NOT PC BUT - Islam is at the heart of this

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News - Homefront Preparations : One Thread

It may not be PC to say but Islam is at the heart of this

America needs to examine its role but so must the Muslim world

Hugo Young Tuesday October 9, 2001 The Guardian

The two myths about this war are that it is not about America and not about Islam. Political correctness allows no other analysis. And the war, it's true, is about more than those totemic powers. America is not the only society threatened by world terrorism. Muslims are not inevitable enemies of the world America dominates. So we must take care not to generalise crudely. But we also need to face squarely the fact that traits embodied by America and Islam are what have brought the world to its gravest crisis since Moscow put missiles into Cuba 40 years ago. Otherwise, the bleak future will become darker still.

Tony Blair has taken the lead in insisting on both these negative assertions. Four weeks ago he declared that the assaults on New York and Washington attacked not America but all democracies. It's been his mantra, and that of others, ever since. On Sunday, after our own attacks began, he expressed much impatience with the regular usage that ascribes the New York atrocity to "Islamic terrorists". It's understandable that he and President Bush should do this. They want to define the nature of the struggle: broadening it to enlist the whole civilised world, narrowing it against a terroristic fraction that merely happens to be Islamic. If people can believe this, it will assist the task, as elementary as it is difficult, of reassuring other Muslim countries, reinforcing their assistance, preventing them being blackened by Osama bin Laden, and stiffening their stomachs against many domestic enemies.

It's a necessary expedient, but an insufficient argument. It obscures the truth behind useful fictions of the moment. It is not helpful, if we're interested in picking up the pieces, doing better than before, taming the enmities that threaten to tear apart the world with a ferocity and ignorance that may be more pervasive than we have ever seen.

In a sense, Islam is at the heart of what is happening. When commentators muse about the evils of religious fundamentalism, in the modern context there's only one religion they can be talking about. That doesn't mean, in any way, that all Muslims are to blame. But the September terrorists who left messages and testaments described their actions as being in the name of Allah. They made this their explicit appeal and defence. Bin Laden himself, no longer disclaiming culpability for their actions, clothes their murders and their suicides in religious glory. A version of Islam - not typical, a minority fragment, but undeniably Islamic - endorses the foaming hatred for America that uniquely emanates, with supplementary texts, from a variety of mullahs.

"Many Muslims seem to be in deep denial about what has happened," Imam Hamza Yusuf, the noted Islamic teacher, told the Guardian yesterday. "Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and a rhetoric of rage." It has bred terrorists with a cause endorsed by misbegotten theology, quite different, for ex ample, from the Irish or the Basques. To pretend that this is mere criminality is deception on a grand scale. It denies the need for self-examination. The ambiguities and contending loyalties of Muslim leaders in the west, even the most decent and reasonable of them, take cover under the pretence that Islam is not at the heart of what has happened.

Nothing justifies what happened. It had no defence. It was a holocaustic obscenity. But in any analysis seeking for what better might happen in the future, the deformity of Islam has its counterpart. The atrocity was not a random flailing. It challenged the US as the largest, most powerful country in the world. The US may be leader of a collective system, the system of democracy, in which many countries have the good fortune to be numbered. But the US is first among unequals, and is asked a question about how it has handled that power and privilege for many years.

The challenge may be prompted by American domination. That is unalterable. The more telling Muslim claim is against American insensitivity, Washington's disposal of its assets and blind indifference to the disposition of its power. Sensitivity to the meaning of power ought to be the key to America's global identity. But such an impulse has tended to be lacking. America would like to be benign, and Americans see themselves that way. But, deprived of the matrix of Cold War thinking, America has not troubled to learn enough about the shape of the world. A slash-and-burn diplomatic mentality left Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban after the Soviets had been kicked out. Sectarian bias cossets Israel's refusal to make a reasonable settlement with Palestine, no matter what damage this does to the wider world. America's mono-cultural incomprehension has produced a deep unawareness of the case for offsetting her economic power with an ever-vigilant political wisdom.

I t now seems to be recognised that this has to change. The planes are delivering not only bombs but food parcels to Afghanistan. It will be the first war where soldiers and saints purport to walk hand in hand. Belatedly, Americans understand they have a desperate need to engage with the Muslim world at all levels. Perhaps they should start some Persian, or even Pashtu, broadcasting for the first time. The world, they dimly apprehend, needs more than missiles to make it love America. At the very minimum, taking copious action against the destitution in which Afghans live would be more than humanitarian generosity. It's the biggest plank available to rebuild a national reputation which, one must painfully ad mit, has contributed much to the unregenerate hatred directed against it.

How the war will end is not possible to say. Our leaders give us not a single ground for optimism. They say it must go on and on. Their immediate aim, the elimination of Bin Laden, looks as elusive as their ultimate aim, the end of all world terrorism. Both are desirable, both perhaps unreal. The work has to be started. Bush and Blair had no choice. But, more than any other military engagement in the last 20 years, it defies confident explanation. The commentator is accustomed to making rational sense of things, pointing the way towards an outcome, admitting the reader to the mind of political leaders who know what they are doing. This time these leaders can be by no means sure. They know what they want, but have little idea how far or long they, or we, will have to go to get it.

Meanwhile, let's be clear about this one aspect. Though the danger is universal, the failings that provoked it are particular. The unforgivable act against humanity sprang from a version of Islam that only Islam can set about repudiating, so that among people of goodwill there can be no shred of misunderstanding. On the other hand, the context in which it happened, the target it was aimed at, is the residue of a history that America needs to recognise. Such truths are the start of making a better world hereafter - if the hereafter ever comes.

-- Anonymous, October 09, 2001


Moderation questions? read the FAQ