The terrorist attack on the United States in September will have grave
repercussions over the whole world for years to come. The
purpose behind the attack was to separate America and its allies
from everyone else, and the Muslim world in particular. For the
past decade or so, Muslim extremists have been on the march,
fighting neighbors of other religions wherever they find them:
Hindus in Kashmir, Jews in Israel, Orthodox Russians in Chechnya,
animists and Christians in Africa. In the perspective of the
suicide bombers, Americans are Westerners but also Christians,
therefore the principal legitimate objects of holy war. These
Muslim extremists have been trying to open their version of an
ideological and armed struggle with global implications: Muslims
and as much of the Third World as possible versus democracy.
This ambition is now out in the open.
Put in familiar European terms, this attack is the equivalent of the
German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. The failure of
Britain and France to rise to that occasion led Hitler to the
conclusion that no matter how aggressive he was the democracies
would always prefer appeasement to war. A similar failure now to
rise to
the occasion will place
every democratic country in jeopardy. All manner of changes in
attitudes towards security, asylum, and human rights have to be
envisaged as the open society takes measures to defend itself.
The democracies are not on their own in the coming struggle, but
time and intelligence are needed in order to prepare for what
lies ahead. The Muslim world does not present a unified bloc. On
the contrary, it is split by sectarian and ethnic disputes
as well as by internal power struggles. The extremists represent a
small—though no doubt growing—minority. Destroying everything
before them, they have already provoked civil war in Algeria,
Sudan, and Afghanistan, and they have destabilized Egypt, Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, the Palestine Authority, and not least Pakistan.
The response of these countries’ respective leaders is critical
to American success.
The terrorist attack on America serves as
a last-minute warning
to moderate Muslim leaders to mend their ways and join the
extremists. Backed into such a corner, the Pakistani President
Musharraf has instead dropped the Taliban and sided outright with
America. Egypt, far and away the most influential Arab country,
is dancing on a tightrope because it too has long been under
continuous threat from its extremists. Muammar Qaddafi in
Libya and General Omar Bashir in Sudan have similarly decided
that they have more to fear from their extremists than from the
United States. About a dozen terror groups have bases in or
around Damascus, but the young president Bashar Assad may not
necessarily protect them. In one of the customary internal
power struggles of the Muslim world, Iran is suspicious of
the Taliban, and for the first time in years at least some of its leaders are not
preaching “Death to America” in the mosques. A wise America will
hold a heavy stick behind its back and in its hand as enticing a
bunch of carrots as possible, including remission of debt, trade
advantages, and political support against extremists. This is,
essentially, a hearts and minds operation.
A fantasy is loose in the world, the fantasy
of an Islamic
supremacy that is destined to triumph everywhere. Some of its
advocates claim that eventually Christian countries will become
Muslim, in what would amount to a reverse colonialism. Like
Communism before it, this Islamic extremism aims to impose its
vision on others and call it universal peace. Here, in an
unexpected form, is another totalitarian movement. Like
all such movements, it does not hesitate to use violence. True
believers in each and every totalitarianism always take their
stand on the specious and murderous grounds that the ends justify
the means.
The huge majority of Muslims understand only too clearly that the
extremists do not speak in their name but are likely to unleash
Armageddon on all, and they view this with horror. The escape of
so many millions of refugees from Afghanistan, for instance, is a
public vote of no-confidence in the Taliban. For some, even
unknown Nauru—
the world’s smallest independant republic—
is evidently preferable to home. Untold millions
of Muslims long to emigrate to the West, whose freedom and
prosperity are the stuff of their dreams.
Needless to say, this Islamic fantasy has nothing to do with
Islam proper, a religion like all other great religions, with a
genuine vision of justice and equality at its core. Indeed, the
damage that the Islamic triumphalist fantasy does to Islam as well as
Muslim countries and peoples is at least as severe and dangerous
as the damage it does to democracy. The same was true about other
totalitarianisms: Nazism utterly ruined Germany, Communism
utterly ruined Russia.
To judge by their reported conduct, the recent suicide bombers
were living in an atmosphere that had nothing to do with Islam.
