> 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?
> 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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