The essence of Islamist resistance: a different view of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas

By Alastair Crooke, New Perspectives Quarterly, June 2, 2009

"Most Western analysts of political Islam make the same mistake. They instinctively assume that conflict with the West has mainly to do with specific foreign policies, particularly of the U.S. with respect to Israel, the Arab world and Iran, and, if those changed, all would be well.

In fact, my intensive contact over the years with Iranian clerics, Hezbollah and Hamas suggest that the conflict with the West is much deeper. It is rooted in radically different worldviews about human nature and the good society.

Failing to grasp this reality, the West continually misreads what is going on in the Muslim world. At root, the West is about individualistic, instrumental rationality and materialism; the Islamic resistance movements are about a communal and spiritual approach to life......

Ironically, the West of the Enlightenment is situated on the wrong of the divide — backing dogma versus the open intellect of religious evolution. It is perhaps not surprising that a literalist and dogmatic West has contributed to literalism in Islam also. But the West, by holding on to this flawed perception that it is supporting docility and “moderation” against “extremism,” paradoxically has left the Middle East a less stable, more dangerous and violent place."