According to Islamic teaching, whoever commits suicide is condemned to
hell. Their central purpose, then, was contrary to their
religion. They had shaved off their beards, they spent time in
bars, they became drunk, they frequented strip clubs. They
carried rolls of hundred dollar bills and spent them
ostentatiously.
We may
suppose that at some level, consciously or unconsciously, they
were enjoying the America they were planning to destroy. For it
is here, in a most complex relationship
of attraction and
repulsion, that we must begin to understand the motivations of the
terrorists, and so frame our responses.
Each man kills the thing he loves, in the famous words of Oscar
Wilde. Premeditated killing of unknown people in an act that
simultaneously kills oneself requires a life-denying hate so
exceptional that it is in a realm of fanaticism all its own.
Such hate signifies a total human failure. This corresponds to
the turmoil of the Muslim world today. Each and every Muslim
country faces intractable problems of demography, lack of
resources and skills, ethnic and religious strife, and selfish
government; each and every Muslim suffers from this jumble of
assorted ills.
As if that were not enough, Muslim extremists and even some
moderates have come to believe that everything wrong with their
world is the fault of the Jews. This is partly a relic from the
tribal past, and partly another mistaken interpretation of the
present. They think in a sort of syllogism. Jews are wicked by
definition. America helps Jews. Therefore America is wicked.
And yet another false syllogism: Saddam Hussein is an Arab,
America wishes to remove Saddam Hussein,
therefore America persecutes Arabs.
Years will have to pass before the extremists grasp that the
humane and democratic values that unite Israel and America serve
no conspiratorial anti-Islamic purposes. But that is the context
in which America must now operate.
The causes of today’s turmoil go deep into the roots of history.
The major intellectual developments of the West—the Renaissance
with its concept of humanism and the Age of Enlightenment during which
scientific principles by and large replaced religious dogma—passed the Muslim world by. Muslims everywhere were in the grip
of the absolute system of one-man despotism that they had
inherited from their forebears and that they believed protected
their religion and identity. Western energy and creativity of
which they were unaware duly overwhelmed them, and they could do
nothing about it. There were Muslim rulers who resisted, and
their names have entered Muslim and Western lore alike: Emir Abdel
Kader in Algeria, Shamyl in the Caucasus, the Mahdi with his
Sudanese dervishes, the so-called Mad Mullah of Berbera.
A nineteenth-century Muslim philosopher, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani,
spoke for all such. He did not hesitate to stigmatize Muslims as
backward. He swung between extreme self-pity about their common
plight and ferocious insistence that the remedy lay in violence.
Putting his finger on what he thought was the crux of the matter,
he wrote, “It is amazing that it was precisely the Christians who
invented Krupp’s cannons and the machine gun before the Muslims.”
The analysis was false; stemming from science, improved weaponry
carried no religious connotation. But al-Afghani succeeded in
imprinting throughout the Muslim world a sense of inferiority to
the West. The Muslim masses, otherwise proud people, came to see
the West as an entity deliberately out to shame and humiliate
them. Today’s Islamic fantasy springs from this mindset in which
self-pity and revenge go hand in hand.
Two alternatives were open to Muslims in practice. One was to
retreat into the fortress of Muslim identity and reject the West.
Numberless groups and organizations have chosen that course, from
the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hizballah
today, as well as the Taliban and their proxy, Osama bin Laden.
They see themselves engaged in a war on two fronts, against the
West and against opponents who are fellow Muslims. They live out
the triumphalist fantasy.
The other alternative was to seek to discover the source of
European energy and mastery. In every colonized Muslim country
leaders believed that nationalism was the great western secret,
and accordingly they formed nationalist movements, and
ultimately nationalist states. Islamic extremists and
nationalists shared a common need to acquire European weapons.
Either way, in order for Muslims to recover their pride, a test
of strength with the Europeans was built into the future.
After the Second World War, the colonial powers no longer had
interests in the Middle East that they deemed worth a real test
of strength, and they retreated. The encounter so far between
Muslims and the West had been a profound movement of history with
pluses and minuses for both sides. But at least the end of
colonialism seemed to absolve Muslims, and in particular Arabs,
from the sense of shame tormenting them.
