‘Death to America!’ or enemy in disguise?

In the recent decades the Western World had more interaction with Middle Eastern countries than before. With the continuous level of globalization, we have established more trade, exchange of thoughts and political co-operation between the Western and the Middle East. However, globalization has not only brought prosperity for both worlds. Especially in the last decade we have witnessed several terrorist attacks of Islamic extremists in the Islamic world, but also within the West, in which the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 can be seen as the most large-scale attack and also the starting point in the ‘war on terrorism’. After this terroristic attack the United States have started several interventions in the Middle East, which led to the Iraq War (2003-present) and the Afghanistan War (2001-2014). From this moment the Western world was aware that the terrorist attacks, committed by Al-Qaeda in 2001, were supported by a far much larger group of Muslims (and not only radical Muslims) than assumed. Quite a number of people in countries like Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and Iraq argued that the attacks in America were legitimate and that Al-Qaeda was doing ‘the proper thing’. Anti-Americanism was more deeply-rooted in the Middle Eastern societies than scholars or politicians were aware of. In 1993 political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published an article ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in response to political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man in which Fukuyama argued that with the end of the Cold War, ideological evolution also ended. The universalization of Western democracy would eventually be the final form of human government. Huntington was not so much opposed to this idea, but he believed that the world would eventually be dominated by cultural clashes. He categorized seven distinct cultures: the Western, Orthodox, Latin-American, Islamic, East-Asian, Japanese and Buddhist culture. In 1996 Huntington expanded his thesis in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World order. Huntington’s thesis was generally not well received. Many scholars found his work controversial and did not see the relevance or relevance of his thesis. Although Huntington considered a clash between the Western world and China more likely, after 9/11 followers of Huntington’s thesis warned that the clash between the Islamic world and the Western world would eventually be inevitable. After the 9/11 attacks the importance of Huntington’s work was attracted renewed attention. But, also today there is still much debate whether it concerns an actual clash of civilization or a conflict between states or a conflict of power. Although Huntington discusses seven civilizations in his thesis, I focus on the Islamic/Middle Eastern and Western civilizations, more particularly the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is important to realize that Iran and Saudi Arabia are not ‘mainstream’ countries in the Middle East. Their highly religious state systems are not representative for other Middle Eastern states. Both have a very special relationship with the US and are very influential nations in the Muslim world at large, in particular Saudi Arabia that finances a wide range of Islamist organization all over the Muslim world. Which actors and motives were important in the anti-American discourse in Iran and Saudi Arabia between 2001-2011 and to what extent do the anti-American manifestations reflect Huntington’s theory of the ‘Clash of civilizations’?