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Making the World Safe for Terrorism
Nuh Ha Mim Keller -
Sunday 30 September
In
the Name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate
By what
one can gather from the press,
the FBI and CIA have seemingly been unable to prove who precisely,
if anyone, may have masterminded the
attack earlier this month on the World Trade Center other than the
immediate assailants, who are presumed to have been several young
men from Saudi Arabia and one from the United Arab Emirates.
Whoever they were, the facts point to a number
of inescapable conclusions. The planning of it argues for a
method to the madness, coupled with at least normal intelligence
and a technical education, while the psychological facts entail
that such people do not destroy themselves unless they see some
advantage for themselves in doing so, which entails that they
believed in an afterlife, meaning that according to their own
standards, they were in all probability “religious.” The question
arises: “What sort of religion condones killing thousands of
ordinary civilian people?” The answer is “No religion at all.”
As far as I
know, there is no religion or system of morality that justifies
deliberately killing or injuring someone unless (1) he is an
aggressor seeking to take one’s life, against whom one may defend
oneself; (2) he has been proven to be guilty of a capital crime,
or (3) he is a combatant in war. Most ethical systems agree upon
these three justifications for deliberately inflicting death or
injury upon someone. The World Trade Center tragedy raises the
question of what on earth may have made some contemporary people
think that these principles may be set aside?
If there
are altogether no moral reasons for this crime, there is perhaps a
discoverable mentality behind it. We call it “terrorism,” in view
of its typical motive, which is to strike terror into the hearts
of those conceived to be guilty by committing atrocities against
those of the innocent who resemble the guilty closely enough,
whether in race, citizenship, or social class, for the terror not
to be lost on the guilty. But its enormity as a crime, as I
apprehend it, lies less in the motive of its perpetrators, which
is bad enough, than in the fact that shedding innocent blood is
wrong. All previous moralities and religions agree that one cannot
kill the innocent, but only the guilty. One cannot, for example,
kill a generic “American” for the actions of other Americans, or
for the actions of his country’s army if he is not part of it, or
for the foreign policy of his government. In general, moral law
mandates that one may not kill a man for what another man has
done.
How has
this now come to be set aside in some minds? While I am not a
specialist in the history of atrocities, it seems to me that this
basic principle of morality was first violated, and on a grand
scale—and with the tacit and the spoken support of the
intelligentsia, press, and policy makers—in the Second World War,
with the advent of “carpet-bombing.” Here, ineffective attempts at
precision bombing of military targets and factories gave way first
to incendiary bombing of particular German cities to burn them
down, then to “area bombing” of as much urban acreage as possible.
Bombing everything—soldiers and civilians, combatants and
non-combatants, residential areas and strategic targets—would
shorten the war; so the bombs rolled out, and eliminating
civilians became itself a major
strategic aim. In Cologne, in Hamburg, in Dresden: the numbers of
the dead were unprecedented and horrendous. In Dresden, where
there were no war industries at all, some 130,000 were killed.
Perhaps the ultimate “area bombing” (there is little reason not to
call it “terror bombing”) was the atomic bomb dropped on the old
Japanese provincial city of Hiroshima, and later on Nagasaki. Men,
women, babies, schoolgirls: the first instantaneous flash of
atomic radiation burned their clothes off them and cooked the
outside of their bodies, then the concussion blew it off so that
it hung down in flapping strips seen by those who survived when
they looked at each other. One can read the eyewitness accounts.
We were showing them what would happen if we dropped one on Tokyo.
They got the picture.
My point is
that a mentality has been given birth in this century, and the
attempts by its beneficiaries to draw some legitimacy for it from
existing morality or religion, if understandable at a
psychological level, have nothing to do with morality or religion.
This kind of terrorism is going on today, indeed has been carried
out by American presidents and their proxies in Nicaragua, in
Sudan, in Lebanon, and in Iraq for the last twenty years, as
described by Noam Chomsky, Edward
Said, and others whose books and articles about these events are
many and well-documented, and blithely ignored by almost everyone
in America.
