Meaning and Motivation:

The Worship of Unreason:

September 11 and the Forces of

Theocratic Fascism

Abstract

Almost from the very moment that the second plane crashed into the south tower, a toxic alliance emerged to denounce America for its complicity in bringing about the attacks. On the Christian right, Jerry Falwell (in solidarity with comrade bin Laden) declared that the suicide-murder of 3, 019 civilians was a judgment from God against the sin and permissiveness of American society. And on the intellectual left, Noam Chomsky (echoing the egregious Jean Baudrillard) announced, with heartfelt insouciance, that the ‘events’ of that day constituted a reprisal for the crimes and injustices of the American Empire. Since I do not wish to question the Word of the God (expertly ventriloquized by Falwell), I shall content myself with questioning the profane words of Chomsky instead. Chomsky’s exegesis continues to occupy a position of some prominence among the bien pensant liberal-left.

There’s a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. At least, that’s part of the job. However, you must have noticed how often certain “complexities” are introduced as a means of obfuscation. Here it becomes necessary to ply with glee the celebrated razor of old Occam, dispose of unnecessary assumptions, and proclaim that, actually, things are less complicated than they appear. Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.

Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001a: 47)

Wolfish Smiles

Consider the following three quotations (the first is from Neal Ascherson (2001), the second Martin Amis (2002a) and the third Christopher Hitchens (2002a)):

1. Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you.

2. Whenever that sense of heavy incredulity seems about to dissipate, I still find, an emergent detail will eagerly replenish it: the “pink mist” in the air, caused by the explosion of the falling bodies; the fact that the second plane, on impact, was travelling at nearly 600mph, a speed that would bring it to the point of disintegration.

3. Everyone has his own indelible image of September 11. Mine is in part imaginary: It involves picturing the wolfish smiles on the faces of the second crew of hijackers as United Airlines Flight 175 screamed toward Manhattan and saw the flames and smoke already billowing from the first World Trade Center tower. With what delight they must have ramped up the speed of their plane, crammed with human cargo, and smashed into the second civilian target.

Of these images, it is the third which is the more terrifyingly evocative. Exhilaration not desperation, one imagines, is what the killers felt in the brief moments before impact. September 11, indisputably, was an act of extraordinary will and courage and self-sacrifice. But it was also an act of unfathomable cruelty and violence and stupidity.

Terror and Empire

September 11, asserts Noam Chomsky, was a riposte for the crimes and injustices of American imperial statecraft. From this perspective, the perpetrators were the oppressed and exploited subjects of the Empire, inspired by an instinct for human freedom and solidarity. ‘Nothing’, Chomsky graciously concedes, ‘can justify crimes such as those of September 11’. ‘But’, he goes on, ‘we can think of the United States as an “innocent victim” only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret’ (Chomsky 2001a: 35). The training, arming and financing of Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network; the systematic bombing of the civilian population of Iraq; and long-standing support for Israel’s military occupation of Palestine: it is precisely these actions, Chomsky insists, that are ‘the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings’ (Chomsky 2001b).

Chomsky is not alone is uttering these dangerous thoughts: indeed his security-detail includes some of the most pre-eminent writers on the intellectual and political left. Tariq Ali, for example, writes: ‘What made them propagandists of the deed? The bombing of Iraq, economic sanctions, the presence of American Forces on Saudi soil. Politicians in the West have turned a blind eye to this, as they have to the occupation of Palestine and the crimes of Israel. Without profound change in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden, dead or alive, is of little significance.’ (Ali 2001)

Susan Sontag similarly reflects:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. (Sontag 2001)

No less forthright is Alexander Cockburn:

What moved those kamikaze Muslims to embark, some many months ago, on the training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Was it the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin Laden? The dream of a world in which all men wear untrimmed beards and women have to stay at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents? I doubt it. If I had to cite what steeled their resolve, the list would surely include the exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Lesley Stahl. Albright was maintaining that sanctions had yielded important concessions from Saddam Hussein. “We have heard that half a million children have died,” Stahl said. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think this is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.” They read that exchange in the Middle East. It was infamous all over the Arab world. I’ll bet the Sept. 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So would it be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright down to the ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of that exchange and point out that the price turned out to include that awful mortuary as well? Was that price worth it too, Mrs. Albright? (Cockburn 2001)

