Growing up in Iraq and Lebanon, we looked at the West with awe. The West was ahead of the Arabs world on many levels, including government, urban planning, social welfare, science, literature, technology and military strength. In Lebanon, almost every child at school was taught three languages, learning English and French, in addition to our native Arabic. Parents talked to their children in these languages.

We generally associated success and wealth with speaking Western languages. Those who spoke fluent English or French, the upper and middle classes, tried to mimic native American, British, or French accents. The better your Western language and accent, the higher social status you signalled.

During my years in the old homeland, the Arabs were in consensus over the need to emulate the West, but there was an obstacle: The West was Christian and we were Muslim. The Arabs therefore reasoned that they would copy everything from the West except for social norms. We Muslims did not eat pork or drink alcohol. Inter-gender relations were strictly limited and monitored. The collective tribal opinion always trumped independent personal thinking.

Our Westernized life copied consumerism but left out values such as liberty, freedom, and equality. The result was a society that was Western on the outside but backward and tribal on the inside. Our societies produced states that were in our image: Sovereign on the outside but failing on the inside.

State failure gave rise to nativist Islamism. Islam the religion we already practised. The new brand was Islamism, in which Islam decided – not only our spiritual and social lives – but all other aspects of our lives, including government, politics, economics and military. In Islamism, the West stopped being a model worth emulating and became a punching bag on which Islamist movements blamed our failure.

Islamism argued that our countries were not backward because we didn’t emulate the West enough, but because we imitated the West too much. We had abandoned our orthodox Islamic creed, under pressure from the imperial West, whose plan was to make us abandon our religion and spread its own – materialism and Christianity. To fix our countries and beat the West, Islamism said that we had to revive Islam the exact same way it was practiced in the seventh century, when our civilisation had enjoyed a golden age that endured until Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.

Eradicating Western influences and replacing them with “authentic” nativist Islamism was exactly where our Middle Eastern backwardness met Western academic fantasies. Leading the Left, Western academia called for breaking the establishment everywhere and replacing it with native, even if rudimentary, social and political systems.

The Left saw Islamism as authentic and unadulterated by White European colonialism. To push for progress, the Middle East had to decolonized and Islamism restored. Western Progressives were, in effect, promoting conservative ideologies, an irony that most of them seem to have missed.

A Muslim-born anti-traditionalist Arab, like me, is considered Left and Progressive in any Muslim country. Breaking with Islamic tradition and calling for the endorsement of Enlightenment ideas, such as liberty and equality, mean that I am pushing for change. But in America, it is people like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who – with her hijab – celebrates a conservative Islamic code and is labeled Progressive. For disagreeing with her hijab, Progressives in the West call me Conservative.

This brings us to Arab and Muslim immigrants in the West. While growing up in the Middle East, we looked up to these immigrants, saw them successful and Westernized. Today, under the influence of Islamism, they appear to have become ashamed of their Westernisation, especially when they visit home. They often try to prove that they have not forgotten their roots, their customs, or social traditions, which include political beliefs.

This is why Arab and Muslim immigrants in the West now endorse the most radical and conservative of Islamist ideologies. The same Arab and Muslim immigrants, who left their homeland to flee tyranny and failing government, are now cheering for the same tyrants that they left behind seeking better lives.

Given praise they receive from Progressives, standing against democracy becomes a double prize for many Arabs and Muslims in the West: Loved in the old homeland, and acting like the poster children for authenticity and diversity in their new countries. What Arab or Muslim would not take such a win-win, support-Hamas, deal?