Climate of Fear (10 page)

Let us cast aside all further pretense. The genesis of the present climate of fear will be found right within the smoldering heart of the Middle East, that confluence of multiple civilizations within which are nestled the most influential spiritualities of the world—Judaic, Christian, and Islamic. The dispersal of the climate of fear therefore rests, fundamentally, in a just solution in the Middle East—it has been said often enough, it cannot be disputed, let no one be in any doubt about it. The time for tergiversations is over, it is time for a holistic confrontation of a global dilemma.

No Community, true, dares succumb to an arrogation of power over the lives of its innocents, and the doctrine of
There are no innocents
must be strategically and morally repudiated. To do less is to surrender our self-esteem, deny ourselves all dignity, diminish our own humanity, and indeed forgo our fundamental right to existence. Yet even as we build protective ramparts, and pursue the proponents of that impious catechism
There
are no innocents
to the ends of the earth, the mind that aspires to an all-inclusive Community must expand beyond the immediate and address the genesis of the current climate of fear, not as an abstraction, but as a man-engendered reality and, thus, one that remains within the compass of human redress.

Between my first lecture, “A Changing Mask of Fear,” and this, yet another annunciation of posturing power left such a flaming imprint yet again on the world, this time on the railway tracks of Madrid, that there flashed across my mind a moment in the career of European fascism. That was the infamous event which a General Millán Astray, at the University of Salamanca, spat the shout of “Long live death” in the face of the humanist philosopher Unamuno. That banner of morbidity appears to have been hoisted all over the world. To take it down, the world must act in concert, and with resolve, but must also embrace or intensify a commitment to the principle of justice that ensures that the dispossessed shall enjoy restitution, and the humiliated are restored to dignity.

Five

“I Am Right; You Are Dead”

The French nation lately was involved in a controversy over its decision to ban ostentatious symbols of religious faiths from secondary schools. I was invited to take part in that debate, and readily accepted. It was a chance openly to interrogate my long-held conviction that there should be a period in the development of the young mind when the perception of differences in humanity is reduced to an absolute minimum, even if, obviously, it cannot be eliminated completely. That period, it appears equally obvious, is that of school pupilage, where the space of instruction is cleansed of manifestations of private wealth, tastes, class, and so on. The symbol, as well as practical expression of this oneness, the leveler, is of course the school uniform.

Objections surfaced in the mind—the indelicate, even provocative timing of the French government— indelicate to the extent of almost sounding like a declaration of hostilities! Then the positive role of religious symbols as spiritual and ethical reminders in the consciousness of youthful minds at all times, a corrective mechanism when one might be on the verge of misconduct. In short, the mind was readying itself for the dialogue mode, anticipating even its extension into protest demonstrations on the streets of Paris and the wharfs of Marseilles. Capitulation by the government was a possibility. I foresaw a protracted dialogue, from objective to acerbic—the basic philosophy of education, instruction traditions from different cultures, inductions into age-groups in traditional societies, reconsiderations in view of the vastly changed nature of the world since Socrates preached his “impieties” in the street “schoolrooms” of Athens. . . .

For some, alas, such dialogue was superfluous. A hitherto unknown group—vying to overtake rivals as the terminal censors of our time—warned the French government that it was next in line for a Madrid-style reprisal, and should prepare for a season of “sorrow and remorse” for its perceived assault on the Islamic faith. At first I was numbed, then surprised at my reaction. Of course, in the world we now inhabit, it should be only a matter of time before some public target, preferably even a school, is bombed, and the contested Islamic head scarves are torn off to serve as tourniquets for severed limbs—and even as shrouds.

Here is an even older terminating venture—the ironically named “Right to Life” crusaders in the United States, known plainly as antiabortion militants. One such group—self-styled the “Army of God”—boasts a supportive network for its assassins, one that extends to Europe. Their zeal for the conversion of minds requires that they gun down doctors, police guards, and the occasional patient or passerby. Their effective network provided protection for the one who named himself “Sword of God” while on the run for murder. Another of the same breed of Christian fundamentalists, an ordained priest, was executed in Texas last year, to a chorus of threats by his support group that they would unleash on the American populace reprisals that would make Timothy McVeigh's crusade of vengeance look like child's play. Timothy McVeigh, for the uninitiated, was that remarkable individual who was plagued by a unique social conscience that could be stilled only by his blowing up a public building, one that housed both a state security department and an infants' school. His timing ensured, naturally, that scores of children were blown apart or maimed for life. McVeigh did not profess any religion. Nonetheless, he was a zealot of his own Supreme Purpose, the manifestation of a private irredentism. His chosen grounds of dispute were neither ideological nor theological, but he presents us with a clear psychopathology of the zealot, one who is imbued with a self-righteousness that must be assuaged by a homicidal resolution. It moves all possible discourse away from even the dogmatic monologue of
I am right, you are wrong
— itself a dead end—to one of
I am right; you are dead.

