Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (58 page)

And eventually, some subset of the militant Jihadists holed up in the carcass of Afghanistan crafted a scheme to fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon headquarters in Washington, D.C.

On that day, September 11, 2001, two world histories crashed together, and out of it came one certainty: Fukiyama was mistaken. History was not over.

Although history is not over, the period since 9/11 has not mulched down enough to enter history yet: it still belongs to journalists. It is not too soon, however, to reflect on this period as a manifestation of two great, out-of-sync narratives intersecting.

In the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., President Bush rallied the United States for military action with rhetoric that evoked long-standing themes of American and Western history. He said the terrorists were out to destroy freedom and democracy and that these values must be defended with blood and treasure, the same rallying cry raised against Nazism in the thirties and communism in the fifties. Since then, the United States and a coalition of largely unwilling allies have poured a great many troops into Iraq to fight a war cast
rhetorically in much the same terms as the Cold War, and the twentieth century world wars, and so on back into earlier chapters of the Western world historical narrative.

But did the perpetrators of 9/11 really see themselves as striking a blow against freedom and democracy?
Is
hatred of freedom the passion that drives militantly political Islamist extremists today? If so, you won’t find it in jihadist discourse, which typically focuses, not on freedom and its opposite, nor on democracy and its opposite, but on discipline versus decadence, on moral purity versus moral corruption, terms that come out of centuries of Western dominance in Islamic societies and the corresponding fragmentation of communities and families there, the erosion of Islamic
social values, the proliferation of liquor, the replacement of
religion with entertainment, and the secularization of the rich elite along with the ever-hardening gap between rich and poor.

One side charges, “You are decadent.” The other side retorts, “We are free.” These are not opposing contentions; they’re nonsequiturs. Each side identifies the other as a character in its own narrative. In the 1980s, Khomeini called America “the Great Satan,” and other Islamist revolutionaries have echoed his rhetoric. In 2008, Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland, suggested that radical Islamists are the Nazis reborn, motivated at core by anti-Semitism and hatred of women. It’s a common analysis.

Herf and others see the Islamist doctrine as boiling down to a call for cutting off heads, cutting off hands, and clamping bags over women. There’s no denying that radical Islamists have done these things. Yet radical Islamists themselves see the main conflict dividing the world today as a disagreement about whether there is one God, many gods, or no God at all. All the problems of humanity would be resolved, they contend, if the world would only recognize the singleness of God (and of Mohammed’s special role as his spokesperson).

Secular intellectuals in the West don’t necessarily disagree about the number of gods. They just don’t think that’s the burning question. To them—to us—the basic human problem is finding ways to satisfy the needs and wants of all people in a manner that gives each one full participation in decision making about his or her own destiny. One God, two gods, three, none, many—whatever: people will have differing views, and it’s not worth fighting about, because settling that question will not help solve hunger, poverty, war, crime, inequality, injustice, global warming, resource
depletion, or any of the other ills plaguing humanity. Such is the secular position.

Yet
secular
and
Western
are not synonymous, despite what Islamists may declare. A 2001 survey by the City University of New York showed that 81 percent of Americans identified with an organized religion, 77 percent of them with Christianity. Of the rest, many called themselves “spiritual.” Declared atheists were so few they didn’t even register on the charts. Whatever the conflict wracking today’s world, it’s not between those who are and those who aren’t religious.

In fact, the West has its own religious devotees who want to put God at the center of politics, most notably the Christian eva
ngelicals who have wielded such clout in the United States since the 1970s. Tariq Ali wrote a book after 9/11 titled
The Clash of Fundamentalisms,
suggesting that this tension between Islam and the West boils down to a religious argument between fundamentalist extremists. If so, however, the two sides don’t present opposing doctrines. Christian fundamentalists don’t necessarily disagree about how many Gods there are; they just don’t think that’s the question. Their discourse revolves around accepting Jesus Christ as one’s savior (whereas no Muslim would ever say “Mohammed is our savior”). So the argument be
tween Christian and Muslim “fundamentalists” comes down to: Is there only one God or is Jesus Christ our savior? Again, that’s not a point-counterpoint; that’s two people talking to themselves in separate rooms.

The fact that the Muslim world and the West have come to the same events by different paths has had concrete consequences. After 2001, U.S. strategists acted on the premise that the climactic terrorist act of modern times somehow fit into the framework of power politics among nation-states. After all, that’s what European wars had been about for many centuries. Even the Cold War came down to a confrontation between blocs of nations, the warring entities lined up along the ideological fault line ultimately being governments. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, therefore, the B
ush administration looked around, over, past, through, anywhere but directly at the specific terrorists of that day, in its quest to find the
government
behind those men. Reflexively, U.S. strategists—and many analysts in the Western media—sought an adversary of the same genre, the same class, the same type the country had confronted in earlier wars.

Thus it was that, after a brief initial incursion into Afghanistan and a transitory obsession with Osama bin Laden, the Bush team zeroed in Saddam Hussein as the mastermind and Iraq as the core state responsible for terrorism against Western citizens, the state whose conquest and “democratization” would put an end to this plague. But after Saddam Hussein had been captured and hanged, after Iraq had been fully occupied, if not subdued, terrorism showed no real sign of abating, whereupon U.S. government strategists shifted focus to Iran. And depending on what happens there, Syria, Libya, Saud
i Arabia, Pakistan, and a host of other nations await their turn as designated chief “state sponsor” of terrorism.

