Now, more than ever, we need this higher kind of patriotism, and it is by necessity a patriotism of the reflective sort. Reflection was not in evidence when, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, an Arizona resident named Frank Roque fired three bullets into a Sikh gas station attendant, killing him. When the police arrived, Roque explained his actions: "I am an American." Actually, so was the man he killed, Guru Khalsa. Roque apparently thought Khalsa was a Muslim from an Arab country. Wrong man, wrong country, wrong religion. This was a rare incident, but even so it is brutish exhibitions of nativism like this one that convince some thoughtful people, like philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that attachment to any tribe or nationality is dangerous and that our moral allegiance should be to "the community of all human beings."(30)

If the only possible patriotism were based on "my country, right or wrong," then Nussbaum would be correct. If patriotism were to inevitably degenerate into the kind of blind hatred that motivated Roque, then we are better off without it. But one can make a distinction between nativism, which is based on resentment, and patriotism, which is based on love. The former is objectionable, but the latter is indispensable. Certainly America requires it now, and will require it even more in the foreseeable future. Even when our initial anger toward our enemies has cooled, we still need an enduring attachment to our country to see her through the long trials ahead. America desperately needs the love of her citizens, for what she is and for what she might become.

A patriotism of this sort --- a thoughtful and affirming patriotism --- must necessarily be based on an examination of first principles. The need for this approach was illustrated by an American radio show host who recently erupted, "I don't know why those crazy Muslims want to fight with us. They believe in Allah this, and Allah that, and they don't realize that we don't give a damn. So why can't we just agree to disagree?" The reason, of course, is that agreeing to disagree is a liberal principle and it is liberalism itself that is being disputed here. The procedural liberalism that we are so used to invoking --- which presupposes that liberal mechanisms like free speech and equal rights are the best way of organizing society --- is ineffective against those who do not believe that these are self-evident goods and who insist that religious truth and virtue have higher claims. We have to show why our society is a moral improvement on theirs, and this is neither an obvious nor an easy task.

I feel that I am in a unique position to write about this subject. I am a native of India who grew up in Bombay and came to the United States as an exchange student in the late 1970s. Since I spent the first part of my life in a different society, I am able to see the United States from the outside and to identify unique aspects of American society that seem completely unremarkable to the natives. This may be called the "Tocqueville advantage," although in invoking it I am by no means comparing myself to Tocqueville. Visiting America in the 1830s, Tocqueville declared that he had encountered "a distinct species of mankind." Tocqueville was especially struck by the average American's "inordinate love of material gratification." At the same time, Tocqueville detected a restlessness of soul that afflicted even the most fortunate and prosperous families. Tocqueville observed that, by contrast with Europeans, Americans exhibited a high degree of civic activism and religious fervor. Tocqueville further remarked that Americans were fierce egalitarians who, despite differences of income and status, refused to bow and scrape before anybody.(31)

These are perceptive observations, and most of them are true today. But a great deal has also changed since Tocqueville came here, and the United States displays some new distinguishing characteristics. I am impressed at the fact that Americans cannot fight a war and say they are doing it for strategic advantage or for oil; they have to be convinced, or to convince themselves, that they are fighting to expel a tyrant, or to secure democracy, or to ensure human rights. In other societies there are multiple measures of social recognition, such as family background, education, caste, and so on: in the United States, it pretty much comes down to how much money you have. Even so, "old money" carries very little prestige in America: all it means is that your grandfather was a robber baron or a bootlegger.

As a frequent speaker at American companies, I am struck by the ease with which Palestinians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Turks and Armenians, all work together in apparent disregard of the bitter historical grievances that have shattered their communities of origin. Elsewhere in the world the poor aspire to middle-class respectability, but in the United States the wealthy seek to dress and act like middle-class people, or even like bums. American children seem to believe quite literally that you can "be whatever you want to be," implausible though this seems to people in other places. American parents seem unnaturally eager to befriend their children and to treat them as equals, yet the children seem firmly convinced that they are far wiser than their elders.

Young people in the United States "go away to college" and typically never return home to live; in many other countries this would be regarded as abandoning one's offspring. Americans are the friendliest people you will encounter, but they have few friends. Most people in the United States do not believe in idleness and pursue even leisure with a kind of strenuous effort. There are very weird people in America, but nobody seems struck or bothered by the amount of weirdness. In many countries old people believe their life is over and pretty much wait to die, while in America people in their mid-seventies pursue the pleasures of life, including remarriage and sexual gratification, with a zeal that I find unnerving. While the funeral is a standard public ceremony in most countries, funerals are a very rare public sight in America, and no one likes to go to them: it seems that Americans don't really die, they just disappear. The significance of some of these cultural peculiarities will be explored later in this book.

Another reason I feel especially qualified to write this book is that I have the background and credentials to evaluate the various accusations that are launched against the United States and the West. Having been raised in a country that was colonized by the West for several hundred years, I have a good vantage point to assess how Western civilization has harmed or helped the peoples of the non-Western world. As a "person of color" who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years, and having devoted a decade to studying issues of race and ethnicity, I am competent to address such questions as what it is like to be a non-white person in America, what this country owes its indigenous minorities, and whether immigrants can maintain their ethnic identity and still "become American."

