[T]alk to young Arabs and Muslims anywhere, and ... the word"humiliation" always come up very quickly in conversation. It was revealing that when Mahathir Mohammed made his October 16, 2003, farewell speech as prime minister of Malaysia at an Islamic summit he was hosting in his own country, he built his remarks to his fellow Muslim leaders around the question of why their civilization had become so humiliated--a term he used five times."I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," said Mahathir."Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel they can do nothing right..."

This humiliation is the key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that. they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. When you take the economic and political backwardness of much of the Arab-Muslim world today, add its past grandeur and self-image of religious superiority, and combine it with the discrimination and alienation these Arab-Muslim males face when they leave home and move to Europe, or when they grow up in Europe, you have one powerful cocktail of rage. As my friend the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said of the 9/11 hijackers, they"are walking the streets of life, searching for tall buildings--for towers to bring down, because they are not able to be tall like them."...

Germany was humiliated after World War I, but it had the modem economic foundations to produce a state response to that humiliation in the form of the Third Reich. The Arab world, by contrast, could not produce a state response to its humiliation. Instead, it has rattled the world stage in the last fifty years with two larger-than-life figures, rather than states, noted political theorist Yaron Ezrahi: One was the Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, and the other was Osama bin Laden. Each achieved global notoriety, each briefly held the world in his palm--one by using oil as a weapon and the other by using the most unconventional suicide violence imaginable. Each gave a temporary"high" to the Arab-Muslim world, a feeling that it was exercising power on the world stage. But bin Laden and Yamani were only the illusions of power, noted Ezrahi: The Saudi oil weapon is economic power without productivity, and bin Laden's terrorism weapon is military force without a real army, state, economy, and engine of innovation to support it.

What makes Yamanism and bin Ladenism so unfortunate as strategies for Arab influence in the world is that they ignore the examples within Arab culture and civilization -- when it was at its height -- of discipline, hard work, knowledge, achievement, scientific inquiry, and pluralism. As Nayan Chanda, the editor of Yale Global Online, pointed out to me, it was the Arab-Muslim world that gave birth to algebra and algorithms, terms both derived from Arabic words. In other words, noted Chanda,"The entire modern information revolution, which is built to a large degree on algorithms, can trace its roots all the way back to Arab-Muslim civilization and the great learning centers of Baghdad and Alexandria," which first introduced these concepts, then transferred them to Europe through Muslim Spain. The Arab-Muslim peoples have an incredibly rich cultural tradition and civilization, with long periods of success and innovation to draw on for inspiration and example for their young people. They have all the resources necessary for modernization in their own cultural terms, if they want to summon them. Unfortunately, there is huge resistance to such modernization from the authoritarian and religiously obscurantist forces within the Arab-Muslim world.