One of the most important aspects of contemporary Muslim society is a sense of humiliation and oppression. This is epitomized by the view, still held by a majority of Muslims around the world, that the attacks of September 11 were not and could not have been the work of Osama bin Laden, but were instead perpetrated by the Mossad or the CIA or both.

It was impossible that Muslims were to blame for 9/11, according to the Muslim view, because on the one hand the attacks required careful planning and above all exact timing, while on the other hand Muslims are never on time and are generally disorganized. Hence the attacks must have been the work of the West itself. But why would the West attack itself? The Muslim answer: to provide a pretext for attacks on the Islamic world, like the campaign in Afghanistan.

How should Westerners understand this important cultural datum? Conventional academic study will point to 150 years of colonial or semi-colonial rule. But Muslims themselves say that their sense of humiliation derives not only from the current ignominy of their condition but from the recollection of a more glorious time when it was they rather than the Western world who were powerful. A time when it was they, to put it in the terms of current cultural study, who were the oppressors rather than the oppressed. If we follow the truly crude logic of contemporary cultural study, we might say that Islamic oppression of the West led Westerners to seek a means of overcoming their weakness, which, when successful, led to the oppression of the Muslim world.

Would it not make more sense, in the interests of understanding Islamic culture, to ask what accounts for the decline of the great Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century? Does it not make sense to ask why the Arab world, liberated from colonial rule at the end of WWII, has failed so miserably politically, economically, and militarily ever since? Above all, would it not make sense to ask what aspects of Muslim or Arab culture, independent of the depredations of outsiders, have contributed to these sad consequences?

These questions have been thoughtfully pursued by Bernard Lewis and Fuad Ajami--with great learning, respect, affection, even love. For those efforts, their intellectual colleagues have rewarded them with vilification. They have, however, achieved a level of real understanding of the Islamic world.

The failures of our present orientation should lead us to resurrect an older academic approach: the notion that one should strive for a sympathetic understanding of the object of one's study. "Sympathetic understanding" meant that one would try to understand a culture first exactly as it understood itself. This kind of understanding doesn't always lead to sympathy in the conventional sense of the word. A full and sympathetic understanding of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran might lead to repulsion. But whatever the outcome, one's conclusion would be based on a clear and accurate understanding. One would also have the satisfaction of knowing that one had tried to be fair and just.

Of course at this point one will hear loud objections. There are many who claim that it is never possible to be fair and just; that one's ultimate interest is always power over the other; that cultural study is necessarily unjust, since it seeks to oppress. From this perspective, it is hard to understand why someone would engage in the study of another culture except to advance his own interests. And hard to understand, by the way, what is wrong with that.

Since this idea seems to be written in our hearts by the nature of things it must be impossible for anyone to behave otherwise. But such a conclusion--the abandonment of justice--is too hard for us to bear. Hence such thinking has led to the view that the injustice of studying other cultures must be rectified by empowering the powerless. As a result, the chief object of scholarship today is to convey the grievances of another culture, as if culture was essentially constituted by grievance. All other sentiments, longings, and aspirations enjoy a much-diminished status, if they are not ignored altogether. This, it should be obvious, is greatly impoverished understanding. But this need not be the case.

Islamic discourse was once alien to me. But that did not prevent me from trying and, in my opinion, succeeding in understanding how the Koran viewed the world and especially its sister religions Judaism and Christianity. Unlike our current students of culture, Islam does not claim to be unintelligible to the outsider. It presents an argument and in doing so means not only to command but to persuade. It escapes me, therefore, how one could do justice to Islam by operating on the conventional premises of contemporary academic study.

Having taken so much refuge and comfort in the repetition of simple-minded dogmas, moving away from the flawed modern understanding of Islam will be difficult for most scholars, as well as for those in the mainstream. But there simply is no alternative if we are serious about understanding other cultures.