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Posted
on 04-Nov-01 03:57 PM
Fighting the Forces of Invisibility
By Salman Rushdie
Tuesday, October 2, 2001; Page A25
NEW YORK -- In January 2000 I wrote in a newspaper column that "the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security," and fretted that to live by the security experts' worst-case scenarios might be to surrender too many of our liberties to the invisible shadow-warriors of the secret world. Democracy requires visibility, I argued, and in the struggle between security and freedom we must always err on the side of freedom. On Tuesday, Sept. 11, however, the worst-case scenario came true.
They broke our city. I'm among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt its wounds deeply, because New York is the beating heart of the visible world, tough-talking, spirit-dazzling, Walt Whitman's "city of orgies, walks and joys," his "proud and passionate city -- mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!" To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it. Now we must ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful deeds.
In making free societies safe -- safer -- from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. But in return for freedom's partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West's response to the Sept. 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost, and must regain.
Next: the question of the counterattack. Yes, we must send our shadow-warriors against theirs, and hope that ours prevail. But this secret war alone cannot bring victory. We will also need a public, political and diplomatic offensive whose aim must be the early resolution of some of the world's thorniest problems: above all the battle between Israel and the Palestinian people for space, dignity, recognition and survival. Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters' misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It's time to stop making enemies and start making friends.
To say this is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists' attacks on the United States. "The problem with Americans is . . . " -- "What America needs to understand . . . " There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country which has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens' deaths. ("Did we deserve this, sir?" a bewildered worker at "ground zero" asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that "sir" quite astonishing.)
Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it.
The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims. (Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.) United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the above list -- yes, even the short skirts and dancing -- are worth dying for?
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.
How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.
Salman Rushdie is a British novelist and essayist.
Distributed by NYT Special Features
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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Posted
on 04-Nov-01 04:00 PM
Yes, This Is About Islam
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
LONDON -- "This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been
repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of
deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West,
partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against
terror it can't afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any
way related.
The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If
this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in
support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed
with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier,
answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British
casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?
Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that
"the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban
leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological
know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why
does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand
to be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a
deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own
spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in
the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the
talk about American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of
Saudi Arabia if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the
heart of the present discontents?
Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that
mean? After all, most religious belief isn't very theological. Most
Muslims are not profound Koranic analysts. For a vast number of
"believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way,
not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one
suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and
prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or
near-sequestration of "their" women; the sermons delivered by their
mullahs of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as
it is with music, godlessness and sex; and a more particularized
loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate
surroundings could be taken over — "Westoxicated" — by the
liberal Western-style way of life.
Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of
Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or
so in growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief."
These Islamists — we must get used to this word, "Islamists,"
meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to
distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral "Muslim"
— include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked
combatants of the Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in
Algeria, the Shiite revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is
their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This
paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of
Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those
societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest
growing version of Islam in the world.
This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists'
project is turned not only against the West and "the Jews," but also
against their fellow Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's
little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions
between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those
nations' resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to
deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with
widespread appeal.
Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a
fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to
blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United
States. Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room
here to rehearse the geopolitics of the cold war and America's
frequently damaging foreign policy "tilts," to use the Kissinger term,
toward (or away from) this or that temporarily useful (or
disapproved-of) nation-state, or America's role in the installation and
deposition of sundry unsavory leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to
ask a question that is no less important now: Suppose we say that the
ills of our societies are not primarily America's fault, that we are to
blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we
not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to
learn to solve them for ourselves?
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Posted
on 04-Nov-01 04:01 PM
continued from above....
Many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the Muslim
world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim
voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist hijacking of
their religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a k a Cat
Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today's pussycats.
An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is
in us, is from us." A British Muslim writes, "Islam has become its own
enemy." A Lebanese friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that in the
aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, public criticism of Islamism has
become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need
for a Reformation in the Muslim world.
I'm reminded of the way noncommunist socialists used to distance
themselves from the tyrannical socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless,
the first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If
Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be
encouraged until they swell into a roar. Many of them speak of another
Islam, their personal, private faith.
The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its
depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in
order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the
terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned
on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must
take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is
based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant
dream.
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 04-Nov-01 04:32 PM
Rushdie's recent article (it is about Islam, stupid!) is a surprisingly(oh, not so)
fresh, straight and outspoken article, that gained currency in international press,
and is an expression of truth that he masters in expressing.
After some continuous shallow comments of Friedman, NYTimes gave its readers an
stellar article by a literary icon that will surely help it preserve its edge over other
papers. I am tired of hearing the same old argument of Bush and his officers being
repeated in all these supposedly free media also.
I mean, come on, let's say it clearly, vocally and emphatically, the most
prominently emerging brand of Islam is represented by Al-Qaida and its devillish
leader Osama, and that is the Islam most of the followers have pursued in Arab,
and probably even in Nepal. Unless we attack them, and unless we attack them
directly at their root without quibbling, we won't be able to eradicate this evil.
Great job, Rushdie.
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