Return to WW4
- Useful References |
|
Source: ERCES
Online Quarterly Review - Issue I - Vol. I - 2004
Copied here July 2011 |
|
Webmaster
notes and recommendation:
Book: Christopher Hitchens
and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
by Simon Cottee, Christopher Hitchens
and Thomas Cushman (Jun 1, 2008) Amazon.com |
FYI More about Hitchens:
... go to The Daily Hitchens |
Although UBLis now dead- his evil lives
on. Read his relevant proclamations HERE |
RE: The many characters mentioned in
this essay?? Copy/Paste names into INFO.com/Research
Go HERE |
|
|
The Worship of Unreason:
September 11 and the Forces
of Theocratic Fascism
By Simon
Cottee
|
|
Abstract
|
Almost from the very moment that the
second plane crashed into the south tower, a toxic alliance emerged to
denounce America for its complicity in bringing about the attacks.
On the Christian right, Jerry Falwell
(in solidarity with comrade bin Laden) declared that the suicide-murder
of 3, 019 civilians was a judgment from God against the sin and permissiveness
of American society.
And on the intellectual left, Noam Chomsky
(echoing the egregious Jean
Baudrillard) announced, with heartfelt insouciance, that the ‘events’
of that day constituted a reprisal for the crimes and injustices of the
American Empire.
Since I do not wish to question the
Word of the God (expertly ventriloquized by Falwell), I shall content myself
with questioning the profane words of Chomsky instead. Chomsky’s exegesis
continues to occupy a position of some prominence among the bienpensant
liberal-left.
There’s a small paradox
here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification
or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it’s more complicated than
that. At least, that’s part of the job. However, you must have noticed
how often certain “complexities” are introduced as a means of obfuscation.
Here it becomes necessary to ply with glee the celebrated razor of old
Occam, dispose of unnecessary assumptions, and proclaim that, actually,
things are less complicated than they appear. Very often in my experience,
the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of
elementary justice or principle is at issue. --
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001a: 47)
|
|
Wolfish Smiles
Consider the following three quotations
(the first is from Neal Ascherson (2001), the second Martin Amis (2002a)
and the third Christopher Hitchens (2002a)):
1. Manhattan that morning
was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so
tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on
the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished.
This is how we delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second
column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until
it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you.
It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written
on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how
much we hate you.
2. Whenever that sense of heavy
incredulity seems about to dissipate, I still find, an emergent detail
will eagerly replenish it: the “pink mist” in the air, caused by the explosion
of the falling bodies; the fact that the second plane, on impact, was travelling
at nearly 600mph, a speed that would bring it to the point of disintegration.
3. Everyone has his own indelible
image of September 11. Mine is in part imaginary: It involves picturing
the wolfish smiles on the faces of the second crew of hijackers as United
Airlines Flight 175 screamed toward Manhattan and saw the flames and smoke
already billowing from the first World Trade Center tower. With what delight
they must have ramped up the speed of their plane, crammed with human cargo,
and smashed into the second civilian target.
Of these images, it is the third which
is the more terrifyingly evocative. Exhilaration not desperation, one imagines,
is what the killers felt in the brief moments before impact. September
11, indisputably, was an act of extraordinary will and courage and self-sacrifice.
But it was also an act of unfathomable cruelty and violence and stupidity.
Terror and Empire
September 11, asserts Noam
Chomsky, was a riposte for the crimes and injustices of American imperial
statecraft. From this perspective, the perpetrators were the oppressed
and exploited subjects of the Empire, inspired by an instinct for human
freedom and solidarity.
‘Nothing’, Chomsky graciously concedes,
‘can justify crimes such as those of September 11’.
‘But’, he goes on, ‘we can
think of the United States as an “innocent victim” only if we adopt the
convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its
allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret’ (Chomsky 2001a: 35).
The training, arming and financing of
Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network; the systematic bombing of the
civilian population of Iraq; and long-standing support for Israel’s military
occupation of Palestine: it is precisely these actions, Chomsky insists,
that are ‘the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings’
(Chomsky 2001b).
Chomsky is not alone is uttering these
dangerous thoughts: indeed his security-detail includes some of the most
pre-eminent writers on the intellectual and political left.
Tariq Ali, for example, writes:
‘What made them propagandists
of the deed? The bombing of Iraq, economic sanctions, the presence of American
Forces on Saudi soil. Politicians in the West have turned a blind eye to
this, as they have to the occupation of Palestine and the crimes of Israel.
Without profound change in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden, dead or alive,
is of little significance.’ (Ali 2001)
Susan Sontag similarly reflects:
Where is the acknowledgment
that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or
“humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed
superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances
and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing
of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly
applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in
the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.
(Sontag 2001)
No less forthright is Alexander Cockburn:
What moved those kamikaze Muslims
to embark, some many months ago, on the training that they knew would culminate
in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon
thousands of innocent people? Was it the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin
Laden? The dream of a world in which all men wear untrimmed beards and
women have to stay at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents?
I doubt it. If I had to cite what steeled their resolve, the list would
surely include the exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine Albright,
then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Lesley Stahl. Albright
was maintaining that sanctions had yielded important concessions from Saddam
Hussein. “We have heard that half a million children have died,” Stahl
said. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know,
is the price worth it?”
