Yes, This Is About Islam
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=L"}
ONDON -- "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."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02RUSH.html?ex=1
006444528&ei=1&en=b8a931974b12cb95
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