[Nettime-bold] Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan - by Kanan Makiya, The Observer,Oct 7

[Smadar Dreyfus & Lennaart Van Oldenborgh <lenny@desk.nl>]

 Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer

War on Terrorism: Observer special
---------------------------------


FIGHTING ISLAM'S KU KLUX KLAN
The Muslim world cannot forever attribute all its ills to the Great Satan,
America, writes the Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya
----

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisationa
challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman
Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that
was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by
them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might
live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled
efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to
Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by
being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that
are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price
brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood
to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and
worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some
legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its
dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved
unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of
1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the
West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the
hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their
democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and
unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a
different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having
tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere.
Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord
in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state
of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the
West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be
felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the
Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering,
and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that
was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to
face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become
unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the
anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded
conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a
society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great
Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of
Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and
politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it
became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam
Hussein's Iraq were built.

>From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on
to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become
the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event,
major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous
brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's
airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should
meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a
slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father
and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but
listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter,
for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you
do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more
important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and
attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No
concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with
one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal
Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so
hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a
justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The
thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he
tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990
in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument
was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of
being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain'
the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds
bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11
September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few
hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them
from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to
excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of
the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who
are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and
genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or
Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and
visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will
increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war.
Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war',
however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President.
For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the
risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his
associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and
Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi
beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within
us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it
ourselves.

Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one
that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And
that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true
meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and
suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To
exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of
the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.

© Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US.
His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab
World and the forthcoming The Rock.




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