“I think this is a very hard choice,”
Albright answered, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.” They
read that exchange in the Middle East. It was infamous all over the Arab
world. I’ll bet the Sept. 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they
could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So would it
be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright down to the ruins of the TradeTowers,
remind her of that exchange and point out that the price turned out to
include that awful mortuary as well? Was that price worth it too, Mrs.
Albright? (Cockburn 2001)
And this is Gore Vidal’s beautifully realized
verdict:
Once we meditate upon the unremitting
violence of the United States against the rest of the world, while relying
upon pretexts that, for sheer flimsiness, might have even given Hitler
pause when justifying some of his most baroque lies, one begins to understand
why Osama struck at us from abroad in the name of 1 billion Muslims whom
we have encouraged, through our own preemptive acts of war as well as relentless
demonization of them through media, to regard us in – how shall I put it?
– less than an amiable light. (Vidal 2002: 45)
To summarize, then:
the events of September 11
constituted a wholly intelligible, if rather brutal, attack on American
imperial hegemony, motivated not by a hatred for western democracy and
its values of pluralism, but rather by a deep and longstanding loathing
of the exploitative and coercive imperial relations with which its leading
state representative directly or indirectly colluded.
This interpretation is – how shall I put
it? - astonishingly misconceived.
Far from being an assault on American
imperialism, the suicide bombings were in fact a grotesque and spectacular
manifestation of what might be called a civil war within the societies
of the Islamic world.
September 11 was a declaration and a
warning, issued by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
It was a declaration of unbending religious
piety, an assertion of fanatical primacy, addressed to all Muslims of secular
temperament: this is how we will defeat
you.
What motivates Al Qaeda, evidently,
is not the plight of their oppressed brothers and (still less) sisters,
but rather the exhilarations of a primeval theocratic fundamentalism. Its
principal objective (for the moment at least) is the creation of an Islamic
republic, not the ‘progressive’ realignment of American foreign policy. |
Islamic Fascism in Theory
and Practice
To suppose, as Chomsky does, that the
Al Qaeda terrorists must be acting to resist oppression or to utter a cry
of help on behalf of the denizens of Palestine is not only misleading;
it is also to miss the crucial and unchallengeable point:
that Al Qaeda is essentially
a fascist sectarian religious cult. Al Qaeda hates ‘the west’ not for what
it does, but for what it strives to be: secular,
cosmopolitan and democratic. These values represent
a systematic affront to bin Laden’s world-view; when they are professed
by Muslims it is ceases to be an affront and becomes something else: a
direct incitement to murder.
This argument has been set out most powerfully
by Christopher Hitchens.
‘Here’, he wrote of September
11, was an ‘unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything
I hated’:
On one side, the ethics of
the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those
are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of
dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on
for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it
is a fight over essentials. (Hitchens 2002a)
This confrontation, Hitchens
argues, began not with the destruction of the World Trade Center, but on
February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his
fatwa against Salman Rushdie (see Hitchens 2003).
Rushdie’s offence was to write a novel,
The
Satanic Verses, for which he received a life sentence and a death sentence.
A large bounty, offered in public, for the solicitation of murder, by the
theocratic leader of a nation, against an author in another country, for
the offence of composing a work of fiction.
This, Hitchens observes, was the most frontal
possible challenge to civilization’s essential principle: free expression.
It was also, he says, a warning about the lethal global menace of theocratic
terrorism. (Rushdie’s Japanese translator, let us not forget, was murdered
(and his body viciously mutilated) by client-operatives of the Iranian
secret services; and, later, his Norwegian publisher was executed by elements
of the same network.)
For Hitchens, the September 11 assault
was the starkest embodiment yet of that menace:
‘Here’, he wrote, ‘was the
most frightful enemy – theocratic barbarism – in plain view’ (Hitchens
2001b):
The people who destroyed the World TradeCenter,
and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to free Gaza. They
are fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women
in Kabul and Karachi. They didn’t just destroy the temple of modernity,
they used heavy artillery to shatter ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan
earlier this year, and in Egypt have plotted to demolish the Pyramids and
the Sphinx because they are un-Islamic and profane. (Hitchens 2001c)
Just look, Hitchens implores us, at what
they do to their own societies. Should we be in any doubt as to what the
militants of the new jihad do to their own societies, Hitchens, in yet
another article, provides us with the following example:
In Nigeria a young woman sits
holding a baby and awaiting a sentence of death. The baby is the main,
if not indeed the sole, evidence against her. The baby is proof positive
that the young woman has engaged in sexual intercourse. The form that the
appointed death sentence will take is death by stoning, death in public,
death that will make a crowd of participants into killers and the baby
into a motherless child.
Why is this happening? It is happening
because the Islamic forces in the northern regions of Nigeria want to impose
sharia law, the primitive Muslim code of mutilation and retribution. Do
the religious authorities propose to inflict this code only on members
of their own congregation, who share the supposed values and taboos? No
they do not. They wish to have it imposed also on Christians and unbelievers.
This they already do in the regions of Nigeria that have fallen under their
control.
But they also want to extend
sharia to the whole of Nigeria, where Islam is still a minority religion…
(Hitchens 2002b)
‘Now perhaps somebody will tell me’,
Hitchens writes, ‘how this – the stoning, the disregard of pluralism, the
stupidity and the viciousness – connects to the situation in Gaza, or would
help alleviate the plight of the Palestinians’. ‘Quite obviously’, he asserts,
the clerics in Nigeria ‘are doing this because they think they can’. He
goes on:
Their counterparts in Malaysia
and Indonesia, who want to declare absolutist Islamic republics in countries
celebrated for their confessional and ethnic diversity, are not reacting
to any “grievance” or suffering from any oppression. They simply think
it obvious that the true word of god is contained in one book, and that
further reflection is not only unnecessary but profane. (Hitchens 2002b)
‘And this’, Hitchens warns us, ‘is precisely,
now, our problem’:
The Taliban and its surrogates
are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom.
They are condemned, and they deludedly believe that they are commanded,
to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very
first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect
and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not
us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think,
not possible. (I say “fortunately” because I am also convinced that such
coexistence is not desirable.) (Hitchens 2001d)
In no sense, then, can it be said that
the Al Qaeda terrorists are heroically avenging the crimes and injustices
of the American Empire:
The bombers of Manhattan represent
fascism with an Islamic face…What they abominate about “the West”, to put
it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend
about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend:
its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry,
its separation of religion from the state. (Hitchens, 2001e, italics in
original)
What they resent, that is,
is not the flaws of the United States, but the United States at its very
best.
Indeed, they ‘are not even “terrorists”
so much as nihilists: at war with the very idea of modernity
and the related practices of pluralism and toleration’ (Hitchens 2001f).
For all the polemical vigor with which
he presses his case, Hitchens is not exaggerating when he says that the
Al Qaeda warriors are the protagonists of a singularly repressive and fanatical
ideology: Islamic fascists, not anti-imperialists.
‘The word Fascism’, wrote Orwell in
1946, ‘has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not
desirable”’ (Orwell 1994: 353, italics in original).
Perhaps. But, as a description of Al
Qaeda’s ideology, the term feels not merely right but penetratingly accurate:
it is, one notices, illiberal and anti-democratic, expansionist, fanatically
violent and deeply paranoid and delusional.
At the center of this ideology is the
belief that Muslims are the sole recipients and custodians of God’s truth,
which it is their duty to bring to the rest of the world.
This is bin Laden, in an interview with
John Miller of ABC News in May 1998:
Our call is the call of Islam
that was revealed to Mohammed. It is a call to all mankind.
We have been entrusted with good cause
to follow in the footsteps of the Messenger and to communicate his message
to all nations. It is an invitation that we extend to all the nations to
embrace Islam, the religion that calls for justice, mercy and fraternity
among all nations, not differentiating between black and white or between
red and yellow except with respect to their devotedness.
All people who worship Allah, not each
other, are equal before Him.
We are entrusted to spread this message
and to extend that call to all the people.(Miller 1998)
What is distinctive about bin Laden’s understanding
– one might say perversion – of Islam is that this obligation must express
itself in the form of armed struggle, or, as bin Laden conceives it, jihad.
This struggle is directed
against two types of enemy: infidels and apostates.
Of these, it is the latter which forms
the immediate, if not central, object of Al Qaeda’s hate.
This should not surprise us.
According to Sharia law, the apostate
or traitor is far worse than the unbeliever. As Bernard Lewis explains:
‘The unbeliever has not seen
the light, and there is always hope that he may eventually see it…[But]
the renegade is one who has known the true faith, however briefly, and
abandoned it. For this offence there is no human forgiveness, and according
to the overwhelming majority of the jurists, the renegade must be put to
death.’ (Lewis 2003: 40-1)
One might say, then, that bin Laden’s hatred
of apostates is obsequiously conventional, if wildly fanatical, in character.
‘They shall all be wiped out’
(Miller 1998), he declares, which of course stands in direct contrast to
the fate of the believers, for whom eternal paradise is promised.
Not only is jihad bloody and exhilarating
and honorable; it must also be relentlessly prosecuted:
it will end only with the creation of the worldwide Caliphate, under which
every person will either adopt the Muslim faith or submit to its rule.
The contours of bin Laden’s ideology become
even clearer when we place it within the context of the wider Islamist
tradition on which it draws. Perhaps the most influential thinker in that
tradition is Sayyid Qutb.
The central theme in Qutb’s writings
is this:
the spiritual emptiness of
modern western society. Western culture, he argued, had reached a point
of unbearable crisis. Everywhere, man was ill at ease and alienated from
his own nature. Modern life, he said, was sliding inexorably downward.
For Qutb, the United States was at the
forefront of this collapse. Everything in America, he wrote, even religion,
was sinful and corrupt. The cause of this crisis, he observed, was not
the denial of God, but rather the failure to acknowledge his universal
and absolute sovereignty. In liberal society, this manifested itself most
clearly in the ‘desolate separation’ - Qutb’s expression - between Church
and society.
This was not only a diagnosis; it was also
a warning. Qutb’s fear was that the degeneracy of the west might engulf
the Muslim world. Indeed the contagion, he despaired, was already spreading.
It began with the capitulation of the Ottoman general Kemal Atatürk
in 1922.
