[wordup] Rushdie: Yes, This Is About Islam

[Adam Shand]

Via: The Eristocracy <Eristocracy at merrymeet.com>
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02RUSH.html?ex=1005732965&ei=1&en6d5db0a92740a631

November 2, 2001
Yes, This Is About Islam
By SALMAN RUSHDIE

LONDON -- "This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been
repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring
reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if
the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't
afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.

The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this
isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of
Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords
and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some
mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three
Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?

Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that
"the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban
leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological
know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why
does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand to
be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a deaf
ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own spokesmen
(there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are
warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the talk about
American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia if
some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the
present discontents?

Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that
mean? After all, most religious belief isn't very theological. Most
Muslims are not profound Koranic analysts. For a vast number of
"believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way,
not only for the fear of God - the fear more than the love, one suspects -
but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that include
their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of
"their" women; the sermons delivered by their mullahs of choice; a
loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music,
godlessness and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the
prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over -
"Westoxicated" - by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim
women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in
growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief." These
Islamists - we must get used to this word, "Islamists," meaning those who
are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from
the more general and politically neutral "Muslim" - include the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic Salvation
Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite revolutionaries of
Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of
their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders,
"infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed
remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of
modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists' project
is turned not only against the West and "the Jews," but also against their
fellow Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's little love lost
between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim
nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations'
resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this
self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a
fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to
blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United States.
Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room here to
rehearse the geopolitics of the cold war and America's frequently damaging
foreign policy "tilts," to use the Kissinger term, toward (or away from)
this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved-of) nation-state, or
America's role in the installation and deposition of sundry unsavory
leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to ask a question that is no less
important now: Suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not
primarily America's fault, that we are to blame for our own failings? How
would we understand them then? Might we not, by accepting our own
responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to solve them for
ourselves?

Many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the Muslim
world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim
voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist hijacking of
their religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a k a Cat
Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today's pussycats.

An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is in
us, is from us." A British Muslim writes, "Islam has become its own
enemy." A Lebanese friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that in the
aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, public criticism of Islamism has
become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for
a Reformation in the Muslim world.

I'm reminded of the way noncommunist socialists used to distance
themselves from the tyrannical socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless, the
first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If Islam
is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until
they swell into a roar. Many of them speak of another Islam, their
personal, private faith.

The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its
depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in
order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the
terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on
its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take
on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based,
and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

Salman Rushdie is the author, most recently, of "Fury: A Novel."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company