I became an U.S. citizen myself in 1991. I took the oath that fateful day, and over the years my identification with America has deepened to the point that I truly feel that I have "become an American." This phrase has become common enough that we don't give it a thought, and yet it is fraught with meaning. An American could come to India and stay for 40 years, perhaps even taking Indian citizenship, but he could not "become Indian." Indians would not consider such a person Indian, nor would it be possible for him to think of himself in that way. The reason is that being Indian, like being German or Swedish or Iranian, is entirely a matter of birth and blood. You become Indian by having Indian parents.

In America, by contrast, millions of people come from all over the world and over time most of them come to think of themselves as Americans. Sometimes their children and grandchildren forget where they came from, or stop caring. Whatever their origins, these people have somehow, like me, "become American." Their experience suggests that becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas. It is only for this reason that terms like "un-American" and "anti-American" make sense. You could not accuse someone of being "un-German" or "un-Pakistani." They would not know what you were talking about.

I believe that over the years I have developed an understanding of the central idea that makes America great, and I have seen the greatness of America reflected in my life. At the same time I take seriously the issues raised by the critics of America. I know that they are on to something as well. In recent years my enthusiasm about America has been shaken by the experience of parenthood. As the father of a seven-year-old girl, I have come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be for me and my wife to raise her in India. We are constantly battling to shield our daughter from toxic influences in American culture that threaten to destroy her innocence. And even as I seek to insulate her from those influences, I am not sure that I can. This is a battle that I know I might lose. Why, I sometimes ask myself, do I stay in America?

I mention these details to make the point that I feel the force of the arguments for and against America, because they play out in my own life. This is a book that seeks to integrate my research and study about America with my personal experience of American life. It is a book that faces the harshest critics of America and the West, but concludes that those critics are wrong. They are missing something of great significance about Western civilization, and about the American way of life. So for all my qualms, I will not be returning to India. I know that my daughter will have a better life if I stay. I don’t just mean that she will be better off; I mean that her life is likely to have greater depth, meaning and fulfillment in the United States than it would be in any other country. I have come to appreciate that there is something great and noble about America, and in this book I intend to say what that is."

(2)John O’Sullivan, "Volatile Ideas that Bombs Can’t Destroy," San Diego Union-Tribune, October 14, 2001, p. G-1.

(3)Nada El Sawy, "Yes, I Follow Islam, but I’m Not a Terrorist," Newsweek, October 15, 2001, p. 12.

(4)Hendrik Hertzberg and David Remnick, "The Trap," New Yorker, October 1, 2001, p. 38.

(5)Joseph Lelyveld, "The Mind of a Suicide Bomber," New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2001, p. 50.

(6) "Don’t Count on Muslim Support," The American Enteprise, December 2001, p. 11.

(7)I understand the limitations of the term "fundamentalism," which refers to a specifically American Protestant movement to return to biblical fundamentals. I use the term here to refer to Muslims who are seeking to return the Islamic world to a purer version of Islam unadulterated by non-Islamic ideas and influences.

(8)The Koran, translated by N.J. Dawood, Penguin Books, New York, 1995, p. 186.

(9)Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967, p. 183.

(10)Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery Of Europe, W. W. Norton, New York, 1982, p. 60-61; see also Bernard Lewis, "Jihad vs. Crusade," Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001.

(11) For readings on the meaning of jihad, see Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton, NJ, 1996.

(12)Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Avon Books, New York, 1992.

(13)Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, New York, 1997, p. 20.

(14)Lee Kuan Yew, "America Is No Longer Asia’s Model," New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1996; Fareed Zakaria, "A Conversation With Lee Kuan Yew," Foreign Affairs, March-April 1994.

(15)John Esposito, ed, "Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival," in Voices of Resurgent Islam, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983; John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, pp. 135-137; Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996, pp. 133, 158, 172; Roxanne Euben, "Pre-modern, Anti-modern or Postmodern: Islamic and Western Critiques of Modernity," The Review of Politics, Summer 1997, p. 434-450.

(16) "The End of Democracy?" First Things, November 1996, p. 18-42.

(17)Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2001, p. 6.

(18)Cited in "Idiocy Watch," The New Republic, October 15, 2001, p. 10.

(19)Ann Gerhart, "Black Caucus Waves the Caution Flag," Washington Post, September 28, 2001, p. C-1, C-8.

(20)James Bowman, "Towers of Intellect," Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2001.

(21)Stanley Kurtz, "Edward Said, Imperialist," The Weekly Standard, October 8, 2001, p. 35.

(22)These words, from the writer Arundhati Roy, were quoted in "Sontagged," The Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001, p. 42-43.

(23)Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 236.

(24)Ali Mazrui, "Islamic and Western Values," Foreign Affairs, September-October 1997.

(25)Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey: The African American Ordeal in Slavery, Vintage Books, New York, 1990, p. 113.

(26)Dennis Farney, "As America Triumphs, Americans Are Awash in Doubt," Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1992, p. A-1; see also John Hope Franklin, "The Moral Legacy of the Founding Fathers," University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1975, p. 10-13.

(27)Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing Too, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994, p. 87.

(28)Haki Madhubuti, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?, Third World Press, Chicago, 1990, p. 28.

(29)Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Books, New York, 1982, p. 172.

(30)Martha Nussbaum, "Genesis of a Book," Liberal Education, Spring 1999, p. 38.

(31)Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage Books, New York, 1990, Vol. I, p. 394, Vol. II, p. 22.