According to Lewis,
‘Even as he fought to liberate
Turkey from Western domination, he took the first steps toward the adoption
of Western or, as he preferred to put it, modern ways’ (Lewis 2003: xvii).
One of his first acts, in November 1922, was to abolish the sultanate.
‘The Ottoman sovereign’, Lewis goes
on, ‘was not only a sultan, the ruler of a specific state; he was also
widely recognized as the caliph, the head of all Sunni Islam, and the last
in a line of rulers that dated back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad
in 632 C.E.’ (Lewis 2003: xvii).
The most decisive act, however, came
in March 1924:
the Turks abolished the caliphate,
and with it nearly thirteen centuries of Islamic tradition came to a humiliating
end.
When Qutb wrote, with characteristic overstatement,
of ‘a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim
countries…an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed,
and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications,
values, institutions, and organizations’ (Cited in Berman 2003: 92), we
know exactly what event he was alluding to.
Islam, in Qutb’s eyes, had come under
assault from forces outside the Muslim world, and, more alarmingly, from
forces within it. It was the religious obligation of every Muslim, he urged,
to actively resist that double assault. This sharply reflected his belief
that Islam requires of its believers not merely an all-encompassing loyalty,
but also a revolutionary practice on its behalf. He wrote of a Muslim ‘vanguard’,
for which victory would be certain, and defeat unthinkable. The aim of
this ‘vanguard’ was to create an Islamic state. ‘The Koran’, Qutb tells
us, ‘was bestowed from on high to Muhammad, God’s Messenger, so that he
might, by means of it, establish a state, bring a community into being,
organize a society, cultivate minds and consciences and set moral values’
(see Berman 2003: 94).
The ambition, in essence, was to resurrect
the pure Islamic society, from before the period of decline. And, from
there, to extend Islamic law to every facet of the globe – which was Mohammed’s
ambition, also.
To this end, lives will have to be sacrificed.
But there is honour as well as immortality in sacrifice, as Qutb makes
clear:
Those who risk their lives
and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the
cause of God are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul.
But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle
must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as
God Himself clearly states.
To all intents and purposes, those people
may very well appear lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial
physical means alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth,
and persistence, while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete
inertia and lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the
cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive
on their blood. Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and
spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping
the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense
that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain
their active existence in everyday life…
There is no real sense of loss in their
death, since they continue to live. (See Berman 2003: 101-2)
How consoling it is to know, we may reflect,
that Mohammed Atta is still thriving among us.
Qutb’s analysis, we can confidently
say, embodied two key emotions: fear and loathing. What he feared, clearly,
was the perversion of Islam; and what he especially loathed was the theory,
not the contradictory practice, of secular cosmopolitan modernity. Allied
to this was the political ambition of establishing an Islamic state, and
ultimately a worldwide Islamic caliphate. Qutb was a revolutionary as well
as a warrior.
What is perhaps most striking about
Qutb’s thinking is the extraordinary degree to which it echoes the spirit
and character of the two main ideological cataclysms of the twentieth century:
Stalinism and Fascism.
Paul Berman vividly expresses this point
in his book Terror and Liberalism (Berman 2003):
There was always a people of
God, whose peaceful and wholesome life had been undermined. They were the
proletariat or the Russian masses (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists);
or the children of the Roman wolf (for Mussolini’s Fascists); or the Spanish
Catholics and the Warriors of Christ the King (for Franco’s Phalange);
or the Aryan race (for the Nazis). There were always the subversive dwellers
in Babylon, who trade commodities from around the world and pollute society
with their abominations. They were the bourgeoisie and the kulaks (for
the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the Freemasons and cosmopolitans (for
the Fascists and Phalangists); and, sooner or later, they were always the
Jews (for the Nazis, and in a lesser degree for the other fascists, and
eventually for Stalin, too).
The subversive dwellers in
Babylon were always aided by Satanic forces from beyond, and the Satanic
forces were always pressing on the people of God from all sides. They were
the forces of capitalist encirclement (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists);
or the pincer pressure of Soviet and American technology, squeezing the
life out of Germany (in Heidegger’s Nazi interpretation); or the international
Jewish conspiracy (again for the Nazis). Yet, no matter how putrid and
oppressive was the present, the reign of God always beckoned in the future.
It was going to be the Age of the Proletariat (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists);
or the resurrected Roman Empire (for the Fascists); or explicitly the Reign
of Christ the King (for the Spanish Phalange); or the Third Reich, meaning
the resurrected Roman Empire in an Aryan version (for the Nazis). (Berman
2003: 48-9)
To which Berman adds a further point of
comparison:
‘The coming reign was always
going to be pure – a society cleansed of its pollutants and abominations.’
(p. 49)
I need not quote Berman further, because
the parallels will be clear to everyone.
John Gray articulates the same point
but in a different way:
‘radical Islam’, he argues,
submits itself to a ‘uniquely modern myth’ (p. 3). Like the Communists
and the Nazis, ‘radical’ Islamists ‘are convinced that they can remake
the human condition’, and that ‘history is a prelude to a new world’ (p.
3).[2]
None of this, however, is to deny that
Al Qaeda’s moral and political philosophy is essentially primeval in inspiration.
Certainly, Al Qaeda is very much a phenomenon of late modernity, a response
to what Ernest Gellner calls the ‘uprootings’ of globalization (see esp.
