The 9/11 Wars (33 page)

For ordinary people in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Stuttgart or any number of smaller cities and towns across Europe, the coming years would be marked by anxiety, anger and deep pessimism. Every day brought news of further attacks. The world seemed launched on an ineluctable course towards a dark and violent future. The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ appeared not just to be inevitable but a reality. Nor were such impressions entirely without foundation. Iraq continued to slide deeper into chaos, public debate globally became increasingly bitter and polarized, relations deteriorated between Western countries and a series of Muslim majority states, polls recorded more and more extreme positions becoming increasingly widespread among huge swathes of populations who had often previously shown themselves largely uninterested in politics or activism. There was a deep, and possibly well-founded, fear that the world would soon become divided into two warring camps. These years, from 2004 to 2007, saw the 9/11 Wars reach a new level of intensity, touching, irrevocably altering, indeed sometimes destroying, the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the entire planet. It was in this period that the 9/11 Wars came closest to being a genuine global conflict.

In this new and violent phase, Europe was crucial. The wars had expanded from south-west Asia to Iraq and had inflamed much of the Middle East. As al-Suri and bin Laden had both recognized, what happened in Europe would determine whether the wars would continue to broaden and deepen as a conflict or whether its hitherto apparently inexorable expansion would falter, opening up the possibility that the slide towards a deeper and broader chaos could be slowed, possibly halted and even, perhaps, reversed.

EUROPE AND ITS MUSLIMS

The problem with even the most cursory overview of relations between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Islamic world’ is that defining either entity is difficult and sketching a single history impossible. If Europe has a geographic unity, encompassing more or less the tract of land bordered by the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and an imaginary line somewhere between the Vistula river and the Ural mountains, there exists no consensus among its infinitely diverse communities as to what being a ‘European’ actually entails. Equally, though the ‘Islamic world’ is supposedly defined by faith, the definition of ‘Islamic’ varies so dramatically as to almost invalidate the very concept of a global community of Muslims. This, as the previous chapters have explored, was the fundamental problem for al-Qaeda from the outset. It is unsurprising that it poses challenges for historians too. It is thus also inevitable that readings of the last 1,300 years of relations between these two already poorly defined and largely imaginary blocs are so often highly subjective and politicized.

So while some readings emphasize the rich cultural exchange between, for example, Muslim Moorish Spain and more northern Christian interlocutors in the early medieval period, others emphasize the violence that occurred at the same time. While some prefer to emphasize how the eleventh and thirteenth centuries saw European crusaders fighting and sacking their way across the Holy Land with an extraordinary and often indiscriminate brutality, others stress how trading contacts thrived despite the hostilities and underline the constant flow of words, ideas, tastes and practices from the Islamic world – algebra, admiral, coffee, guitar – into Europe and vice versa. Some see the first battle of Poitiers in 732 as the moment when a united Christendom successfully repelled a concerted attempt by Islamic armies to subdue and colonize northern Europe, others portray it as nothing more than the heading-off of a raid by Moorish armies set on gathering gold rather than spreading the faith.
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Some prefer to emphasize the long centuries of strife between a newly potent Ottoman Empire and ‘European’ Christian powers following the 1453 fall of Constantinople, while others point out that Francis I of France allied with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to fight his rival, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and that Queen Elizabeth I of England asked one of Suleiman’s successors for naval assistance to defeat the Spanish Armada.
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What is certain is that the view that Europeans have had of the Moor, Saracen, Turk or Mohammedan has often been determined by the potential threat the latter have been thought to pose.
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With Muslim armies advancing on Constantinople and Ottoman navies surging into the Mediterranean, commentators and writers such as Nicetas Byzantios or Dante Alighieri reserved the worst of their bile for ‘the bad and noxious’ religion of Islam with Mohammed ‘the Antichrist’ at its head. With the Ottomans on the defensive after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, the Turk was seen instead as exotic and eccentric but not necessarily dangerous.
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The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 saw Anglican Christian Britain and Roman Catholic France allied with the Ottomans to defend Constantinople against a Russian (Orthodox) Empire demonized by Western European clergy as ‘impure, demoralising and intolerant’.
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As European colonial armies pushed deeper into the Islamic world – the French into what was to become Algeria, the Spanish into Morocco, the British into the Asian subcontinent and the Dutch into what was to become Indonesia – Muslims, Turks or Moors became decadent, sensual, poetic, representative of the supposed simplicity, honesty and ‘honour’ that an industrializing West was leaving behind.
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When the ‘Oriental’ was depicted as violent, the violence was usually directed at others of his type through exotic punishments, duels, incomprehensible tribal wars. In all cases, the Western viewer could rest assured that these heroic warriors’ picturesque
jezzail
muskets and long curved
yatagans
were no match for well-drilled troops with contemporary Western armaments. The superb duelling Arab or Berber horsemen painted by Eugène Delacroix to the acclaim of Parisians through the middle of the nineteenth century were being wiped out by modern armies armed with modern weapons even as the artist’s canvases dried.
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When a threat surfaced, however, so did the old stereotypes. So during the Indian Mutiny or War of Independence of 1857 ‘proud, vengeful and fanatical … cunning and cruel’ Muslims were blamed in Britain for the trouble even though 90 per cent of the mutineers were Hindu.
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A decade or so later, when the immediate scare had passed, a less negative vision of ‘the Mohammedan’ returned to dominate literature, popular journalism and art.

