Roots of Terror
Starman
Radical Islam's fusion of the primitive and the progressive
is a typically modern phenomenon, writes Terry Eagleton
by Terry Eagleton
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian [UK]
The Crisis of Islam
by Bernard Lewis
192pp, Weidenfeld, #12.99
Power and Terror
by Noam Chomsky
144pp, Seven Stories Press (New York), #7.99
Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern
by John Gray
160pp, Faber, #10.99
Terror's Source
by Vincenzo Olivetti
128pp, Amadeus Books, #9.95
"There are few acts of comparable deliberate and indiscriminate
wickedness in human history," writes Bernard Lewis of the September 11
attacks. The statement inspires about as much faith in the Princeton
professor's scholarly credentials as if he were to claim that Jeffrey
Archer is the finest novelist since Cervantes. September 11 was a
human catastrophe, but it scarcely registers on the Richter scale of
historical atrocity. Has Lewis never heard of Mao, Stalin, Hitler,
Genghis Khan, Hiroshima, Vietnam? Indeed, the two years that have
passed since it happened have thrown it into a variety of new
perspectives -- not least as the hazy backdrop to a newer catastrophe
that is still unfolding in Iraq.
Professor Lewis would probably claim this book was written before the
invasion of Iraq, and it is true that it is the fate of such critiques
to seem out of date almost as soon as they are written. But that is no
excuse for giving September 11 more importance than greater human
miseries simply because it happened in America. To do so displays the
same sort of slipshod thinking that inspired the US authorities
to erect a sign at Ground Zero referring to those who were slaughtered
there as "heroes". Some of them were heroes, to be sure, not least
those firefighters who bravely sacrificed their lives. And some
civilians no doubt behaved with great selflessness. But there is
nothing heroic, as opposed to tragic, about having an aircraft slam
into your office. The truth is that evoking the concept of heroism is
part of America's problem, not a solution for easing the pain.
Lewis is resident intellectual jester to the court of George Bush, a
member of the scholarly wing of the occupation of Iraq, and The Crisis
of Islam is little more than propagandist polemic. The author is the
kind of Middle Eastern specialist whom the state department can rely
upon to suggest (as he does in his book) that the Israel-Palestine
conflict gets the heated attention it does because Israel is an "open
society" and is thus easier to report on. Israel, he thinks, is merely
a convenient displacement of Arab wrath about their own governments.
Readers who blink may miss a mention here of the establishment of the
state of Israel. They will certainly look in vain for more than five
words about Israel's criminal treatment of the Palestinians.
There are other odd gaps in the narrative. Lewis is strangely coy
about western intervention in the post-war Middle East. Only the
preternaturally astute reader might gather from a single word in the
text that it was the US that set up and financed Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, Lewis has a lot to say about the dangerous links between
politics and religion in the Muslim world, but nothing to say about
the same perils in the US. Fundamentalism is evidently a Taliban
rather than a Texan affair.
In Power and Terror, a series of post-September 11 talks and
interviews, Noam Chomsky fills in a few of the gaps in Lewis's
amnesiac narrative. He reminds us of the US's arming of both Turkey
and Saddam Hussein in their state terrorism against the Kurds. He
recalls the west's funding of genocide in Indonesia, which butchered
more people over the years than Saddam did. He touches on the tens of
thousands of deaths that resulted from American intervention in
Nicaragua, an adventure for which the US was condemned by the world
court of international terrorism. Not to speak of American support for
the 1982 Israeli massacres in Lebanon, or its blood-stained record in
Haiti.
Here, as always, Chomsky has a vital weapon at his disposal: facts. It
is a resource much despised by the postmodernists, but one that, as a
scientific researcher, he rightly cherishes. Hardly anyone in the
radical humanities, which these days regard facts as "positivist",
could match this explosive information-gathering. Chomsky has a
formidable filing cabinet of a mind, and devours the Air Force Review
as well as the New York Times. By grubbing in obscure corners of the
media, he can sabotage one of his government's key supports: its
cynical reliance on the ignorance and forgetfulness of its own people.
He monitors the website of the Afghan Revolutionary Association of
Women as carefully as he memorises the details of the CIA-planted car
bomb in Beirut in 1985. He can tell you how many people were massacred
in South Africa in the years when Reagan was an ally of apartheid, and
is well-versed in Japanese wartime propaganda in Manchuria. He
has culled information from Turkish sociologists, Colombian social
activists and the Kurdish Human Rights Project.
The contrast with uninformed propagandist potboilers such as Lewis's
book could not be greater. Many Americans, Lewis admits, see history
as irrelevant to present-day politics, but his book demonstrates one
way in which it can be craftily pressed into their service. The trick
is to emphasise that phenomena such as Islam's distrust of the
west go a very long way back. In which case, so the implication goes,
they can have precious little to do with the Bushes, Sharon, the CIA
or the oil companies. The US reader, relieved to learn that Muslims
and Christians were slogging it out even before Watergate, can put it
all down to age-old animosities, just like an Ulster liberal.
Like most western ideologues, Lewis uses words such as "modern" and
"modernisation" only as terms of approval. In Al Qaeda and What It
Means to Be Modern , John Gray usefully demolishes this piece of
sentimentality. Nazism, Stalinism, nationalism, fundamentalism and
revolutionary terror, Gray points out, are all impeccably modern
inventions. "There are many ways of being modern," he writes, "some of
them monstrous." Radical Islam, he argues, is just as modern a
current as the free-market liberalism it is out to destroy. Its
ideology, he suggests, is as much indebted to western
counter-Enlightenment thought as to Muslim tradition.