Gellner 1992). But it is wholly misleading to suppose that the ideas to
which it is committed are, as Gray suggests, ‘quintessentially modern’
(p 26). Far from it.
For all its apparent symmetry with Nazism
and Stalinism, Al Qaeda’s ideology is explicitly and self-avowedly anti-modern
in nature: resistant not only to the principle of secularism, but also
to any practice not (supposedly) sanctioned or ‘anticipated’ in the Koran.
This ideology is strongly present in
all of bin Laden’s recent pronouncements and provocations.
Consider, for example, the 1998 ‘Declaration
of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders’.
(This was published in London on February 23 by the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds
al-‘Arabi, bearing the signatures of bin Laden and the leaders of Jihad
groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.)
Among the opening paragraphs we find
the following proclamation:
‘Since God laid down the Arabian
peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with its seas, no calamity
has ever befallen it like these Crusader hosts that have spread in it like
locusts, crowding its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure;
and this at a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners
jostling around a bowl of food.’ (Cited in Lewis 2003: xxiv-xxv)
The declaration then goes on to identify
three main points of grievance:
First – For more than seven
years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest
of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers,
humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases
in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic
peoples.
Though some in the past have disputed
the true nature of this occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety
have now recognized it.
There is no better proof of this than
the continuing American aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from
Arabia despite its rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories
for this purpose but are subjugated.
Second – Despite the immense destruction
inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader Jewish alliance,
and in spite of the appalling number of dead, exceeding a million, the
Americans nevertheless, in spite of all this, are trying once more to repeat
this dreadful slaughter. It seems that the long blockade following after
a fierce war, the dismemberment and the destruction are not enough for
them. So they come again today to destroy what remains of this people and
to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third – While the purposes of the Americans
in these wars are religious and economic, they also serve the petty state
of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and
their killing of Muslims in it.
There is no better proof of all this
than their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest of the neighbouring
Arab states, and their attempt to dismember all the states of the region,
such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Sudan, into petty states, whose
division and weakness would ensure the survival of Israel and the continuation
of the calamitous Crusader occupation of the lands of Arabia. (See Lewis
2003: xxv-xxvi)
These crimes, says bin Laden and his fellow
signatories, constitute a
‘clear declaration of war by
the Americans against God, His Prophet, and the Muslims. In such a situation,
it is the unanimous opinion of the ulema throughout the centuries that
when enemies attack the Muslim lands, Jihad becomes a personal duty of
every Muslim’ (see Lewis 2003: xxvi).
The declaration concludes with the injunction
to
‘kill Americans and their allies,
both civil and military’. This, it states, ‘is an individual duty of every
Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa
mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their
grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from
all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim’ (see Lewis
2003: xxvii).
Of the three areas of grievance listed
in the declaration, it is the first and the second – Arabia and Iraq -
which are the most deeply felt.
I quote Lewis’s explanation:
For Muslims, as we in the West
sometimes tend to forget, the Holy Land par excellence is Arabia and especially
the Hijaz and its two holy cities – Mecca, where the Prophet was born,
and Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; the country whose
people were the first to rally to the new faith and became its standard-bearers.
The Prophet Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did his immediate successors,
the caliphs, in the headship of the community. Thereafter, except for a
brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene
of its major achievements was Iraq, and its capital, Baghdad, was the seat
of the caliphate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land once
added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compare
in significance with Arabia and Iraq. (Lewis 2003: xxviii-xxix)
The chief cause of bin Laden’s resentment,
it seems, is not the arbitrary and repressive way in which the United States
exercises its power in the Middle East, but its very presence in the Middle
East. This is a theological grievance, not a political one. Moreover (and
if you will excuse the tautology), it reflects a sentiment which is fiercely
indifferent to dialogue or compromise. And when bin Laden does contrive
to mention overtly political grievances, the shadow of religion is never
far from the foreground. Robin Blackburn exaggerates only very slightly
when he writes that ‘when bin Laden refers to “peace in Palestine” what
he probably means is driving all Jews, Christians and atheists into the
sea’ (Blackburn 2001).
We can indeed be certain that no settlement
for the Palestinians or the Chechens or the Kashmiris or the Bosnians would
have appeased bin Laden’s barbarous piety.
The Clash Within Civilizations
Consider the following:
1. On April 25, 1967, the Syrian
army magazine Jaysh al-Sha‘b (‘The People’s Army’) published an article
by Second Lieutenant Ibrahim Khalas, entitled ‘The Means of Creating
a New Arab Man’.
‘God, religions, feudalism,
capital, and all the values which prevailed in the pre-existing society’
are no more than ‘mummies in the museums of history’, Khalas proclaimed.