The myths woven through this vexed and complex history of representation and misrepresentation have permanently marked imaginations and identities. Few of the clichés bear much relation to reality. Early Islamic armies fought on foot with spears, not waving scimitars from Arab stallions as popularly imagined, not least because they tended to be composed of poor desert tribesmen who could not afford a mount.
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The great Christian knight Roland, the paragon of medieval chivalry, died fighting Basque bandits who had lain in ambush in a Pyrenean mountain pass, not ‘the Moors’ as recounted in later literature. The sensuality of the East so dear to nineteenth-century travelling (or indeed sedentary) French poets revealed more about the conservative contemporary mores of their homeland than about the Levant. More recently a series of commentators and analysts have opposed ‘Oriental’ and ‘Western’ styles of warfare, unconsciously reproducing the old stereotypes of the wily, highly mobile Saracen with the sharp scimitar trying to outwit the manly, slightly plodding but fundamentally honest and upstanding Western warrior with his heavy broadsword that featured in primary school history books even in the 1970s.
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But if there is Orientalism, a false and romanticized vision of ‘the East’ informed as much by the prejudices and complexes of ‘the West’, there has also been Occidentalism, the equally distorted vision of ‘the West’ in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) too.
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Many of the prejudices so tediously trotted out by radical Islamic militants such as Bouyeri have roots as deep as any of those of ‘European’ visions of Muslims. They too have been embedded by successive decades of representation in literature and films. The vision of the European in much of the Islamic world has been as heavily mythologized as any representation of the sensual or violent Moor in Europe and has also depended to a considerable degree on the degree of perceived threat posed by the West at a given time. The resilience of such stereotypes is striking too. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries Muslims ‘regarded the Franks … as little better than animals in manners of sexual propriety’ and Crusaders were, like American troops today, seen as dirty, polluting, indelicate and bestial.
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‘All those who were well informed about the Franks saw them as animals who are superior in strength and aggression,’ said Usama ibn Munqidh in 1095. And Saladin himself is meant to have commented on the ‘obstinacy’ with which the ‘Franks … fight for religion’.
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In the eighteenth century, the famous Ottoman scholar Naima compared contemporary European states to those of the Crusaders and concluded that they were so backward and barbaric as to not be ‘worthy of his attention’.
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Concepts of infection or corruption by a decadent and depraved West go back to anti-colonial rhetoric from the first half of the last century and well beyond. There are the key texts of radical Islamic militancy such as those of Sayyid Qutb, who, after a short voyage in America in the late 1940s, dismissed Western civilization as lascivious, materialist and base, citing it as the modern version of pre-Islamic ignorance and barbarism,
jahiliya
.
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Another solidly rooted generalization is that Westerners in general and Western soldiers in particular are cowards, afraid to fight man to man but who rely instead on their technological superiority. Interrogations of aides of the dictator revealed that the latter presumption was one reason why Saddam Hussein – who distributed videos of the film
Blackhawk Down
to his generals – failed to avail himself of the various possible options that might conceivably have averted the war of 2003.
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It was also one reason why bin Laden took the enormous strategic gamble of 9/11, though better informed associates warned the US would react like ‘a wounded bear’. Such ideas have bled into mainstream political, public and private conversation in much of the Islamic world, which is often marked by a depressing level of ignorance and prejudice.

Another important part of Occidentalism has long been a crude anti-Semitism. As the writings of Qutb show, negative images of the Jew have long been associated with urbanity and thus a ‘decadent’ modernity. Hatred of Jews in many Muslim countries, despite some historic examples of peaceful and fruitful coexistence, was extremely widespread even before the foundation of Israel. Since the establishment of the Jewish state, the fusion of the political and the religious has given rise to an anti-Semitism that is impressive in its vitriol. ‘Read history,’ Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, the imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca and a controversial figure who has also been seen by some as a proponent of moderation, preached in 2004, ‘and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels … calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers … the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs … These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption.’
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A favourite theme of soap operas in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and elsewhere is the shadowy Zionist-Semitic conspiracy and its brutal American accomplices.
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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a tract first published in 1903 supposedly outlining a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and exposed many years ago as a fake by the Tsarist secret police, has long been on sale throughout the Middle East and beyond.
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The tract’s claims, which featured prominently in the foundational literature of groups such as Hamas that were increasingly popular with European Muslims and others from the 1990s onwards, were seen as entirely uncontroversial by many hundreds of millions of people in the Islamic world and in Muslim communities in Western Europe by the end of the twentieth century.
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Such stereotypes – the Frank, the Moor, the Saracen, the European colonizer, the American neo-imperialist – had rarely survived contact with reality. Until very recently, the distance that allowed them to persist unchallenged remained. But in Europe in the last forty years that distance has vanished. Communities that were once free to imagine the worst of one another without such preconceptions being challenged – or having direct effects on everyday life – live intermingled. New and difficult questions of integration and assimilation are being posed that a thousand years’ worth of myths and misrepresentations aggravate rather than resolve. As it was meant to do, the Islamic extremist violence of the middle years of the decade revealed the tensions this new proximity has generated in a cruel and effective way.