And this is Gore Vidal’s beautifully realized verdict:

Once we meditate upon the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world, while relying upon pretexts that, for sheer flimsiness, might have even given Hitler pause when justifying some of his most baroque lies, one begins to understand why Osama struck at us from abroad in the name of 1 billion Muslims whom we have encouraged, through our own preemptive acts of war as well as relentless demonization of them through media, to regard us in – how shall I put it? – less than an amiable light. (Vidal 2002: 45)

To summarize, then: the events of September 11 constituted a wholly intelligible, if rather brutal, attack on American imperial hegemony, motivated not by a hatred for western democracy and its values of pluralism, but rather by a deep and longstanding loathing of the exploitative and coercive imperial relations with which its leading state representative directly or indirectly colluded.

This interpretation is – how shall I put it? - astonishingly misconceived. Far from being an assault on American imperialism, the suicide bombings were in fact a grotesque and spectacular manifestation of what might be called a civil war within the societies of the Islamic world. September 11 was a declaration and a warning, issued by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. It was a declaration of unbending religious piety, an assertion of fanatical primacy, addressed to all Muslims of secular temperament: this is how we will defeat you.

What motivates Al Qaeda, evidently, is not the plight of their oppressed brothers and (still less) sisters, but rather the exhilarations of a primeval theocratic fundamentalism. Its principal objective (for the moment at least) is the creation of an Islamic republic, not the ‘progressive’ realignment of American foreign policy.

Islamic Fascism in Theory and Practice

To suppose, as Chomsky does, that the Al Qaeda terrorists must be acting to resist oppression or to utter a cry of help on behalf of the denizens of Palestine is not only misleading; it is also to miss the crucial and unchallengeable point: that Al Qaeda is essentially a fascist sectarian religious cult. Al Qaeda hates ‘the west’ not for what it does, but for what it strives to be: secular, cosmopolitan and democratic. These values represent a systematic affront to bin Laden’s world-view; when they are professed by Muslims it is ceases to be an affront and becomes something else: a direct incitement to murder.

This argument has been set out most powerfully by Christopher Hitchens. ‘Here’, he wrote of September 11, was an ‘unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated’:

On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. (Hitchens 2002a)

This confrontation, Hitchens argues, began not with the destruction of the World Trade Center, but on February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie (see Hitchens 2003). Rushdie’s offence was to write a novel, The Satanic Verses, for which he received a life sentence and a death sentence. A large bounty, offered in public, for the solicitation of murder, by the theocratic leader of a nation, against an author in another country, for the offence of composing a work of fiction. This, Hitchens observes, was the most frontal possible challenge to civilization’s essential principle: free expression. It was also, he says, a warning about the lethal global menace of theocratic terrorism. (Rushdie’s Japanese translator, let us not forget, was murdered (and his body viciously mutilated) by client-operatives of the Iranian secret services; and, later, his Norwegian publisher was executed by elements of the same network.)

For Hitchens, the September 11 assault was the starkest embodiment yet of that menace: ‘Here’, he wrote, ‘was the most frightful enemy – theocratic barbarism – in plain view’ (Hitchens 2001b):

The people who destroyed the World Trade Center, and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to free Gaza. They are fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi. They didn’t just destroy the temple of modernity, they used heavy artillery to shatter ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan earlier this year, and in Egypt have plotted to demolish the Pyramids and the Sphinx because they are un-Islamic and profane. (Hitchens 2001c)

Just look, Hitchens implores us, at what they do to their own societies. Should we be in any doubt as to what the militants of the new jihad do to their own societies, Hitchens, in yet another article, provides us with the following example:

In Nigeria a young woman sits holding a baby and awaiting a sentence of death. The baby is the main, if not indeed the sole, evidence against her. The baby is proof positive that the young woman has engaged in sexual intercourse. The form that the appointed death sentence will take is death by stoning, death in public, death that will make a crowd of participants into killers and the baby into a motherless child.

Why is this happening? It is happening because the Islamic forces in the northern regions of Nigeria want to impose sharia law, the primitive Muslim code of mutilation and retribution. Do the religious authorities propose to inflict this code only on members of their own congregation, who share the supposed values and taboos? No they do not. They wish to have it imposed also on Christians and unbelievers. This they already do in the regions of Nigeria that have fallen under their control.