Arab society and civilization, he insisted,
must recognize that there is only one value:
'absolute faith in the new
man of destiny…who relies only on himself and on his own contribution to
humanity…because he knows that his inescapable end is death and nothing
beyond death…no heaven and no hell…We have no need of men who kneel and
beg for grace and pity…’ (Cited in Lewis 1973: 13)
Here is how Lewis describes the reaction
to Khalas’s article:
This was the first time that
such sentiments had appeared in print in any of the revolutionary Arab
states. The result was electrifying…In the face of mounting tension and
hostility...the author of the article and the editors of the journal were
arrested. The following day [May 6] the semi-official newspaper al-Thawra
(The Revolution) proclaimed its respect for religion, and shortly afterwards
it was announced that the article was planted by the C.I.A., and the resistance
concerted with “the Americans, the English, the Jordanians, the Saudis,
the Zionists, and Selim Hatum (a Druze opponent of the regime). The troubles
continued, and on 11 May the author and editors were sentenced by a military
court to life imprisonment. (Lewis 1973: 13-4)
2. On November 20, 1979, a group
of 1,000 or so Islamic extremists seized the Great Mosque in Mecca, and
held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. ‘The aim of this
spectacular attack’, explains Gilles Kepel, ‘was to protest against the
corrupt rulers in Riyadh, who, they said, worshipped no god but the rial
(the currency of Saudi Arabia)’ (Kepel 1994: 29).
After a ‘murderous struggle the attackers,
who had taken refuge inside the mosque, were captured and subsequently
executed’ (p. 29).
3. On October 6, 1981, President
AnwarSadat was assassinated in Cairo by militants of the Islamist group
Al-Jihad (‘The Holy War’). ‘Abd al-SalamFaraj, the group’s ideologue, ‘rationalized’
the act in the following terms:
It is our duty to concentrate
on our Islamic cause, and that is the establishment first of all of God’s
law in our own country and causing the word of God to prevail. There is
no doubt that the first battlefield of the jihad is the extirpation of
these infidel leaderships and their replacement by a perfect Islamic order,
and from this will come the release of our energies. (Cited in Lewis 2003:
135)
In April 1982 Faraj was executed on the
charge of planning and instigating Sadat’s murder.
What, if anything, connects
all these episodes?
Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on
the response to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, provides us with an
answer:
For a long time now, a major
fissure has been opening in the Muslim world…To speak very roughly and
approximately, Muslim societies are undergoing a general crisis of adaptation
to modernity and to ‘the West’. Some states, like Turkey and Egypt and
Algeria, are faced with violent internal challenges to secularism, because
secularism has been the guise either of corruption or of arbitrary rule.
Others, like the Gulf States and Pakistan
and Indonesia, have seen Islamic rhetoric used as the excuses for corruption
and arbitrary rule, and have still faced rebellions from those who claim
to be more truly Islamic. Among the most secular and pluralist Muslim populations,
which are probably the Bosnians and the Palestinians, maltreatment at the
hands of non-Muslims has caused some to value secularism more, and some
to draw the opposite conclusion and value Muslim principles more dearly.
(Hitchens [1999] 2000: 111-2)
That is how the world looked in 1999.
Since then the crisis to which Hitchens
refers has become even more acute, culminating in the increasingly violent
clash between secular Muslims on the one side and Islamic reactionaries
on the other.
On September 10, 2001, it would have
been true to say that nothing more vividly illustrated the depth and intensity
of that clash than the Rushdie ‘controversy’. Undeniably, this was a civilizational
clash. But it was a clash within civilizations not, pace Huntington (Huntington
1997), between two opposing ones. On February 14, 1989, Rushdie had indeed
become world-historical (see esp. Amis 1993: 170-8).
The Muslim world is emphatically not,
as Huntington would suggest, at war against ‘the West’, but, on the contrary,
with itself. The causes and manifestations of this war are formidably complex
(see Kepel 1995, 2002; Riesebrodt 1993; and Bruce 2000). What is clear,
however, is that the September 11 terror attack was a direct consequence
of its prosecution. Hitchens expresses this argument as follows:
There is a civil war raging
within the Muslim world, where many believers do not wish to live under
sharia any more than I do. This war has been at an incandescent pitch in
Algeria, for example, for more than a decade. It is smouldering but still
toxic in Iran, in Egypt, among the Palestinians and now in some of the
major cities of “the West”.
But the extremist and fundamentalist
side in that war has evolved a new tactic. By exporting the conflict and
staging it in Europe and America, it hopes both to intimidate and impress
those who are wavering. This simple point was made, you may remember, in
New York and Washington and Pennsylvania about 12 months ago, and we can
be entirely certain that it will be rammed home to us again. (Hitchens
2002b)
Should one require further supporting evidence
for this position, one need go no further than the assessment set out in
Fred Halliday’s excellent book Two Hours that Shook the World (2002).
Huntington’s thesis systematically fails to consider ‘the most important
cause of the events of 11 September…namely’:
the enormous, long and very
violent clash within the Muslim world between those who want to reform
and secularize and those whose power is threatened or who want to take
power in the name of fundamentalism. It is not, as Huntington asserts,
that Islam has “bloody frontiers”…It is rather that within Muslim societies
a war has been in train for decades, and found on 11 September a dramatic
transnational expression…The goal [of the fundamentalists] is…to seize
power, political, social and gendered, within their own societies. Their
greatest foe is secularism: this is the internal clash that led to the
World Trade Center atrocity.
That, to be clear, was Halliday (Halliday
2002: 46-7, italics in original), not Hitchens.
