With almost 40 years of experience in the Middle East, international correspondent Robin Wright has found that some American perceptions of Islam are based on paranoia.
Wright, an international correspondent who has reported from more than 140 countries but concentrated in the Middle East, spoke to a large crowd in Memorial Hall on Monday night as part of the Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor program.
Wright, who has reported for numerous publications, including The New York Times and Time magazine, said Muslims’ struggles for democracy today comes not from a clash of Western and Islamic civilizations but instead from conflicts within the faith itself.
“They have paid a larger price for Islamic extremism than we have,” Wright said, alluding to the large number of civilian casualties that have been sustained as a result of the violent acts committed by antidemocratic regimes in nations like Iran and Iraq.
“A decade after 9/11, we are more fearful of the Islamic world than we were right after 9/11,” she said.
For this reason, she said, many Americans fail to realize that not all Islamic culture is based upon fundamentalism.
“In the world’s most volatile region, you’re seeing for the first time change happen through peaceful civil disobedience,” Wright said.
“People are putting their lives on the line not to kill anyone else, as we have seen in suicide bombs, but to shame their governments,” she said.
What she described as new martyrdom can be found in numerous anecdotes detailed in her new book “Rock the Casbah”, such as that of a young fruit seller in Tunisia who set himself on fire because he did not want to partake in a government bribe, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the Arab Spring.
