Communalism Combat
THE VIEW FROM ISLAMABAD
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Samuel Huntington's evil desire for a
clash between civilizations may well come true after Tuesday's
terror attacks. The crack that divided Muslims everywhere from the
rest of the world is no longer a crack. It is a gulf that, if not
bridged, will surely destroy both.
For much of the world, it was the
indescribable savagery of seeing jet-loads of innocent human
beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human
beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people jump from the
80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than be
consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims
also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less
sharply. The heads of state of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein
excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in
the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made
impassioned denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish
between ordinary
Muslims and extremists.
But the pretence that reality goes no
further must be abandoned because this merely obfuscates facts and
slows down the search for solutions. One would like to dismiss
televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as
unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political
immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.
Similarly, Pakistan Television,
operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to
portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too,
the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my
university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in
the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that
crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had
cheered as the WTC
came crashing down. It makes one feel
sick from inside.
A bizarre new world awaits us, where
old rules of social and political behavior have broken down and
new ones are yet to defined. Catapulted into a situation of
darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events, as
rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that
is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and
practicality. This requires beginning
with a clearly defined moral supposition - the fundamental
equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must
proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of
which is not interchangeable.
Before all else, Black Tuesday's mass
murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without
qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that
may even remotely be used to justify it, and without regard for
the national identity of the victims or the perpetrators. The
demented, suicidical, fury of the attackers led to heinous acts of
indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the world
for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal
condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the
language by which people can communicate.
Analysis comes second, but it is just
as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely
to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their
supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by
something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings
capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened,
fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What
was that?
Tragically, CNN and the US media have
so far made little attempt to understand this affliction. The cost
for this omission, if it is to stay this way, cannot be anything
but terrible. What we have seen is probably the first of similar
tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as the century
of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism" and
billions are likely to be poured into surveillance,
fortifications, and
emergency plans, not to mention the
ridiculous idea of missile defence systems. But, as a handful of
suicide bombers armed with no more than knives and box-cutters
have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all this means
precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be
protected - a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a
building or two, but all of Manhattan.
Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of
survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.
Only a fool can believe that the
services of a suicidical terrorist can be purchased, or that they
can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their breeding grounds are
in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned
by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower, indifferent
to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their tormentors,
has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme arrogance,
indifferent to world opinion, the US
openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the
Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence
over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and
the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon
of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought
out the worst that humans are capable of. In the words of Robert
Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated
population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of
a doomed people".
It is stupid and cruel to derive
satisfaction from such revenge, or from the indisputable fact that
Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIAs misadventures in
Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we, the
inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be
learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade
Centre?
If the lesson is that America needs to
assert its military might, then the future will be as grim as can
be. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell, has promised "more than a
single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what end? No one
doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash carnage.
But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring
peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist
attack.
This not an argument for inaction:
Osama and his gang, as well as other such gangs, if they can be
found, must be brought to justice. But indiscriminate slaughter
can do nothing except add fuel to existing hatreds. Today, the US
is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan will cause it
to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its
favour the world over. Instead, it
will create nothing but revulsion and promote never-ending
tit-for-tat killings.
Ultimately, the security of the United
States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world,
especially with those that it has grieviously harmed. As a great
country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the
life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of
humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect
international
treaties such as those on greenhouse
gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War
by pushing through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the
aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalization.
But it is not only the US that needs
to learn new modes of behaviour. There are important lessons for
Muslims too, particularly those living in the US, Canada, and
Europe. Last year I heard the arch-conservative head of Pakistan's
Jamat-i-Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before an
American audience in Washington with high praise for
a "pluralist society where I can wear
the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach my religion".
Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious minorities in
Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries.
One hopes that the misplaced anger
against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms are not
curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question
as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does
not, whose responsibility it will be. The problem is that
immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large, chosen isolation
over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally
unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and
makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious
ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is
perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile
feelings. This is not an
argument for doing away with one's
Muslim identity. But, without closer interaction with the
mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all, survival of
the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference
between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from
within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the
Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are
fair
game because of bad US government
policies has no business being there.
To echo George W. Bush, "let there be
no mistake". But here the mistake will be to let the heart rule
the head in the aftermath of utter horror, to bomb a helpless
Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone Age, or to
take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in
deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to
hand over charge to the cerebellum.
Else, survival of this particular species is far from guaranteed.
(The author is professor of physics at
Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad).