The Middle East in Morgantown

My assignment this reading period was to write an essay about what's going wrong in the Middle East. It's a question that provokes much polemic but little consensus.

In hopes of inspiration, I've put the question to many acquaintances. A friend from home studying international relations proposed the three-letter answer O-I-L. Another friend, a Palestinian, suggested that the fact that two of the region's countries are occupied might explain some of the turmoil. American foreign policy and its bumblings always came in for a serious beating.

Others from my class tended to respond with an "I don't know," commiserating over the difficulty of defining such a big problem by Dean's Date. However, when I opened Thursday's New York Times to an opinion column written by Asra Q. Nomani, a graduate of my high school, I realized that the question is much more than what's gone wrong in the Middle East. The question that before seemed so distant, so academic, became what's going wrong in my hometown?

Morgantown, West Virginia, is above all a friendly town. You're guaranteed to see someone you know when you run to the grocery store. If you take an early morning walk down High Street, the main artery of the downtown, the arriving vendors greet you like old friends. Joni Mitchell even wrote a song about it. The university welcomes students and professors from across the world and serves as a center for academic discussion, cultural exchange, and artistic expression. Yet there are those who take advantage of this openness to pursue an agenda of hatred.

In "Hate at the Local Mosque," Nomani, author of "Tantrika" and "Standing Alone in Mecca" and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, describes the takeover of the governing board of a local mosque by a group of extremists. Sermons now echo fundamentalist language, especially in reference to women and non-Muslims, and fundamentalist literature fills the library.

Though the majority of the mosque's members are moderate, lack of protest has permitted this shift to occur. Worse, national Islamic associations are loath to become involved. Nomani concludes by asking, "If tolerant and inclusive Islam can't express itself in small corners like Morgantown, where on this earth can the real beauty of Islam flourish?"

The sudden, ugly growth of extremism in my own small town creates an almost unimaginable sense of vulnerability. When fundamentalism flourishes in the Middle East, we can attribute its popularity to ignorance or lack of education, poverty or frustration at lack of social mobility. By assigning extremism a socioeconomic origin, there must, then, exist concrete steps that can be taken to lessen the influence of fundamentalism. Addressing extremism's root causes should eliminate the threat it poses to tolerance and thus to our security.

In Morgantown, however, the socioeconomic argument falls short and it becomes much harder to ignore extremism's ideological element. Why would someone living in the openness of a university town reject out of hand such opportunities? Worse is the fact that such openness allows him the freedom to do so, should he choose, and the ability to urge others to follow his lead.

I remember Sept. 11. I was walking down High Street to class when a friend told me that the Twin Towers had fallen. I grieved with the rest of the nation, yes, but I also remained far from the tragedy. I knew no one who had lost his life that day; unlike my friends from New York and New Jersey, I was sheltered from the serious emotional aftermath and so retained little real sense of vulnerability.

Now that extremism exists also in Morgantown, my small-town sense of security has been stripped away. Anonymity cannot protect me when everything I've learned in class has lost its academic distance. The problem is, indeed, much bigger than can be solved by Dean's Date. Emily Stolzenberg is a freshman from Morgantown, W. Va. You can reach her at estolzen@princeton.edu.