Editorial

Abstract

A common accusation made by Muslims is that the West disrespects Islam and employs a double standard when dealing with them. It is so easy to find instances of hypocrisy that one may reasonably argue that it is the West’s default response to Muslims (e.g., saying it supports democracy while financing authoritarian regimes, or saying Islam oppresses women while overlooking the prevalence of sexual harassment against women in the western workforce.) In his “Clash of Civilizations” article, Samuel Huntington argued that such double standards are an inevitable result of the “kin-country syndrome”: “Aworld of clashing civilizations…is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others.”1 So, Muslims should not complain about such western double standards as sanctioning Iraq for failing to comply with United Nations resolutions (he was writing in the 1990s) while ignoring the same failure when it comes to Israel.2 His idea of a kin-based double standard has parallels in other cultures, of course, as reflected in theArab proverb “Myself againstmy brother;my brother andmyself againstmy cousin; andmy cousin, my brother, and myself against the foreigner.” Sacrificing justice for all in the name of protecting oneself and one’s “kin” is both blameworthy and a source of tension in today’s international system. It is also connected to a simplistic western understanding ofMuslims and the internal and external challenges they face as a community. Both of these lead to negative judgments of Muslims and Muslim cultures. To explain. In his article, Huntington went on, famously, to propose that as the United States moved into sole superpower status and as the West’s “victory” in the cold war demonstrated that the western liberal capitalist model was the best political system, the coming age would be marked by wars sparked by civilizational differences instead of ideology. “Islam”was singled out as a civilization most likely to cause wars, due to certain aspects of its essential nature (“Islam has bloody borders [p. 35].)” He posited a dyadic relationship between the West and Islam: whereas western values were laudable, they were missing in Islam, for ...