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April 25, 2002
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
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Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
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Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
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Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
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Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
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The
Loneliest Road
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The Broken Home:
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A
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April 23, 2002
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I,
George:
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Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
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Parks, Goodbye:
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Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
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April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
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DeskScan: What's Playing
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A20
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An Open Letter to
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Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
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We Come for Peace
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Bar-Tal
Is
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Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
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Gimme
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April 25, 2002
Letter to a Young Muslim
by Tariq Ali
Dear friend
Remember when you approached me after
the big antiwar meeting in November 2001 (I think it was Glasgow)
and asked whether I was a believer? I have not forgotten the
shock you registered when I replied "no", or the comment
of your friend ("our parents warned us against you"),
or the angry questions which the pair of you then began to hurl
at me like darts. All of that made me think, and this is my
reply for you and all the others like you who asked similar
questions elsewhere in Europe and North America.
When we spoke, I told you that my criticism
of religion and those who use it for political ends was not
a case of being diplomatic in public. Exploiters and manipulators
have always used religion self-righteously to further their
own selfish ends. It's true that this is not the whole story.
There are, of course, deeply sincere people of religion in
different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side
of the poor, but they are usually in conflict with organised
religion themselves.
The Catholic Church victimised worker
or peasant priests who organised against oppression. The Iranian
ayatollahs dealt severely with Muslims who preached in favour
of a social radicalism. If I genuinely believed that this radical
Islam was the way forward for humanity, I would not hesitate
to say so in public, whatever the consequences. I know that
many of your friends love chanting the name "Osama"
and I know that they cheered on September 11, 2001. They were
not alone. It happened all over the world,
but had nothing to do with religion. I know of Argentine students
who walked out when a teacher criticised Osama. I know a Russian
teenager who emailed a one-word message - "Congratulations"
- to his Russian friends whose parents had settled outside New
York, and they replied: "Thanks. It was great." We
talked, I remember, of the Greek crowds at football matches
who refused to mourn for the two minutes the government had
imposed and instead broke the silence with anti-American chants.
But none of this justifies what took
place. What lies behind the vicarious pleasure is not a feeling
of strength, but a terrible weakness. The people of Indo-China
suffered more than any Muslim country at the hands of the US
government. They were bombed for 15 whole years and lost millions
of their people. Did they even think of bombing America? Nor
did the Cubans or the Chileans or the Brazilians. The last
two fought against the US-imposed military regimes at home and
finally triumphed.
Today, people feel powerless. And so
when America is hit they celebrate. They don't ask what such
an act will achieve, what its consequences will be and who will
benefit. Their response, like the event itself, is purely symbolic.
I think that Osama and his group have
reached a political dead-end. It was a grand spectacle, but
nothing more. The US, in responding with a war, has enhanced
the importance of the action, but I doubt if even that will
rescue it from obscurity in the future. It will be a footnote
in the history of this century. In political, economic or military
terms it was barely a pinprick.
What do the Islamists offer? A route
to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century,
never existed. If the "Emirate of Afghanistan" is
the model for what they want to impose on the world then the
bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don't imagine
that either Osama or Mullah Omar represent the future of Islam.
It would be a major disaster for the culture we both share if
that turned out to be the case. Would you want to live under
those conditions? Would you tolerate your sister, your mother
or the woman you love being hidden from public view and only
allowed out shrouded like a corpse?
I want to be honest with you. I opposed
this latest Afghan war. I do not accept the right of big powers
to change governments as and when it affects their interests.
But I did not shed any tears for the Taliban as they shaved
their beards and ran back home. This does not mean that those
who have been captured should be treated like animals or denied
their elementary rights according to the Geneva convention,
but as I've argued elsewhere, the fundamentalism of the American
Empire has no equal today. They can disregard all conventions
and laws at will. The reason they are openly mistreating prisoners
they captured after waging an illegal war in Afghanistan is
to assert their power before the world - hence they humiliate
Cuba by doing their dirty work on its soil - and warn others
who attempt to twist the lion's tail that the punishment will
be severe.
