Islam and the West are inadequate banners

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.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)