headlines of the day to look at the complex cultures, histories and viewpoints of the countries of the region.

Instead of deep understanding, Americans often weave together ideas from movies and television shows made for entertainment (ranging from 24 and other terrorist–themed shows to Disney’s Aladdin) and disturbing headlines about the wars in Iraq or Somalia or about high oil prices, for example. Camels, deserts, “oil sheikhs,” and the “veil” often figure very prominently in Americans’ visualization of the Middle East. They often end up with a picture of the entire region as an exotic and very dangerous place, whose peoples are not like “us.” After the horrific events of September 11, 2001, these ideas became even more entrenched.

Us vs. Them

Building on these stereotypes is a set of ideas often called “the clash of civilizations.” (footnote: This is often an oversimplified version of Samuel Huntingdon’s arguments in “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993). The “clash of civilizations” implies that there are two or more civilizations—societies with fixed borders and unchanging, opposing valu es and ideologies—that oppose one another. In this us vs. them view of the world, there is a grand conflict between good and evil playing out, and the teams are the “West” and “Islam.”

Of course, those in the “West” (America and Europe) tend to believe that “our” civilization is better—more forward-looking, more secular, more modern, more humanistic—than the other guys. This isn’t a new idea, of course—during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was seen as this same kind of enemy. Nowadays, this "Other" enemy is sometimes seen as China, but more often as the Middle East or even all of Islam.

Who is the “West?” Who is “Islam?”

Inherent in the clash of civilizations model is the idea that there are two different entities we can define as the West and Islam, which have fundamentally different values, cultures, social and political systems, etc. They are polar opposites of one another, and each embodies a totally different set of ideas and practices.

The U.S. is the single most powerful state in the West, and is seen to embody values like separation between church and state, democracy, human rights, freedom of religion and the press, gender equality, modernity and technological innovation, and much more. It has a shared history and culture arising from the birth of democracy in ancient Greece, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the present day.

But the West is also much larger than the US, and perhaps even larger than western Europe. When we begin asking about countries like Estonia and Greece, or perhaps Japan or Israel, we see that it becomes more difficult to draw a line around the West. Some states have a different sense of the relationship between religion and the state—in England, the Queen is still head of the Anglican church and the prime minister appoints its bishops; the German state collects taxes for religious institutions, the Israeli state funds many Jewish religious organizations… is this “Western?”

There are of course also many cultures and languages among the societies of the “West,” and even a great deal of conflict within those societies and among them about the very values they are supposed to stand for: secularism, democracy and how to implement it, whether there are limits to human rights, to gender and religious equality, or to freedom of the press, and more.

In short, the “West” is not a monolithic civilization, and neither is “Islam.”

Muslims make up one fifth of humanity, over 1.3 billion people spread across the world. We tend to think of Muslims as being concentrated in the Middle East, but in fact the country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia, in southeast Asia, and the largest regional concentration of Muslims is in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are Muslim majorities in countries in a wide belt across Africa and Asia, and large minorities in countries as different as China, France, and Kenya.

Just as all Christians across the globe don’t live the same lifestyle or practice their religion in exactly the same way, Muslims in different countries live very different lives, based on their culture, level of education, political ideas, socio-economic class, whether they live in a rural or urban setting, etc.

This unit will help us explore the stereotypical ideas often held by people in the U.S. and Muslim societies and the Middle East about one another, and the facts that challenge those stereotypes.

Litmus test: Find the stereotype

If you hear a comment or an assertion about Arabs or Muslims, try this simple activity to decide if the claim is stereotypical or not. Substitute the word Arab or Muslim with some group with which you’re more familiar—Canadians, women, Christians, or teachers, for example. If someone were to say, “Muslims are violent,” for example, see how that sentence would sound if it were about Canadians. Perhaps some Canadians are violent, but wouldn’t you want a little more information before you passed judgment on the whole group?