Moral Equivalence
This analysis is, of course, cursory
and incomplete. It does not, for example, even mention the devastatingly
important fact that the CIA, the ISI and Saudi Arabia’s security apparatus
collectively incubated the very movements against which the United States
is now campaigning (see esp. Cooley 1999; and Rashid 2001). But it does,
I trust, go some way towards refuting the claim that the perpetrators of
the September 11 attack were acting on behalf of the victims of American
statecraft. The perpetrators, indeed, were the clones of the Empire, not
its maligned subjects.
It also invites us to reconsider the
idea that there is a moral equivalence between the violence of Al Qaeda
and the recent military actions of the United States. We might, for example,
attempt to compare the events of September 11 with the United States bombing
of Khartoum: this is Chomsky’s preferred comparative case study. The bombing,
he reports, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
This is because Clinton’s target – the Al Shifa pharmaceutical facility
- produced over 60 per cent of the human and veterinary medicine in Sudan
(see esp. Hitchens 1999: 87-103). Chomsky states that ‘Proportional to
population, this is as if the bin Laden network, in a single attack on
the United States, caused hundreds of thousands of people - many of them
children - to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases, though the
analogy is unfair because a rich country, not under sanctions and denied
aid, can easily replenish its stocks and respond appropriately to such
an atrocity…’ (Chomsky 2001c).
Chomsky’s analogy, however, contrives
to obscure the following incontrovertible fact: those murdered in the September
11 suicide bombings were not (to use an obscene euphemism) ‘collateral
damage’. Quite the reverse: their murders were the direct object of the
‘operation’. Or to put the matter differently: the terrorists of September
11 intended to murder thousands of innocent people; this can scarcely be
said of Clinton’s bombing of Khartoum, for all its moral depravity and
catastrophic consequences. We might also add that Clinton did not boast
of having taught the Sudanese civilians a lesson; nor, furthermore, were
his missiles full of passengers.
Chomsky’s position, it seems to me,
is a uniquely poisonous version of what Orwell had in mind when he wrote
the following:
The majority of pacifists either
belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object
to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point.
But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged
motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.
Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad
as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual
pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval
but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.
(Orwell 1994: 312)
The attempt to enforce a moral equivalence
between the military actions of Al Qaeda and those of the United States
not only discloses a form of denial about the totalitarian and fanatical
character of Al Qaeda; it also discloses a masochistic contempt for our
own society.
Conclusion: Whose Side
Are We On?
September 11, as Amis wrote of the ‘Rushdie
Affair’ (Amis 1993: 171), ‘feels rivetingly central and exemplary’: a resounding
symbol or vector of a wider civilizational conflict. We are, indeed, engaged
in a momentous and defining war: not, as G. W. Bush stipulates, against
‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’, but against the forces of theocratic fascism.
Moreover, this is a war about which no one (not even comrade Chomsky) can
hope to be neutral, because no one (not even the heroic exiles of Ravello)
can escape its vertiginously global reach: we are all combatants now. This,
to put the matter at its starkest, is a war for civilization, against theocratic
tyranny and violence and intolerance. It is – and must be – a ‘war’ because
no dialogue is possible with the enemy: theocratic fascists, by definition,
are intransigently opposed to compromise. ‘Fascism means war’, as the left
used to say (at a time when it could indeed contrive a good slogan).
What clearly exhilarates Hitchens is
the strongly internationalist character of this engagement: to fight theocratic
fascism is not only to defend ourselves against a lethal foe; it is also
to extend our solidarity to those for whom the threat of theocratic violence
is most acute.
In the closing months of 1993 a range
of thinkers responded, in Foreign Affairs, to Huntington’s essay ‘The
Clash of Civilizations?’, published in the same journal earlier that
year (Huntington 1993). This is from Fouad Ajami’s contribution:
He [Huntington] has underestimated
the tenacity of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these
ways against great odds, always perilously close to the abyss, the darkness
never far. (Ajami 1993)
And this is from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s:
Indubitably, important social,
cultural and political differences exist between Muslim and Judeo-Christian
civilizations. But the most important and explosive differences involving
Muslims are found within the Muslim world - between persons, parties and
governments who are reasonably moderate, nonexpansionist and nonviolent
and those who are anti-modern and anti-Western, extremely intolerant, expansionist
and violent. (Kirkpatrick 1993)
It is to precisely our secular, democratic
and nonviolent allies in the Muslim world whom we must now show our solidarity.
By declaring our allegiance with secularism and the trangressive forces
of modernity we not only find ourselves on the right side of the argument,
but also – we must hope – on the right side of history too. |
|
|
|
For reading and commenting on earlier
drafts of this essay, I am deeply grateful to Howard Davis, Christopher
Hitchens, John Palmoski and Jose Sanchez Ortega.
Notes
[1] See esp. Rashid 2002, pp. 1-11;
and Ahmad 1999a, 1999b, 1999c.
[2] Which is not, of course, to imply
that communism is the moral equivalent of Nazism, nor indeed of reactionary
Islam. As Hitchens, denouncing Amis’s reading of the Soviet experiment
(Amis 2002b), reminds us: ‘Jessica Mitford giving her life to the civil
rights movement in California and Unity Mitford making her innuendoes about
the Jews from her sumptuous villa in Paris did not live their lives in
morally equivalent ways.’ (Hitchens 2002c)
Bibliography
Ahmad, E. (1999a), ‘Roots of the religious
right’, Dawn, January 24.