For fifty years and more, the Muslim world has been independent,
free to organize as it wishes, and, moreover, several Muslim
countries are beneficiaries of a petrodollar bonanza, which they
can dispose
of for any end they like. Throughout this period
Muslim and Arab rulers have plumped for the outward signs of
Western life, such as high-rise buildings, hospitals,
and colleges. They have imported modernity as though it were a
commodity like any other. But once again, in an incomplete and
misleading analysis of the position, they did not recognize that
the true source of Western strength lay in a democratic political
system that liberated people’s energies and had nothing to do
with nationalism.
Instead, the leaders of nationalist movements lost no time in
promoting themselves absolute one-man rulers of their own
countries. Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt was the model for them all.
The result has been a present-day mimicry of the historic
despotisms of the past. Nothing like democracy exists in the
Muslim world, where Turkey alone has ever experienced a change of
government through a free and unrigged election, and there only
once. Parliaments exist to rubberstamp the ruler’s decrees.
There is no freedom of speech or of assembly, no civil rights,
but only the dreaded secret police, prisons, torture, and
execution. The injustice is flagrant. Corruption is everywhere.
Excluded from any say, the masses still have no control over
their destiny, but they are able to protest only through a riot.
Power changes hands by assassination or
coup. In the absence of mechanisms for power-sharing and
mediation, every national and international conflict of interest
degenerates into a test of strength.
Muslims and Arabs have nobody to blame but themselves for so
disastrous a social and political failure. There are
intellectuals who point this out, but they are few. It is far
more comforting to displace the blame on to others. At the very
end of 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini carefully staged a coup in Iran
and seized power from the shah. In a large and potentially rich
country, he was able to bring up-to-date al-Afghani’s expressions of
self-pity and revenge.
Muslims, the ayatollah held, were weak because the West had
deliberately made them so. It was another self-serving falsehood.
In reality the West displays a yawning indifference to all
manifestations of religion, but the ayatollah crystallized the
contemporary Islamic fantasy that the West is actually out to
destroy Islam. In response, Muslims had the duty to unite
against the West and all its works, especially in its most
salient incarnation, America, dubbed the Great Satan. He advised
Mikhail Gorbachev to show the way by converting to Islam.
Nationalist rulers, Saddam Hussein for instance, had to be
obliged to subscribe to his fantasy, if need be by war to the
death.
Muslims everywhere, rich and poor, educated men like Osama bin
Laden and illiterate youths, have eagerly absorbed Khomeini’s
prescriptions and formed an archipelago of conspiratorial groups
in half the countries of the world, often clandestinely linked in
a manner reminiscent of former Communist cells, volunteering to
right the wrongs they believe to have been done to them, and to
establish an Islamic utopia. Many of them take advantage of Western
medicine, technology, and education, depending on these benefits that they are unable to provide for themselves. The
contradiction powers the grievance, impotence, and hate of
their fantasy.
The suicide bombers have at last engaged the United States in a
test of strength according to their standards. Muslim—and
especially Arab—one-man rulers will be watching for signs that
the United States understands the stakes and has the resolve to act
as it should. If they detect weakness in Washington, they will
have no choice but to pay lip-service to the Islamic fantasy and
at least pretend to join the ideological war against the West.
Anything less leaves them at the mercy of assassination or a coup
undertaken by extremists. American strength and determination to see this
through, however, will encourage them to join the
coalition of Western allies. As was exactly the case in forming
the earlier coalition to fight the Gulf War against Saddam
Hussein, they and others in their position must be sure to end on
the winning side.
For the present, we do not know whether the suicide bombers had
ultimate sponsorship from a Muslim or Arab state. Any such state
must also be brought to account, if necessary by an outright
invasion that leads to a change of regime. This is a just war
if ever there was one, in defence of life and liberty against an
ideological enemy. If the United States and its allies were to
retreat from the test of strength imposed on them, or botch it
somehow through inadequate preparation or loss of will, then the
extremists will conclude that they have the West on the run. They
will strive on for victory. Who can guess how far hate and killing will
then spread, or how destructive it will prove for mankind.
