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September 16,
2001
Time for
Intellectual Honesty
There Are Many Islams
By Edward Said
Spectacular horror of the sort that
struck New York (and to a lesser degree Washington) has ushered
in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror missions
without political message, senseless destruction.
For the residents of this wounded
city, the consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage
and shock will certainly continue for a long time, as will the
genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly
imposed on so many.
New Yorkers have been fortunate
that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly
combative, even retrograde figure, has rapidly attained Churchillian
status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion,
he has marshalled the city's heroic police, fire and emergency
services to admirable effect and, alas, with huge loss of life.
Giuliani's was the first voice of caution against panic and
jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim communities,
the first to express the commonsense of anguish, the first to
press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering blows.
Would that that were all. The
national television reporting has of course brought the horror
of those dreadful winged juggernauts into every household, unremittingly,
insistently, not always edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed,
indeed magnified, the expected and the predictable in what most
Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated
vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and un-restrained retribution.
Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and patriotism, every
politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully repeated
how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until
terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism,
everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends?
No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the
Middle East and Islam are what 'we' are up against, and that
terrorism must be destroyed.
What is most depressing, however,
is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role
in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality
beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of
the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average
American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant
rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some
sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's
name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans
as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers
might have had before they became stock symbols of everything
loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably,
then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for
war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby
Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured
at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically
in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict,
without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols
and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences
and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the
situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George
Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet
to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US
is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously
munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive
Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility
of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real
grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on
a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative
of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the
cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions
and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American
catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression
of the Palestinians.
Political rhetoric in the
US has overridden these things by flinging about words like
'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions
have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence
of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their
hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility
to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms every day.
Intellectual responsibility,
however, requires a still more critical sense of the actuality.
There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling
modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was
as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, Zionism
included. And yet bombing defenceless civilians with F-16s and
helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more
conventional nationalist terror.
What is bad about all terror
is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions
and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and
sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to
make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle East. No
cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter
of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people
are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent
the cause without having a real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been
quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't a single Islam: there
are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true
of all traditions, religions or nations even though some of
their adherents have futiley tried to draw boundaries around
themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet history is
far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by
demagogues who are much less representative than either their
followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or
moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of
revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill and
be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication
and what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation.
The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been
middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting
a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilisation
and patient organisation in the service of a cause, the poor
and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking
and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models pro vide,
wrapped in lying religious claptrap.
On the other hand, immense
military and economic power are no guarantee of wisdom or moral
vision. Sceptical and humane voices have been largely unheard
in the present crisis, as 'America' girds itself for a long war
to be fought somewhere out there, along with allies who have
been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for
imprecise ends. We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds
that separate people from each other and re-examine the labels,
reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share
our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite
the bellicose cries and creeds.
'Islam' and 'the West' are
simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run
behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves
to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical
pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice
and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual
enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary. Demonisation
of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent
politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice
can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put
out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more
worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale
violence and suffering. CP
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