The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (17 page)

Unlike the medieval holy warrior or assassin, who was willing to face certain death at the hands of his enemies or captors, the new suicide terrorist dies by his own hand. This raises an important question of Islamic teaching. Islamic law books are very clear on the subject of suicide. It is a major sin and is punished by eternal damnation in the form of the endless repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The following passages, from the traditions of the Prophet, make the point vividly:

The Prophet said: Whoever kills himself with a blade will be tormented with that blade in the fires of Hell.

The Prophet also said: He who strangles himself will strangle himself in Hell, and he who stabs himself will stab himself in Hell. . . . He who throws himself off a mountain and kills himself will throw himself downward into the fires of Hell for ever and ever. He who drinks poison and kills himself will carry his poison in his hand and drink it in Hell for ever and ever. . . . Whoever kills himself in any way will be tormented in that way in Hell. . . . Whoever kills himself in any way in this world will be tormented with it on the day of resurrection.
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The early authorities make a clear distinction between facing certain death at the hands of the enemy and dying by one’s own hand. A very early tradition of the type known as
had
th quds
,
denoting a statement of the Prophet citing God Himself, gives a striking example. The Prophet was present when a man mortally wounded in the holy war killed himself to shorten his pain. Whereupon God said: “My servant pre-empted me by taking his soul with his own hand; he will therefore not be admitted to paradise.” According to another early tradition, the Prophet refused to say prayers over the body of a man who had died by his own hand.
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Two features mark the attacks of September 11 and other similar actions: the willingness of the perpetrators to commit suicide and the ruthlessness of those who send them, concerning both their own emissaries and their numerous victims. Can these in any sense be justified in terms of Islam?

The answer must be a clear no.

The callous destruction of thousands in the World Trade Center, including many who were not American, some of them Muslims from Muslim countries, has no justification in Islamic doctrine or law and no precedent in Islamic history. Indeed, there are few acts of comparable deliberate and indiscriminate wickedness in human history. These are not just crimes against humanity and against civilization; they are also acts—from a Muslim point of view—of blasphemy, when those who perpetrate such crimes claim to be doing so in the name of God, His Prophet, and His scriptures.

The response of many Arabs and Muslims to the attack on the World Trade Center was one of shock and horror at the terrible destruction and carnage, together with shame and anger that this was being done in their name and in the name of their faith. This was the response of many—but not all. There were reports and even pictures of rejoicing in the streets in Arab and other Muslim cities at the news from New York. In part, the reaction was one of envy—a sentiment that was also widespread, in a more muted form, in Europe. Among the poor and the wretched there was a measure of satisfaction—for some indeed of delight—in seeing the rich and self-indulgent Americans being taught a lesson.

Responses in the Arabic press to the massacres in New York and Washington were an uneasy balance between denial and approval, rather similar to their response to the Holocaust.
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On the Holocaust three positions are not infrequently found in the Arabic media: it never happened; it was greatly exaggerated; the Jews deserved it anyway. On the last point, some more enterprising writers add a rebuke to Hitler for not having finished the job. No one has yet asserted that the destruction of the World Trade Center never happened, though with the passage of time this will not be beyond the capacity of conspiracy theorists. The present line among many though by no means all Muslim commentators is to argue that neither Muslims nor Arabs could have done this. Instead, they offer other explanations. These include American white supremacists and militias, with reference of course to Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh; opponents of globalization; European, Chinese, and other opponents of the missile defense shield project; the Russians, seeking vengeance for the breakup of the Soviet Union; the Japanese, as a long-delayed reprisal for Hiroshima; and the like. One columnist even suggests that the attack was organized by President Bush, to distract attention from his election by “a minuscule minority that would not have sufficed to elect a village counselor in upper Egypt.” This writer also implicates Colin Powell as an accomplice of both Presidents Bush.