But they also want to extend sharia to the whole of Nigeria, where Islam is still a minority religion… (Hitchens 2002b)

‘Now perhaps somebody will tell me’, Hitchens writes, ‘how this – the stoning, the disregard of pluralism, the stupidity and the viciousness – connects to the situation in Gaza, or would help alleviate the plight of the Palestinians’. ‘Quite obviously’, he asserts, the clerics in Nigeria ‘are doing this because they think they can’. He goes on:

Their counterparts in Malaysia and Indonesia, who want to declare absolutist Islamic republics in countries celebrated for their confessional and ethnic diversity, are not reacting to any “grievance” or suffering from any oppression. They simply think it obvious that the true word of god is contained in one book, and that further reflection is not only unnecessary but profane. (Hitchens 2002b)

‘And this’, Hitchens warns us, ‘is precisely, now, our problem’:

The Taliban and its surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and they deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think, not possible. (I say “fortunately” because I am also convinced that such coexistence is not desirable.) (Hitchens 2001d)

In no sense, then, can it be said that the Al Qaeda terrorists are heroically avenging the crimes and injustices of the American Empire:

The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face…What they abominate about “the West”, to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. (Hitchens, 2001e, italics in original)

What they resent, that is, is not the flaws of the United States, but the United States at its very best. Indeed, they ‘are not even “terrorists” so much as nihilists: at war with the very idea of modernity and the related practices of pluralism and toleration’ (Hitchens 2001f).

For all the polemical vigor with which he presses his case, Hitchens is not exaggerating when he says that the Al Qaeda warriors are the protagonists of a singularly repressive and fanatical ideology: Islamic fascists, not anti-imperialists.

‘The word Fascism’, wrote Orwell in 1946, ‘has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”’ (Orwell 1994: 353, italics in original). Perhaps. But, as a description of Al Qaeda’s ideology, the term feels not merely right but penetratingly accurate: it is, one notices, illiberal and anti-democratic, expansionist, fanatically violent and deeply paranoid and delusional.

At the center of this ideology is the belief that Muslims are the sole recipients and custodians of God’s truth, which it is their duty to bring to the rest of the world. This is bin Laden, in an interview with John Miller of ABC News in May 1998:

Our call is the call of Islam that was revealed to Mohammed. It is a call to all mankind. We have been entrusted with good cause to follow in the footsteps of the Messenger and to communicate his message to all nations. It is an invitation that we extend to all the nations to embrace Islam, the religion that calls for justice, mercy and fraternity among all nations, not differentiating between black and white or between red and yellow except with respect to their devotedness. All people who worship Allah, not each other, are equal before Him. We are entrusted to spread this message and to extend that call to all the people. (Miller 1998)

What is distinctive about bin Laden’s understanding – one might say perversion[1] – of Islam is that this obligation must express itself in the form of armed struggle, or, as bin Laden conceives it, jihad. This struggle is directed against two types of enemy: infidels and apostates. Of these, it is the latter which forms the immediate, if not central, object of Al Qaeda’s hate. This should not surprise us. According to Sharia law, the apostate or traitor is far worse than the unbeliever. As Bernard Lewis explains: ‘The unbeliever has not seen the light, and there is always hope that he may eventually see it…[But] the renegade is one who has known the true faith, however briefly, and abandoned it. For this offence there is no human forgiveness, and according to the overwhelming majority of the jurists, the renegade must be put to death.’ (Lewis 2003: 40-1) One might say, then, that bin Laden’s hatred of apostates is obsequiously conventional, if wildly fanatical, in character. ‘They shall all be wiped out’ (Miller 1998), he declares, which of course stands in direct contrast to the fate of the believers, for whom eternal paradise is promised. Not only is jihad bloody and exhilarating and honorable; it must also be relentlessly prosecuted: it will end only with the creation of the worldwide Caliphate, under which every person will either adopt the Muslim faith or submit to its rule.

The contours of bin Laden’s ideology become even clearer when we place it within the context of the wider Islamist tradition on which it draws. Perhaps the most influential thinker in that tradition is Sayyid Qutb. The central theme in Qutb’s writings is this: the spiritual emptiness of modern western society. Western culture, he argued, had reached a point of unbearable crisis. Everywhere, man was ill at ease and alienated from his own nature. Modern life, he said, was sliding inexorably downward. For Qutb, the United States was at the forefront of this collapse. Everything in America, he wrote, even religion, was sinful and corrupt. The cause of this crisis, he observed, was not the denial of God, but rather the failure to acknowledge his universal and absolute sovereignty. In liberal society, this manifested itself most clearly in the ‘desolate separation’ - Qutb’s expression - between Church and society.

