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.But there are also active and oftenviolent reactions by Hindus, Christians and Jews to modernisation which impingeson sensitive areas such as the rights of women, abortion, gay marriage, allegedlysalacious cultural behaviour, some forms of free speech and democratic politicalprocesses that threaten the power of entrenched traditional bureaucratic (especiallyreligious) elites.For over two decades the clash between Islamic extremism,particularly in its Jihadist/Islamist variety, had been building against the forces ofWestern modernisation.The rise of Islamism has stimulated many scholars to examine the roots andevolution of anti-Western thought and the source of antagonism to the West bothfrom within and outside the West.Some see the origins of Jihadist thought in manystrains of nineteenth century European Romantic thought13 hostile to industrial,materialist, free market, multicultural, pluralist (tolerant of Jews), urban society.It isboth a critique of modernism as well as an assertive Islamic antagonism toward the mongrel culture of the urban West with its breakdown of family structures, equalrights for woman, pervasive idolatry and collapsed traditional social controls.Thisanti-modernisation, and concomitant anti-Semitism, was found in Fascist, Nazi,and Stalinist Communist states as well as in the nativist romanticism of Japanesemilitarism.They all saw the West as decadent, bourgeois, democracies attempting topollute the purity of traditional societies.In the nineteenth century the British Empirewas viewed as the source of social breakdown for the non-Western world; and afterthe Second World War the British were progressively replaced by the Americans.Even the US Left, harbouring anti-Americanism, attacks the decadence ofmaterialist culture, and evangelical Right Christian conservatives like the ProtestantMinisters Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, suggested 9/11 was a punishment onAmerica for its sins of idolatry and rampant homosexuality.For Islamists, the Westhas been the enemy for centuries and, drawing on Persian concepts of Manichaeism,13 Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes of itsEnemies (New York, 2004) which was composed in opposition to Edward Said s concept ofOrientalism. The Great Wars and Cold War, 1914 1991 63they see threat from the West involving a conflict between good and evil.14 Throughoutthe nineteenth century Arab Muslim thinkers struggled to come to terms with thechallenges of modernisation asking whether the Arab world could accommodatethe ideas of secularism, democracy and modernity with traditional Muslim societywithout the implosion of the religious and social order.The Egyptian, MuhammadAbduh, struggled with the dilemmas of Western penetration of Middle Easternculture and initially offered some philosophical solutions, but eventually drifted intoxenophobia and hostility to the West in general and the British in particular.Aftera century of speculation Arab thinkers reached a near consensus, a determinationto rid themselves, first and foremost, of the economic and military power of Europeand the West and, perhaps, the cultural influences that went with it.Although theJihadism of the twenty first century also has more modern causes, the intellectualfoundations for it were already set down in previous centuries.15An instructive historical prototype for the current phase of anti-modernisation wasthe Boxer Rebellion in China in the final years of the Manchu Dynasty in 1900.Thisquasi-mystical society of Boxers attempted to eject the foreign devils from Chinain 1900 by attacks on Europeans.This failed miserably and accelerated the carvingup of China by the Western powers.The Boxer Rebellion heralded the coming ofage of the US and Japan as imperial powers in the Western Pacific and indicated thegreat price the US would have to pay when it later took over the role of the world spoliceman from Britain.The flowering flag devils , as the Americans were called bythe Boxers, inherited not only the mantle of world imperial hegemon, but also facedthe wrath of the world s anti-modernisation forces.The Americans then bore thecosts of being the dominant Western nation not just in Asia but throughout the world,and these costs would be high indeed.The highest costs, however, of the BoxerRebellion were borne by the 100,000 Chinese Christians who were slaughtered bythe Boxer forces
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