MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-11-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] Salman Rushdie
|
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02RUSH.html
Yes, This Is About Islam
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
Published: November 2, 2001
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?
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.
Salman Rushdie is the author, most recently, of "Fury: A Novel."
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