Ahmad, E. (1999b), ‘Religion in politics’,
Dawn, January 31.
Ahmad, E. (1999c), ‘Profile of the religious
right’, Dawn, March 7.
Ajami, F. (1993), ‘Responses to Samuel
P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’:
The Summoning; ‘But They Said, We Will
Not Hearken.’ JEREMIAH 6:17’,
Foreign Affairs,September/October.
Ali, T. (2001), ‘11 September’, London
Review of Books,
October 4, 23/19: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult01_.html
Amis, M. (1993), Visiting Mrs Nabokov
and Other Excursions. London: Penguin Books.
Amis, M. (2002a), ‘The voice of the
lonely crowd’, The Guardian,
June 1: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,725608,00.html
Amis, M. (2002b), Koba the Dread: Laughter
and the Twenty Million. New York: Talk Miramax Books.
Ascherson, N. (2001), ‘11 September’,
London Review of Books,
October 4, 23/19: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult01_.html
Berman, P. (2003), Terror and Liberalism.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Blackburn, R. (2001), Terror and Empire,
Counterpunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/robin1.html
Bruce, S. (2000), Fundamentalism. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Chomsky, N. (2001a), 9-11. New York:
Seven Stories Press.
Chomsky, N. (2001b), Interview, Radio
B92, Belgrade,
September 18: http://www.b92.net/intervju/eng/2001/0919-chomsky.phtml
Chomsky, N. (2001), ‘Reply to Hitchens’,
The Nation,
October 1: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20011015&s=chomsky20011001
Cockburn, A. (2001), ‘The Price’, New
York Press,
September 26,14/39: http://www.nypress.com/14/39/news&columns/wildjustice.cfm
Cooley, J. (1999), Unholy Wars: Afghanistan,
America and International Terrorism.
London: Pluto Press.
Gellner, E. (1992), Postmodernism, Reason
and Religion. London: Routledge.
Gray, J. (2003), Al Qaeda and What it
Means to be Modern. London: Faber and Faber.
Halliday, F. (2002), Two Hours that
Shook the World: September 11, 2001:
Causes andConsequences. London: Saqi
Books.
Hitchens, C. (1999), No One Left To
Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton.
London: Verso.
Hitchens, C. (2000), Unacknowledged
Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. London: Verso.
Hitchens, C. (2001a), Letters to a Young
Contrarian. Oxford: The Perseus Press.
Hitchens, C. (2001b), ‘Images in a Rearview
Mirror’, The Nation,
December 3: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20011203&s=hitchens
Hitchens, C. (2001c), ‘The pursuit of
happiness is at an end’, London Evening Standard,
September 19.
Hitchens, C. (2001d), ‘Of Sin, the Left
and Islamic Fascism’, The Nation,
September 24: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20011008&s=hitchens20010924
Hitchens, C. (2001e), ‘Against Rationalization’,
The Nation,
October 8: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011008&s=hitchens
Hitchens, C. (2001f), ‘American society
can outlast or absorb practically anything’,
TheIndependent, September 16:
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=94249
Hitchens, C. (2002a), ‘It’s a good time
for war’, The Boston Globe, September 8:
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/09002_hitchens_entire.htm
Hitchens, C. (2002b), ‘Saving Islam
from bin Laden’, The Age,
September 5: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/04/1031115884039.html
Hitchens, C. (2002c), ‘Laying the myth
of Stalin to rest’, London Evening Standard,
September2: http://www.thisislondon.com/entertainment/stayingin/articles/1258613
Hitchens, C. (2003), ‘Holy Writ’, The
Atlantic Monthly,
April: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/04/hitchens.htm
Huntington, S. (1993), ‘The Clash of
Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, Summer.
Huntington, S. (1997), The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
London:Simon and Schuster.
Kepel, G. (1994), The Revenge of God:
The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity
and Judaism in the Modern World,
trans. A. Braley. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Kepel, G. (2002), Jihad: The Trail of
Political Islam, trans. A. F. Roberts. London:I. B. Tauris.
Kirkpatrick, J. (1993), ‘Responses to
Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’:
The Modernizing Imperative; Tradition
and Change’, Foreign Affairs, September/October.
Lewis, B. (1973), Islam in History:
Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East. London: Alcove Press.
Lewis, B. (2003), The Crisis of Islam:
Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library.
Miller, J. (1998), Interview with bin
Laden, Frontline,
May: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html
Orwell, G. [1946] (1994), George Orwell:
Essays. London: Penguin Books.
Rashid, A. (2001), Taliban: The Story
of the Afghan Warlords. London: Pan Books.
Rashid, A. (2002), Jihad: The Rise of
Militant Islam in Central Asia.New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.
Riesebrodt, M. (1993), Pious Passion:
The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism
in the UnitedStates and Iran, trans.
D. Reneau. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Sontag, S. (2001), ‘First Reactions’,
The New Yorker,
September 24: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?010924ta_talk_wtc
Vidal, G. (2002), Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace:
How We Got to Be So Hated. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books.
Simon Cottee is a Lecturer in Criminology
and Criminal Justice at the University of Wales, Bangor:
http://www.bangor.ac.uk/so/staff/cottee.php.en |
|
|
|
TOP
|
|