By far the most popular explanation attributes the crime, with minor variations, to their favorite villains—to Israel, to the Mossad (according to some, in association with the CIA), to the Elders of Zion, or most simply and satisfactorily, to “the Jews.” This enables them at once to appreciate and to disown the attacks. The motive ascribed to the Jews is to make the Arabs and more generally the Muslims look bad and to sow discord between them and the Americans. A Jordanian columnist added an interesting additional theme—that “the Zionist organizations” perpetrated the attack so that Israel could destroy the Aksa Mosque while the attention of the world was diverted to America. This kind of explanation does not inhibit—on the contrary, it encourages—the frequently expressed view that what happened, though criminal, was a just retribution for American crimes. Perhaps the most dramatic—and explicit—response came from the Hamas weekly,
Al-Ris
la,
in Gaza, in its issue of September 13, 2001: “Allah has answered our prayers.”

As the full horror of the operation became better known, some writers were willing to express condemnation of the perpetrators and compassion for the victims. But even these rarely missed the opportunity to point out that the Americans had brought it on themselves. The catalog of American offenses they cite is long and detailed, beginning with the conquest, colonization, and settlement—emotive words—of the New World and continuing to the present day; so too is the list of victims who have fallen prey to American greed and ruthlessness, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Usama bin Ladin has made clear how he perceives the struggle by repeatedly defining his enemy as “Crusaders.” The Crusaders, it will be recalled, were neither Americans nor Jews; they were Christians fighting a holy war to recover the lost holy places of Christendom. A “letter to America” published in November 2002,
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and attributed to Usama bin Ladin, enumerates in some detail various offenses committed not just by the government but also by the people of the United States and sets forth, under seven headings, “what we are calling you to do, and what we want from you.” The first is to embrace Islam; the second, “to stop your oppressions, lies, immorality, and debauchery”; the third, to discover and admit that America is “a nation without principles or manners”; the fourth, to stop supporting Israel in Palestine, the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens, and the Manila government against the Muslims in the southern Philippines; the fifth, “to pack your luggage and get out of our lands.” This is offered as advice for America’s own good, “so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.” The sixth, “to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington; seventh, to deal and interact with the Muslims on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of subjugation, theft, and occupation.” The document ends by telling the Americans that, if they reject this advice, they will be defeated like all the previous Crusaders, and “their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.”

The case against America made in this document is very detailed. It includes, apart from the familiar list of specific grievances, a range of accusations both general and particular. These are of varied and usually recognizable provenance, reflecting the successive ideologies that have at different times influenced Middle Eastern politicians and policies. Some date from the Nazi era, e.g., degeneracy and ultimate Jewish control; others from the period of Soviet influence, e.g., capitalist greed and exploitation. Many are of recent European and even American origin, and come from both left and right. They include world pollution and the refusal to sign the Kyoto accords; political corruption through campaign financing; privileging the “white race”; and, from the right, the neo-Nazi, white supremacist myth that Benjamin Franklin gave warning against the Jewish danger. The sinister role of the Jews is stressed in almost all these offenses.

Even the vaunted merits of the American way of life become crimes and sins. The liberation of women means debauchery and the commercial use of women as “consumer products.” Free elections mean that the American people freely chose their rulers and must therefore be held accountable and punishable for those rulers’ misdeeds—that is, there are no “innocent civilians.” Worst of all is the separation of church and state: “You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.” In sum, “You are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” This judgment is the more remarkable coming at a time when the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships are still living memories—not to speak of earlier tyrannies preserved in the historical record which Usama bin Ladin and his associates so often cite.

The basic reason is that America is now perceived as the leader of what is variously designated as the West, Christendom, or more generally the “Lands of the Unbelievers.” In this sense the American president is the successor of a long line of rulers—the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople, the Holy Roman emperors in Vienna, Queen Victoria and her imperial colleagues and successors in Europe. Today as in the past, this world of Christian unbelievers is seen as the only serious force rivaling and obstructing the divinely ordained spread of Islam, resisting and delaying but not preventing its final, inevitable, universal triumph.

There is no doubt that the foundation of Al-Qa‘ida and the consecutive declarations of war by Usama bin Ladin marked the beginning of a new and ominous phase in the history of both Islam and terrorism. The triggers for bin Ladin’s actions, as he himself has explained very clearly, were America’s presence in Arabia during the Gulf War—a desecration of the Muslim Holy Land—and America’s use of Saudi Arabia as a base for an attack on Iraq. If Arabia is the most symbolic location in the world of Islam, Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history, is the second.