The sacred—including the infant crèche—appears to diminish by the day, drowned perhaps by the saturation of the world in the rhetoric of sacrosanctity. Here is another lesson from school, an autobiographical note to consider in the collapse of logical (?) expectations from an evolving world:

The boarding school that I attended in Ibadan, Nigeria, was not without its share of bullies. My class was cursed with a singularly vicious specimen against whom we, the smallest and thus the most vulnerable, adopted a very simple strategy: we formed what, taking our cue from history books, we called the Tripartite Coalition. We summoned the bully into our presence and formally announced to him that, from then on, an attack on any one of the three of us would be considered an attack on all three. We moved together as much as possible, especially when changing classes or on the playing fields. Our strategy held the bully in check for a while, but he soon discovered that all he had to do was bide his time—since we could not always be together—and then pounce on the isolated wanderer. Unfortunately for me, I had a tendency to wander off on my own. Because of this, taken together with the fact that he had decided in his mind— perhaps because I was the smallest—that I was the architect of this defense agreement, he constantly stalked me and tried to teach me a lesson.

Well, I also had an answer to that. I schooled myself to keep to a certain perimeter whose center was the school chapel. I already had certain agnostic tendencies—which would later develop into outright atheistic convictions— so it was not that I believed in any kind of divine protection. What mattered was that
he
did. Well, not protection as such, but—interdiction. He could not bring himself to attack me in a house of worship. So I watched him prowl, taunt, dare, and do everything to invite me out to single combat. All he got in return was an equal dose of insults. Then, when the school bell rang for classes, I took off as fast as my short legs could carry me into the safety of the classroom.

Even the class bully, a creature of quite indeterminate religious conviction, to the best of my recollection, respected the mandates of
sanctuary.
Today, there are no more sanctuaries left in the world, not even the holy city of Mecca, whose time-honored serenity was shattered some years ago by a bunch of fanatics. Acting from a most ruthless determination, they destroyed all notion of a peaceful affirmation of faith that eliminated, for a few days of spiritual rapture, all distinctions of race, color, class, wealth, and so on, in what sometimes appeared to be a single concourse of
one
humanity. Nothing that the world knows today equals the annual hajj to Mecca, neither the combined pilgrimages of other religions, nor those of rival deities, such as the football World Cup. And thus, appropriately for our times, this proved the setting for the most heinous act of religious desecration that the modern world has known. The recent massacre in Iraq that accounted for nearly two hundred worshippers, a massacre that was timed for the holy festival of the Shiite sect of the Islamic faith, naturally shocks and dispirits, but it counts almost as a footnote to the memory of the outrage that was inflicted on the harmonizing potential of that concourse of humanity, one that does have its lessons even for non-Muslims or, indeed, nonbelievers in any deity.

We have to speak to religion! True, the issue is fanaticism, but this does not exonerate the mother—secular ideology or religious indoctrination—from the lapses of the child. We are obliged to recognize, indeed, to emphasize, the place of injustice, localized or global, as ready manure for the deadly shoots of fanaticism. However, the engines of global violence today are oiled from the deep wells of fanaticism, even though they may be cranked by the calculating hands of politicians or the power-hungry. These sometimes end up being run over by the juggernaut they have set in motion, but the lesson appears to be constantly lost on the next contenders for political domination. They believe that they have uncovered a secret that the erstwhile contender for power failed to grasp, and proceed to unleash a monster on an unprepared polity. It is time for all to recognize that there is no regulating mechanism for the fanatic mind. The sooner this is accepted, the earlier we can move to addressing the phenomenon of fanaticism in its own right. Not for nothing do the Yoruba warn that
Sooner than
have a monster child meet a shameful death in the marketplace,
it is best that the mother strangle it in the secret recesses of the
home.
What this means, quite simply, is that the primary burden of exorcising the demon that escaped from the womb rests on the same womb that gave it life. Today, there is urgent need for Mother Religion, of whatever inclination, to come to the rescue of humanity with the benevolent act of infanticide.