With its policies deeply rooted in the Western narrative, the United States has prescribed democracy and sponsored elections t
o remedy local ills in Iraq and Afghanistan and other troubled regions. Upon the successful completion of such elections, the countries in question are said to have become democracies or at least to have moved closer to that happy state.

But I keep remembering the elections held in Afghanistan after the Taliban had fled the country. Across the nation, people chose delegates to represent them at a national meeting organized by the United States to forge a new democratic government, complete with parliament, constitution, president, and cabinet. That summer in Paghman, a town near Kabul, I met a man who said he had voted in the elections. I couldn’t picture him in a voting booth, since he looked like the traditional rural villagers I had known in my youth, with the standard long shirt, baggy pants, turban, and be
ard, so I asked him to describe the voting process for me—what was the actual activity?

“Well, sir,” he said, “a couple of city men came around with slips of paper and went on and on about how we were supposed to make marks on them, and we listened politely, because they had come a long way and we didn’t want to be rude, but we didn’t need those city fellows to tell us who our man was. We made the marks they wanted, but we always knew who would be representing us—Agha-i-Sayyaf, of course.”

“And how did you settle on Sayyaf?” I asked.

“Settle on him? Sir! What do you mean? His family has lived here since the days of Dost Mohammed Khan and longer. Go over that ridge, you’ll see his house across the valley—biggest one around! Every year at Eid, he comes by and gives candy to the children and inquires about our problems, and if someone needs help, why, he fetches money out of his pocket and hands it over then and there, whatever he has on him. That man is a Muslim! Did you know that my sister’s husband has a cousin who is married to Sayyaf ’s sister-in-law? He’s one of our own.”

It struck me that what Western planners called “democracy” was an extraneous apparatus this man shouldered because he had to, under which load he carried on with his real life as best he could. In him flowed two streams of history that were unrelated and interconnecting awkwardly. And if this was happening an hour outside Kabul, it was happening all over the country.

From the Western side, it seems plausible (to some) to assert that funding and arming rulers amenable to Western ways in place
s like Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt helps bring democracy to those societies, not to mention the blessings of a free market. It also seems plausible (to some) to assert that Islamic social values are backward and need correction by more progressive people, even if force must needs be applied to get it done.

From the other side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like the long-familiar program to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems, and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self-interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman, and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.

What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their
communal
selves as familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.

The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations,” if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on.

Unraveling the vectors of those two crowds is the minimum precondition for sorting out the doctrinal bases of today’s disputes. The unraveling will not itself produce sweetness and light, because there are actual incompatibilities here, not just “misunderstandings.” When I started working on this book, I read my proposal to a group of fellow writers, two of whom declared that the conflict between the Muslim world and the West was promoted by hidden powers because “people are really the same and we all want the same things”; the conflict would fade away if only people in the West understood tha
t Islam was actually just like Christianity. “They believe in Abraham, too,” one of them offered.

This sort of well-meant simplification won’t get us very far.

On the other side, I often hear liberal Muslims in the United States say that “
jihad
just means ‘trying to be a good person,’” suggesting that only anti-Muslim bigots think the term has something to do with violence. But they ignore what
jihad
has meant to Muslims in the course of history dating back to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed himself. Anyone who claims that jihad has nothing to do with violence must account for the warfare that the earliest Muslims called “jihad.” Anyone who wants to say that early Muslims felt a certain way but we modern Muslims can create whole new definit
ions for jihad (and other aspects of Islam) must wrestle with the doctrine Muslims have fleshed out over time: that the Qur’an, Mohammed’s prophetic career, and the lives, deeds, and words of his companions in the first Muslim community were the will of God revealed on Earth and no mortal human can improve on the laws and customs of that time and place. This doctrine has forced all Muslim reformers to declare that they are proposing nothing new, only restoring what was originally meant. They must deny that they are forging forward, must insist that they are going back to the pristine original.
That’s a trap Muslim thinkers must break out of.

The modernist Egyptian theologian Sheikh Mohammed Abduh wrote famous books showing that the Qur’an actually prescribed science and
certain
(but not other) modern social values. He cites scriptural declarations to show that in marriage the Qur’an actually favors monogamy over polygamy. His case is convincing but he clearly came to his task intending to find support for monogamy in the Qur’an. It was a conclusion he had already reached. The question is, from what other source did he derive this conclusion? Was it not rational thought applied to the deepest principles of shared human life?

The role of women in society is no doubt the starkest instance of the incompatibility between the Islamic world and the West, an issue much in need of intellectual unraveling and deconstruction. Every society in every era has understood the powerful potential of sexuality to disrupt social harmony and every society has developed social forms to check that power. On this point, the disagreement between Islamic and Western culture is not about whether women should be oppressed, as is often represented in the West. Well-meaning folk on both sides believe that no
human beings should be oppressed. This is not to deny that women suffer grievously from oppressive laws in many Muslim countries. It is only to say that the principle on which Muslims stand is not the “right” to oppress women. Rather, what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community.