I remember how, during the cold war,
the CIA and its indigenous recruits tortured political prisoners
and raped them in many parts of Latin America. During the Vietnam
war the US violated most of the Geneva conventions. They tortured
and executed prisoners, raped women, threw prisoners out of
helicopters to die on the ground or drown in the sea, and all
this, of course, in the name of freedom.
Because many people in the west believe
the nonsense about "humanitarian interventions", they
are shocked by these acts, but this is relatively mild compared
with the crimes committed in the last century by the Empire.
I've met many of our people in different parts of the world
since September 11. One question is always repeated: "Do
you think we Muslims are clever enough to have done this?"
I always answer "Yes". Then I ask who they think is
responsible, and the answer is invariably "Israel".
Why? "To discredit us and make the Americans attack our
countries." I gently expose their wishful illusions, but
the conversation saddens me. Why are so many Muslims sunk in
this torpor? Why do they wallow in so much self-pity? Why is
their sky always overcast? Why is it always someone else who
is to blame?
Sometimes when we talk I get the impression
that there is not a single Muslim country of which they can
feel really proud. Those who have migrated from South Asia are
much better treated in Britain than in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf
States. It is here that something has to happen. The Arab world
is desperate for a change. Over the years, in every discussion
with Iraqis, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians,
the same questions are raised, the same problems recur. We are
suffocating. Why can't we breathe? Everything seems static:
our economy, our politics, our intellectuals and, most of all,
our religion.
Palestine suffers every day. The west
does nothing. Our governments are dead. Our politicians are
corrupt. Our people are ignored. Is it surprising that some
are responsive to the Islamists? Who else offers anything these
days? The US? It doesn't even want democracy, not even in little
Qatar, and for a very simple reason. If we elected our own governments
they might demand that the US close down its bases. Would it?
They already resent al-Jazeera television because it has different
priorities from them. It was fine when al-Jazeera attacked corruption
within the Arab elite. Thomas Friedman even devoted a whole
column to praise of al-Jazeera in the New York Times. He saw
it as a sign of democracy coming to the Arab world. No longer.
Because democracy means the right to think differently, and
al-Jazeera showed pictures of the Afghan war that were not
shown on the US networks, so Bush and Blair put pressure on
Qatar to stop unfriendly broadcasts.
For the west, democracy means believing
in exactly the same things that they believe. Is that really
democracy? If we elected our own government, in one or two countries
people might elect Islamists. Would the west leave us alone?
Did the French government leave the Algerian military alone?
No. They insisted that the elections of 1990 and 1991 be declared
null and void. French intellectuals described the Front Islamique
du Salut (FIS) as "Islamo-fascists", ignoring the
fact that they had won an election. Had they been allowed to
become the government, divisions already present within them
would have come to the surface. The army could have warned that
any attempt to tamper with the rights guaranteed to citizens
under the constitution would not be tolerated. It was only when
the original leaders of the FIS had been eliminated that the
more lumpen elements came to the fore and created mayhem. Should
we blame them for the civil war, or those in Algiers and Paris
who robbed them of their victory? The massacres in Algeria are
horrendous. Is it only the Islamists who are responsible? What
happened in Bentalha, 10 miles south of Algiers, on the night
of September 22, 1997? Who slaughtered the 500 men, women and
children of that township? Who? The Frenchman who knows everything,
Bernard-Henri Levy, is sure it was the Islamists who perpetrated
this dreadful deed. Then why did the army deny the local population
arms to defend itself? Why did it tell the local militia to
go away that night? Why did the security forces not intervene
when they could see what was going on? Why does M Levy believe
that the Maghreb has to be subordinated to the needs of the
French republic, and why does nobody attack this sort of fundamentalism?
We know what we have to do, say the Arabs,
but every time the west intervenes it sets our cause back many
years. So if they want to help, they should stay out. That's
what my Arab friends say, and I agree with this approach. Look
at Iran. The western gaze turned benevolent during the assault
on Afghanistan. Iran was needed for the war, but let the west
watch from afar. The imperial fundamentalists are talking about
the "axis of evil", which includes Iran. An intervention
there would be fatal. A new generation has experienced clerical
oppression. It has known nothing else. Stories about the shah
are part of its prehistory. These young men and women are sure
about one thing if nothing else. They don't want the ayatollahs
to rule them any more. Even though Iran, in recent years, has
not been as bad as Saudi Arabia or the late "Emirate of
Afghanistan", it has not been good for the people.
