Black Tuesday: The View From Islamabad

Samuel Huntington's evil desire for a clash between civilizations may well

come true after Tuesday's terror attacks. The crack that divided Muslims

everywhere from the rest of the world is no longer a crack. It is a gulf,

that if not bridged, will surely destroy both.

For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing

jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with

other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people

jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than

be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims also

saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less sharply. The

heads of states of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein excepted, condemned

the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Britain,

Europe, and Australia have made impassioned denunciations and pleaded for

the need to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and extremists.

But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because

this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions. One

would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of

joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity

of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking. Similarly, Pakistan

Television, operating under strict control of the government, is

attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here

too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university

here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from

the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV

sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the WTC came crashing down. It

makes one feel sick from inside.

A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political

behavior have broken down and new ones are yet to defined. Catapulted into

a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events,

as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that is

moral, and not based upon considerations of power and practicality. This

requires beginning with a clearly defined moral supposition - the

fundamental equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must

proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of which is

not interchangeable.

Before all else, Black Tuesday's mass murder must be condemned in the

harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without

seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it,

and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the

perpetrators. The demented, suicidical, fury of the attackers led to

heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the

world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal

condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by

which people can communicate.

Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is

known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers,

and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted

by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings

capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with

nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that?

Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to

understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay

this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably

the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as

the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism"

and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance, fortifications,

and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea of missile defence

systems. But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed with no more than

knives and box-cutters have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all

this means precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be

protected - a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a building or

two, but all of Manhattan. Therefore, the simple logic of survival says

that the chances of survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.

Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidical terrorist can be

purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their

breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of

humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower,

indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their

tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme

arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily

dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation

forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and

Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of

70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable

of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed,

humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty

of a doomed people".

It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from

the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIAs

misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we,

the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be

learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?

If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then the

future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell, has

promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what

end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash

carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring

peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist attack.

This not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other

such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But

indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing

hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan

will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its favour the

world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and promote

never-ending tit-for-tat killings.

Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with

the people of the world, especially with those that it has grieviously

harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that

protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its

definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect

international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological

weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing through NMD, pay

its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of

globalization.

But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour.

There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living in

the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch-conservative head

of Pakistan's Jamat-i-Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before

an American audience in Washington with high praise for a "pluralist

society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach

my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious

minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries. One hopes that the

misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms

are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question

as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does not,

whose responsibility it will be.

The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large,

chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally

unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and makes

living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious ethical

questions about drawing upon the resources of what is perceived to be

another society, for which one has hostile feelings. This is not an

argument for doing away with one's Muslim identity. But, without closer

interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all,

survival of the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference

between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from within

jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the Muslim

community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are fair game because

of bad US government policies has no business being there.

To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake

will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror,

to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone

Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in

deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to hand over

charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular species is far

from guaranteed.



The author is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.