Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that “the Jews” arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and 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-Qaida’s guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al-Qaida’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, et cetera)? Why all the talk about U.S. 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?
Let’s start calling a spade a spade. 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 Quranic 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 mullah 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 thirty years or so, on 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 FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia 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 really 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 as, 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 which 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?
It is interesting that 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 “hijack” 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 that “Islam has become its own enemy.” A Lebanese writer friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that, in the aftermath of September 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 non-communist socialists used to distance themselves from the tyrannous “actually existing” 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, and 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 in which the terrorists are interested is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned against 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 their countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.
FEBRUARY 2002: ANTI-AMERICANISM
They told us it would be a long, ugly struggle, and so it is. America’s war against terror has entered its second phase, a phase characterized by the storm over the condition, status, and human rights of the prisoners held at Camp X-Ray; by the frustrating failure of the United States to find Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar; and by growing opposition to the continued bombing in Afghanistan. Additionally, if America now attacks other countries suspected of harboring terrorists, it will almost certainly do so alone, without the backing of the coalition that supported the action in Afghanistan. The reason is that America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.
The good news is that these post-Taliban days are bad times for Islamist fanatics. Dead or alive, bin Laden and Omar look like yesterday’s men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves. Also, if the persistent rumors are to be believed, the fall of the terrorist axis in Afghanistan may well have prevented an Islamist coup against Musharraf in Pakistan, led by the more Taliban-like elements in the armed forces and intelligence services—people like the terrifying General Hamid Gul. And President Musharraf, no angel himself, has been pushed into arresting the leaders of the Kashmiri terrorist groups he used to encourage. (It’s just two and a quarter years since he unleashed the same groups against India and engineered the last Kashmir crisis.)
Around the world, the lessons of the American action in Afghanistan are being learned. Jihad is no longer quite as cool an idea as it was last fall. States under suspicion of giving succor to terrorism have suddenly been trying to make nice, even going so far as to round up a few bad guys. Iran has accepted the legitimacy of the new Afghan government. Even Britain, a state that has been more tolerant of Islamist fanaticism than most, is beginning to see the difference between resisting “Islamophobia” and providing a safe haven for some of the worst people in the world.
America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done, and did it well. The bad news, however, is that none of these successes have won friends for the United States. In fact, the effectiveness of the American campaign may paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before. Western critics of America’s Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be not only spineless but wrong at every step: no, U.S. forces weren’t humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn’t massacr
e people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like the hated tyrants they were, even in their southern strongholds; and no, it wasn’t that difficult to get the militants out of their cave fortresses; and yes, the various factions succeeded in putting together a new government that is surprising people by functioning pretty well.
Meanwhile, those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever. As always, anti-U.S. radicalism feeds off the widespread anger over the plight of the Palestinians, and it remains true that nothing would undermine the fanatics’ propaganda more comprehensively than an acceptable settlement in the Middle East. However, even if that settlement were arrived at tomorrow, anti-Americanism would probably not abate. It has become too useful a smoke screen for Muslim nations’ many defects—their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific, and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self-loathing (“we hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves”). What America is accused of—closed-mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance—is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.
Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and, oddly, far more personalized. Muslim countries don’t like America’s power, its “arrogance,” its success; in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted (“Americans care only about their own dead”). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.
It would be easy for America, in the present climate of hostility, to fail to respond to constructive criticism. The treatment of the Camp X-Ray detainees is a case in point. Colin Powell’s reported desire to grant these persons POW status and Geneva Convention rights was a statesmanlike response to global pressure; his apparent failure to persuade President Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld to accept his recommendations is a worrying sign. The Bush administration has come a long way from its treaty-canceling beginnings. It should not retreat from consensus-building now. Great power and great wealth are perhaps never popular. And yet, more than ever, we need the United States to exercise its power and economic might responsibly. This is not the time to ignore the rest of the world and decide to go it alone. To do so would be to risk losing after you’ve won.
MARCH 2002: GOD IN GUJARAT
The defining image of the week is of a small child’s burned and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat. The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies, the massacre of innocents in Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s, and of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them, or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood. I say “our” because I write as an Indian man born and bred, who loves India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India’s strengths, then India’s sins must be mine as well.
Do I sound angry? Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in over a decade, many people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed, or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men’s unwillingness to defend the citizens of India without regard to religion, by saying that these men have feelings too, and are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general.
Meanwhile, India’s political masters have been tut-tutting and offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control. (It has escaped nobody’s notice that the ruling BJP—the Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian People’s Party—and the Hindu extremists of the VHP—the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council—are sister organizations, offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some international commentators, like Britain’s Independent newspaper, urge us to “beware excess pessimism.” The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we’re used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That’s how life is, folks. Most of the time, India is the world’s largest secular democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy-religious steam, we mustn’t let that distort the picture.
Of course there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992, when a VHP mob demolished a four-hundred-year-old Muslim mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some Muslims were ready to give it to them. The murderous attack on the trainload of VHP activists at Godhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the trainload during the Partition riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists’ hands.
The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and insufficient radicalism of the BJP government. Prime Minister Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a coalition government, and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP’s more extreme Hindu-nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together. But it isn’t working anymore. In state elections across the country, the BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP firebrands. Why put up with the government’s betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn’t even result in electoral success?
The electoral failure of the BJP (used by the let’s-not-get-carried-away gang to show that India is turning away from communalist politics) is thus, in all probability, the spark that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque—that’s where the Godhra dead were coming from—and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically, tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee has insisted that the notoriously slow Indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait.
The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to the Indian president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing “too little too late,” and pins the blame firmly on the “motivated, well-planned out and provocative actions” of the Hindu nationalists. However, another writer, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India’s Muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement. The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in her letter demands “stern legal action” against them. But the VHP and its other related organization, the equally sinister RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, or Association of National Volunteers, from which both the BJP and the VHP take inspiration), are determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting them, V. S. Naipaul makes himself a fellow-traveler of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award.
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there’s something beneath it, something we don’t want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, re
ligion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect.” What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we’ve done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India, happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
PART IV
Step Across
This Line
The Tanner Lectures
on Human Values,
Yale, 2002
Part One
The first frontier was the water’s edge, and there was a first moment, because how could there not have been such a moment, when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary, and found that it could breathe. Before that first creature drew that first breath there would have been other moments when other creatures made the same attempt and fell fainting back into the waves, or else suffocated, flopping fishily from side to side, on the same seashore and another, and another. There were perhaps millions of these unrecorded retreats, these anonymous deaths, before the first successful step across the waterline. As we imagine the scene of that triumphant crossing—our volcanic young planet, the smoky, sulfurous air, the hot sea, the red glow in the sky, the exhausted entity gasping on the unfamiliar, inhospitable shore—we can’t help wondering about those proto-creatures. What motivated them? Why did the sea so thoroughly lose its appeal that they risked everything to migrate from the old into the new? What urge was born in them that overpowered even the survival instinct? How did they intuit that air could be breathed—and how, living underwater as they did, could they begin to grow the lungs that allowed them to breathe it?