Let me tell you a story. A couple of
years ago I met a young Iranian film-maker in Los Angeles. His
name was Moslem Mansouri. He had managed to escape with several
hours of filmed interviews for a documentary he was making.
He had won the confidence of three Tehran prostitutes and filmed
them for more than two years. He showed me some of the footage.
They talked to him quite openly. They described how the best
pick-ups were at religious festivals. I got a flavour of the
film from the transcripts he sent me. One of the women tells
him: "Today everyone is forced to sell their bodies! Women
like us have to tolerate a man for 10,000 toomans. Young people
need to be in a bed together, even for 10 minutes . . . It is
a primary need . . . it calms them down.
"When the government does not allow
it, then prostitution grows. We don't even need to talk about
prostitution, the government has taken away the right to speak
with the opposite sex freely in public . . . In the parks, in
the cinemas, or in the streets, you can't talk to the person
sitting next to you. On the streets, if you talk to a man,
the 'Islamic guard' interrogates you endlessly. Today in our
country, nobody is satisfied! Nobody has security. I went to
a company to get a job. The manager of the company, a bearded
guy, looked at my face and said, 'I will hire you and I'll give
you 10,000 toomans more than the pay rate.' I said, 'You can
at least test my computer skills to see if I'm proficient or
not . . .' He said, 'I hire you for your looks!' I knew that
if I had to work there, I had to have sex with him at least
once a day.
"Wherever you go it's like this!
I went to a special family court - for divorce - and begged
the judge, a clergyman, to give me my child's custody. I told
him, 'Please . . . I beg you to give me the custody of my child.
I'll be your Kaniz . . . ["Kaniz" means servant. This
is a Persian expression which basically means 'I beg you, I
am very desperate'.] What do you think the guy said? He said,
'I don't need a servant! I need a woman!' What do you expect
of others when the clergyman, the head of the court, says this?
I went to the officer to get my divorce signed, instead he said
I should not get divorced and instead get married again without
divorce, illegally. Because he said without a husband it will
be hard to find a job. He was right, but I didn't have money
to pay him . . . These things make you age faster . . . you
get depressed . . . you have a lot of stress and it damages
you. Perhaps there is a means to get out of this . . . "
Moslem was distraught because none of
the American networks wanted to buy the film. They didn't want
to destabilise Khatami's regime! Moslem himself is a child of
the Revolution. Without it he would never have become a film-maker.
He comes from a very poor family. His father is a muezzin and
his upbringing was ultra-religious. Now he hates religion. He
refused to fight in the war against Iraq. He was arrested. This
experience transformed him. "The prison was a hard but
good experience for me. It was in the prison that I felt I am
reaching a stage of intellectual maturity. I was resisting and
I enjoyed my sense of strength. I felt that I saved my life
from the corrupted world of clergies and this is a price I was
paying for it. I was proud of it. After one year in prison,
they told me that I would be released on the condition that
I sign papers stating that I will participate in Friday sermons
and religious activities. I refused to sign. They kept me in
the prison for one more year."
Afterwards he took a job on a film magazine
as a reporter. "I thought my work in the media would serve
as a cover for my own projects, which were to document the hideous
crimes of the political regime itself. I knew that I would not
be able to make the kind of films I really want to make due
to the censorship regulations. Any scenario that I would write
would have never got the permission of the Islamic censorship
office. I knew that my time and energy would get wasted. So
I decided to make eight documentaries secretly. I smuggled the
footage out of Iran. Due to financial problems I've only been
able to finish editing two of my films. One is Close Up, Long
Shot and the other is Shamloo, The Poet Of Liberty.
"The first film is about the life
of Hossein Sabzian, who was the main character of Abbas Kiarostami's
drama-documentary called Close Up. A few years after Kiarostami's
film, I went to visit Sabzian. He loves cinema. His wife and
children get frustrated with him and finally leave him. Today,
he lives in a village on the outskirts of Tehran and has come
to the conclusion that his love for cinema has resulted in nothing
but misery. In my film he says, 'People like me get destroyed
in societies like the one we live in. We can never present ourselves.