This is a fair case lamentably overstated. The Lewises of this world
certainly need reminding that "modernisation" means the technology of
genocide as well as CNN; deepening inequalities as well as liberal
institutions. But Nazism, nationalism and radical Islam are not just
modern. They are, rather, modernist -- mixtures of the modern and the
archaic, the primitive and the progressive. Al-Qaida may use laptop
computers, but it also believes in a theocratic state, not the most
popular of doctrines in Brussels. Bin Laden's outfit may be, in Gray's
phrase, a "global multinational", but organisation is not the same
thing as ideology. The Nazis were technocrats who believed in Nordic
gods. The modern era is littered with such cross-breeds of the very
old and the very new, all the way from Zionism to the poetry of TS
Eliot.
The real enemy for Gray is not terrorism but the Enlightenment. It was
from here that we derived our lunatic belief in a single universal
system that could save us. In Gray's view, this applied to
neoliberalism as much as to Marxism, Nazism or nationalism. You need,
however, to be standing rather a long way off to see Lenin, Goebbels,
Bin Laden, Murdoch and the internet as all aspects of the same
phenomenon. In fact, you need to have a system which reduces
everything under the sun to the same dreary logic, which is just what
Gray accuses his opponents of doing.
Gray's personal odyssey from free-market cheerleader to professional
misanthrope has been in one sense fruitful. As a fully recovered
neoliberal, he now believes that countries must modernise on their own
cultural terms, otherwise they will be devastated. Free markets must
be responsive to local conditions. What we need is not capitalism, but
capitalisms. It is the postmodern panacea for all human woes:
diversity. But since capitalism is, of its nature, homogenising, this
is a bit like arguing that what we need is a different-coloured ocean
for every coastline. The fact is that capitalism will not be
responsive to local culture if it is unprofitable for it to be so.
Gray, however, is right in one respect. The idea of terror is indeed
modern. Of course people have been terrorising one another ever since
they could crawl. But the idea of a political terror that shakes the
mind to the roots, and stretches the imagination to its limits -- this
dates back to the late 18th century, and is known in the arts as the
sublime. This is not the story Gray is out to tell; but since his book
covers everything in 150-odd pages, from the founding of America to
the collapse of the Argentine economy, he might just have squeezed it
in.
Readers who want to bone up on Islam should not seek to wade through
the murky ideological currents of The Crisis of Islam. Instead they
should try Vincenzo Olivetti's Terror's Source, which is erudite but
non-tendentious. Olivetti gives an excellently lucid account of the
Wahhabi-Salafi school of Islamic thought, which is what we loosely
know as "fundamentalist". In the western sense of the word, all
Islamic theology is fundamentalist, since the word in these parts
means a literal interpretation of scripture. This is how western
fundamentalism began in early 20th-century Protestant America.
Fundamentalism is a fight over meaning.
That the Koran is divinely inspired in its every word is a generally
accepted Muslim doctrine; but the Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam is
also fundamentalist in the broader sense of the word. It is purist,
militant and sectarian, and believes in restoring a corrupted Muslim
civilisation to its authentic roots. It does not, however, encourage
violence; according to Olivetti, only the small minority known as
Salafi-Takfiris do that.
To understand one's enemy may help to defeat him. Chomsky, however,
has some simpler -- and, in the context of the current occupation of
Iraq -- more pertinent advice about how to stop terrorism: "Stop
participating in it."
***
Terry Eagleton is a fellow of the British Academy. His book After
Theory is published by Penguin this month.
____________________
fwd//Starman
Dev Carter
>Like most western ideologues, Lewis uses words such as "modern" and
>"modernisation" only as terms of approval. In Al Qaeda and What It
>Means to Be Modern , John Gray usefully demolishes this piece of
>sentimentality. Nazism, Stalinism, nationalism, fundamentalism and
>revolutionary terror, Gray points out, are all impeccably modern
>inventions. "There are many ways of being modern," he writes, "some of
>them monstrous." Radical Islam, he argues, is just as modern a
>current as the free-market liberalism it is out to destroy. Its
>ideology, he suggests, is as much indebted to western
>counter-Enlightenment thought as to Muslim tradition.
>
>This is a fair case lamentably overstated. The Lewises of this world
>certainly need reminding that "modernisation" means the technology of
>genocide as well as CNN; deepening inequalities as well as liberal
>institutions. But Nazism, nationalism and radical Islam are not just
>modern. They are, rather, modernist -- mixtures of the modern and the
>archaic, the primitive and the progressive. Al-Qaida may use laptop
>computers, but it also believes in a theocratic state, not the most
>popular of doctrines in Brussels.
Modernism in a political sense contrasts with traditionalism.
Whereas most political institutions have evolved from traditions
supporting the belief in monotheism or polytheism, modernism has its
roots in the rejection of theism, either on Darwinian grounds, or on
the agnostic philosophies that followed Darwinism..
Modernism asserts that since nothing is currently known about god or
gods other than conjecture, societies ought to be built upon secular
rule structures that individuals agree to abide by, rather than
conjectures about divine wishes.
Thus modernism is a kind of pragmatic idealism whose time has not yet
arrived. Traditionalism produces global tribalism as different
national and religious traditions clash. Technology will eventually
make tribalism unworkable, so modernism remains a future alternative.
dev carter