It was not theocratic dictatorship but repressions of a secular order that evoked my sense of unease when, a full generation ago, I delivered a lecture entitled “Climates of Art,” to which I made reference at the beginning of this series. There is however a link, unsought, a sense of brutal continuity. That link is the attempted murder of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner, by the way, but what matters to us is that he was—and still is—a writer of his time and, most relevantly, place. Unlike a number of other creative minds trapped within the killing domains of the terminal censors, Mahfouz did survive. So, however, most lamentably, has the poised blade of fanaticism that has become even more proficient and inventive over its agency of execution: the time bomb, the suicide bomb, the sarin sachet, and even, possibly, that ominous pod, miniaturized, one that, almost on its own, bore full responsibility for the climate of fear of fifty years before—the atom bomb. Let Mahfouz serve us as a living symbol of that space of creative martyrdom that stretches from antiquity till now, from the communist world of the Soviet Union to Afghanistan of the Taliban through Iran, Ireland, and Yugoslavia to North Africa—Algeria most excruciatingly. The space of fanaticism aggressively expands into other nations of traditional tolerance and balance, including my own, Nigeria.

Once, the terminal censor flourished in the arena of ideological insecurity and/or the will to total mind domination, where the so-called crime of deviationism—that is, diversion from the strict party line—led, quite simply, to a Siberian wilderness or, straightforwardly, to death. Who can forget the notorious purges and show trials of the Stalinist era! Secular zealotry and intolerance appear to have lost steam since then, although we must be careful not to sing their demise too early. Still, it is largely the religious breed that remains to plague the world, a stubborn strain nestled in the vital organs of humanity from the earliest social orders—as the fate of Socrates eternally reminds us. Now that was one obsessed lover of dialogue, who reminds us that it is from the “dialectics of the mind” that truth is elicited and tested far more durably than from the monologue. The monologue, alas, continues to dominate the murderous swath blazed by succeeding religions—Christianity and Islam most notoriously. Deviationism—or heresy—is one shortcut to death.

My poem “Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known” was a tribute to Naguib Mahfouz, who was fated to expand into the religious those apprehensions of the secular to which I had given voice in “Climates of Art,” delivered some twenty-five years ago:

. . . the ink of Kandahar
Has turned to blood. The heir of ancient dynasties
Of letters—Khuorassan, Alexandria, Timbuktoo lies
sprawled
In the dirt and dust of a passageway.

He is no alien. No roots than his grow deeper
In that marketplace, no eye roved closer home.
He is that fixture in the marketplace café
Sipping sweetened cups of mint, oblivious of
The bitter one that would be served
By the shadowy one, the waiter-stalker, a youth
Fed on dreams of sarabands of houris
Doe-eyed virgins, wine and sweetmeats in the afterlife
But to his paradise, a key—the plunging knife.

The nineteenth-century black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once declared that the issue of the twentieth century would be that of race. It is becoming clear that while that century, the last, did indeed inherit—and still remains plagued almost continuously by—that social issue, race was replaced toward the end by religion, and it is something that has yet to be addressed with the same global concern as race once was. The issue of the twenty-first century is clearly that of religion, whose cynical manipulations contribute in no small measure to our current climate of fear. Perhaps the Khatami-UNESCO initiative to which I referred in an earlier lecture, a series of contacts titled Dialogue of Civilizations, will succeed in bringing the world to confront this lethal successor to the secular monologue whose fanatic fringe has been lately deprived of oxygen, and much of its breeding ground. In the wilds of Thailand or Cambodia, in a few isolated spots in South America, the mind of the fanatic secularist still operates, locked in a vision of Utopia that demands a disposable approach to “unenlightened” humanity. Pol Pot, however, is dead, gone the way of those other architects of the necropolis, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and mixed company of both left and right. Today, the main source of the fanatic mind is religion, and its temper—one that, ironically, is grounded in the doctrine of submission—has grown increasingly contemptuous of humanity, being characterized by arrogance, intolerance, and violence, almost as an unconscious vengeful recompense for its apprenticeship within the spiritual principle of submission.

At stake is tolerance, and the place of dissent in social interaction. We would do well, however, to note—for practical ends—the differences between the workings of secular intolerance and those of the theocratic order. Such differences may assist us in assessing the very real threat to human freedom that the closed world of fanaticism poses to humanity. Secular ideology derives its theories from history and the material world. The mind has therefore learned to pause occasionally and reflect on the processes that link the material world to doctrines that derive from or govern it, to review changes in such a world, test theories against old and new realities—be they economic, cultural, industrial, or even environmental. The dynamic totality of the real world is given rational space. Even the craving after comprehensiveness and infallibility—as in the case of Marxism—may result in the exposure of fallacies and inconsistencies or, at the least, ambiguous zones within the theory.