The little
bands of bomb makers and plane hijackers are not at bottom
religious men, but desperate men. They are inspired less by
religion than by hope that on a symbolic scale they can somehow
emulate the “success” of America’s and Israel’s “punitive
strikes,” and “preemptive attacks.” Civilians die all the time in
the West Bank and in Iraq. Someone in Jordan told me of a relative
from another country who needed a kidney and could not find a
donor of suitable blood group from his extended family, so he went
to Iraq and bought one for two thousand dollars. The donor did not
have food to eat, and was willing to sell his kidney. People are
starving there. Birth defects and cancer are burgeoning from all
the chemicals and explosives that have that been dropped on the
people. Bombs are dropped from time to time to show them who
is boss. According to Chomsky we have
by now succeeded in killing one million civilians in Iraq, one
half of whom were small children. The
United States continually vetoes the United Nations initiative to
allow UN observers into Israel to see what is being done to
Palestinians there. In 1998 Clinton destroyed one half of Sudan’s
pharmaceuticals and the means of replenishing them in punitive
bombing raids on that country and killed untold numbers of
civilians. How many? We don’t know, because the United States
prevented the UN inquiry. Eighty percent of the refugees of the
world bear Muslim last names. Desperation grows among these
throngs, as hope wanes for a balanced U.S. foreign policy, or even
an abatement of U.S. bombing and violence against Muslim civilian
populations. There is no hope for people who know from the example
of Nicaragua, Sudan, Iraq, and Israel that any attempt of redress
or appeal to the United Nations or World Court will be vetoed or
defied by the attackers. People without hope do a lot of things.
Someone
recently informed me that half the terrorist organizations
officially listed on some or another “terrorist watch website,”
were Muslim. Though Islamic law does not countenance terrorism or
suicide of any sort, and I know these organizations represent an
extreme splinter of an extreme splinter of Islam, I did not find
the statistic particularly shocking. Rather, if in the last fifty
years world governments like the United States and Britain have
somehow convinced themselves that it is morally acceptable to
kill, starve, and maim civilians of other countries in order to
persuade their governments to do something, it would be surprising
if this conviction did not somehow percolate down to the
dispossessed, the hopeless, the aggrieved, and the powerless of
every religion and ethnic group in the world. It looks as if it
has.
We
Americans are not bombing people, young and old, whose lives, when
they survive, are brutally interrupted by the loss of an arm or a
leg, or a father, or a son, or a mother, or a house that the
family saved for years to build. We are too civilized for that.
Rather, we bomb Iraq. We bomb Sudan. We bomb Southern Lebanon. We
bomb “Palestinian positions.” We don’t cause the tens of thousands
of birth defective and mentally retarded babies with the chemical
mayhem and ten-year famine we are currently paying for in Iraq: We
are “imposing sanctions.” We don’t kill actual human beings with
all the explosives we are dumping on these countries. We are
killing generic Iraqis, generic Sudanis,
generic Palestinians. It sounds like we
may now have to kill some generic Afghanis. And now the shock of
all shocks, the devastation of all devastations: some crazy people
this past month decided to kill a lot of generic Americans. What
on earth made them think it was morally acceptable to kill people
who hadn’t committed any crime, who were not combatants, and were
not killed in self-defense?
The answer,
I apprehend, is not to be found in Islam, or in any religion or
morality, but in the fact that there are fashions in atrocities
and in the rhetoric used to dress them up. Unfortunately these
begin to look increasingly like our own fashions and sound
increasingly like our own rhetoric, reheated and served up to us.
The terrorists themselves, in their own minds, were doubtless not
killing secretaries, janitors, and firemen. That would be too
obscene. Rather, they were “attacking America.”
The attack
has been condemned, as President Bush has noted, by “Muslim
scholars and clerics” across the board, and indeed by all people
of decency around the world. I have read Islamic law with
scholars, and know that it does not condone either suicide or
killing non-combatants. But what to do about
the crime itself?
The
solution being proposed seems to be a technological one. We will
highlight these people on our screens, and press delete. If we
cannot find the precise people, we will delete others like them,
until everyone else gets the message. We’ve done it lots of times.