There are two types of dead: flat and walking. We are the walking
dead!'"
We could find stories like this and worse
in every Muslim country. There is a big difference between the
Muslims of the diaspora - those whose parents migrated to the
western lands - and those who still live in the House of Islam.
The latter are far more critical because religion is not crucial
to their identity. It's taken for granted that they are Muslims.
In Europe and North America things are different. Here an official
multiculturalism has stressed difference at the expense of all
else. Its rise correlates with a decline in radical politics
as such.
"Culture" and "religion"
are softer, euphemistic substitutes for socioeconomic inequality
- as if diversity, rather than hierarchy, were the central issue
in North American or European society today. I have spoken to
Muslims from the Maghreb (France), from Anatolia (Germany);
from Pakistan and Bangladesh (Britain), from everywhere (United
States) and a South Asian sprinkling in Scandinavia. Why is
it, I often ask myself, that so many are like you? They have
become much more orthodox and rigid than the robust and vigorous
peasants of Kashmir and the Punjab, whom I used to know so
well.
The British prime minister is a great
believer in single-faith schools. The American president ends
each speech with "God Save America". Osama starts
and ends each TV interview by praising Allah. All three have
the right to do so, just as I have the right to remain committed
to most of the values of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment
attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons:
that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was
a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of
persecution and intolerance. Why should we abandon either of
these legacies today?
I don't want you to misunderstand me.
My aversion to religion is by no means confined to Islam alone.
And nor do I ignore the role which religious ideologies have
played in the past in order to move the world forward. It was
the ideological clashes between two rival interpretations of
Christianity - the Protestant Reformation versus the Catholic
Counter-Reformation - that led to volcanic explosions in Europe.
Here was an example of razor-sharp intellectual debates fuelled
by theological passions, leading to a civil war, followed by
a revolution.
The 16th-century Dutch revolt against
Spanish occupation was triggered off by an assault on sacred
images in the name of confessional correctness. The introduction
of a new prayer book in Scotland was one of the causes of the
17th-century Puritan Revolution in England, the refusal to tolerate
Catholicism sparked off its successor in 1688. The intellectual
ferment did not cease and a century later the ideas of the Enlightenment
stoked the furnaces of revolutionary France. The Church of England
and the Vatican now combined to contest the new threat, but
ideas of popular sovereignty and republics were too strong to
be easily obliterated.
I can almost hear your question. What
has all this got to do with us? A great deal, my friend. Western
Europe had been fired by theological passions, but these were
now being transcended. Modernity was on the horizon. This was
a dynamic that the culture and economy of the Ottoman Empire
could never mimic. The Sunni-Shia divide had come too soon
and congealed into rival dogmas. Dissent had, by this time,
been virtually wiped out in Islam. The Sultan, flanked by his
religious scholars, ruled a state-Empire that was going to wither
away and die.
If this was already the case in the 18th
century, how much truer it is today. Perhaps the only way in
which Muslims will discover this is through their own experiences,
as in Iran. The rise of religion is partially explained by the
lack of any other alternative to the universal regime of neoliberalism.
Here you will discover that as long as Islamist governments
open their countries to global penetration, they will be permitted
to do what they want in the sociopolitical realm.
The American Empire used Islam before
and it can do so again. Here lies the challenge. We are in desperate
need of an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed
conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists but, more
than that, opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are
seen to be more advanced than what is currently on offer from
the west.
This would necessitate a rigid separation
of state and mosque; the dissolution of the clergy; the assertion
by Muslim intellectuals of their right to interpret the texts
that are the collective property of Islamic culture as a whole;
the freedom to think freely and rationally and the freedom of
imagination. Unless we move in this direction we will be doomed
to reliving old battles and thinking not of a richer and humane
future, but of how we can move from the present to the past.
It is an unacceptable vision. I've let my pen run away with
me and preached my heresies for too long. I doubt that I will
change, but I hope you will.
Tariq Ali
is an editor of New Left Review and a frequent contributor to
CounterPunch. This article is extracted from his new book The
Clash Of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads And Modernity,
published by Verso.
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