The problem with this is that it is morally wrong, and will send a
clear confirmation—if more is needed beyond the shoot-em-ups
abroad of the last decades that show our more or less complete
disdain for both non-white human life and international law—that
there is no law between us and other nations besides the law of
the jungle. People like these attackers, willing to kill
themselves to devastate others, are not ordinary people. They are
desperate people. What has made them so is not lunacy, or
religion, but the perception that there is no effective legal
recourse to stop crimes against the civilian peoples they identify
with. Our own and our clients’ killing, mutilating, and starving
civilians are termed “strikes,” “preemptive attacks,” “raiding the
frontiers,” and “sanctions”—because we have a standing army, print
our own currency, and have a press establishment and other
trappings of modern statehood. Without them, our actions would be
pure “terrorism.”
Two wrongs
do not make a right. They only make two wrongs. I think the whole
moral discourse has been derailed by our own rhetoric in recent
decades. Terrorism must be repudiated by America not only by words
but by actions, beginning with its own. As ‘Abd
al-Hakim Winter asks, “Are the architects of policy sane in their
certainty that America can enrage large numbers of people, but
contain that rage forever through satellite technology and
intrepid double agents?” I think we have to get back to basics and
start acting as if we knew that killing civilians is wrong.
As it is,
we seem to have convinced a lot of other people that it is right,
among them some of the more extreme elements of the contemporary
Wahhabi sect of Muslims, including the
members of the Bin Laden network, whom the security agencies seem
to be pointing their finger at for this crime. The
Wahhabi sect, which has not been
around for more than two and a half centuries, has never been part
of traditional Sunni Islam, which rejects it and which it rejects.
Orthodox Sunnis, who make up the vast majority of Muslims, are
neither Wahhabis nor terrorists, for
the traditional law they follow forbids killing civilian
non-combatants to make any kind of point, political or otherwise.
Those who have travelled through North
Africa, Turkey, Egypt, or the Levant know what traditional Muslims
are like in their own lands. Travellers
find them decent, helpful, and hospitable people, and feel safer
in Muslim lands than in many places, such as Central America, for
example, or for that matter, Central Park.
On the
other hand, there will always be publicists who hate Muslims, and
who for ideological or religious reasons want others to do so.
Where there is an ill-will, there is a way. A fifth of humanity
are Muslims, and if to err is human, we
may reasonably expect Muslims to err also, and it is certainly
possible to stir up hatred by publicizing bad examples. But if
experience is any indication, the only people convinced by media
pieces about the inherent fanaticism of Muslims will be those who
don’t know any. Muslims have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing
to hide, and should simply tell people what their scholars and
religious leaders have always said: first, that the
Wahhabi sect has nothing to do with
orthodox Islam, for its lack of tolerance is a perversion of
traditional values; and second, that killing civilians is wrong
and immoral.
And we
Americans should take the necessary measures to get the ship of
state back on a course that is credible, fair,
and at bottom at least moral in our dealings with the other
peoples of the world. For if our ideas of how to get along with
other nations do not exceed the morality of action-thriller
destruction movies, we may well get more action than we paid for.
About
Shaikh
Nuh Ha Mim Keller
Nuh Ha Mim Keller, American Muslim translator and specialist in
Islamic Law. Born in 1954 in the north-western United States, was
educated in philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago and
UCLA. He entered Islam in 1977 at al-Azhar in Cairo, and later
studied the traditional Islamic Sciences of hadith, Shafi'i and
Hanafi jurisprudence, legal methodology (usul al-fiqh), and
tenets of faith (`aqidah) in Syria and Jordan, where he has
lived since 1980. His English translation of `Umdat al-Salik
[The
Reliance of the Traveller] (1250 pp., Sunna Books,
1991) is the first Islamic legal work in a European language to
receive the certification of al-Azhar, the Muslim world's oldest
institution of higher learning. He also possesses ijazas
or "certifiates of authorisation" in Islamic jurisprudence from
sheikhs in Syria and Jordan.
His Other translations and works include:
Al-Maqasid: Imam
Nawawi's Manual of Islam; The Sunni Path: A Handbook of Islamic
Belief; and Tariqa Notes (handbook for those on the
Shadhilli path of tasawwuf). He is currently translating Imam
Nawawi's Kitab al-Adhkar [The Book of Rememberance of
Allah], a compendium of some 1227 hadiths on prayers and dhikrs
of the prophetic sunna. He is also completing a work on the issue
of the Qibla which will be available soon.