This was not only a diagnosis; it was also a warning. Qutb’s fear was that the degeneracy of the west might engulf the Muslim world. Indeed the contagion, he despaired, was already spreading. It began with the capitulation of the Ottoman general Kemal Atatürk in 1922. According to Lewis, ‘Even as he fought to liberate Turkey from Western domination, he took the first steps toward the adoption of Western or, as he preferred to put it, modern ways’ (Lewis 2003: xvii). One of his first acts, in November 1922, was to abolish the sultanate. ‘The Ottoman sovereign’, Lewis goes on, ‘was not only a sultan, the ruler of a specific state; he was also widely recognized as the caliph, the head of all Sunni Islam, and the last in a line of rulers that dated back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E.’ (Lewis 2003: xvii). The most decisive act, however, came in March 1924: the Turks abolished the caliphate, and with it nearly thirteen centuries of Islamic tradition came to a humiliating end. When Qutb wrote, with characteristic overstatement, of ‘a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim countries…an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions, and organizations’ (Cited in Berman 2003: 92), we know exactly what event he was alluding to. Islam, in Qutb’s eyes, had come under assault from forces outside the Muslim world, and, more alarmingly, from forces within it. It was the religious obligation of every Muslim, he urged, to actively resist that double assault. This sharply reflected his belief that Islam requires of its believers not merely an all-encompassing loyalty, but also a revolutionary practice on its behalf. He wrote of a Muslim ‘vanguard’, for which victory would be certain, and defeat unthinkable. The aim of this ‘vanguard’ was to create an Islamic state. ‘The Koran’, Qutb tells us, ‘was bestowed from on high to Muhammad, God’s Messenger, so that he might, by means of it, establish a state, bring a community into being, organize a society, cultivate minds and consciences and set moral values’ (see Berman 2003: 94).

The ambition, in essence, was to resurrect the pure Islamic society, from before the period of decline. And, from there, to extend Islamic law to every facet of the globe – which was Mohammed’s ambition, also.

To this end, lives will have to be sacrificed. But there is honour as well as immortality in sacrifice, as Qutb makes clear:

Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.

To all intents and purposes, those people may very well appear lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial physical means alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth, and persistence, while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete inertia and lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life…

There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live. (See Berman 2003: 101-2)

How consoling it is to know, we may reflect, that Mohammed Atta is still thriving among us.

Qutb’s analysis, we can confidently say, embodied two key emotions: fear and loathing. What he feared, clearly, was the perversion of Islam; and what he especially loathed was the theory, not the contradictory practice, of secular cosmopolitan modernity. Allied to this was the political ambition of establishing an Islamic state, and ultimately a worldwide Islamic caliphate. Qutb was a revolutionary as well as a warrior.

What is perhaps most striking about Qutb’s thinking is the extraordinary degree to which it echoes the spirit and character of the two main ideological cataclysms of the twentieth century: Stalinism and Fascism. Paul Berman vividly expresses this point in his book Terror and Liberalism (Berman 2003):

There was always a people of God, whose peaceful and wholesome life had been undermined. They were the proletariat or the Russian masses (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the children of the Roman wolf (for Mussolini’s Fascists); or the Spanish Catholics and the Warriors of Christ the King (for Franco’s Phalange); or the Aryan race (for the Nazis). There were always the subversive dwellers in Babylon, who trade commodities from around the world and pollute society with their abominations. They were the bourgeoisie and the kulaks (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the Freemasons and cosmopolitans (for the Fascists and Phalangists); and, sooner or later, they were always the Jews (for the Nazis, and in a lesser degree for the other fascists, and eventually for Stalin, too).

The subversive dwellers in Babylon were always aided by Satanic forces from beyond, and the Satanic forces were always pressing on the people of God from all sides. They were the forces of capitalist encirclement (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the pincer pressure of Soviet and American technology, squeezing the life out of Germany (in Heidegger’s Nazi interpretation); or the international Jewish conspiracy (again for the Nazis). Yet, no matter how putrid and oppressive was the present, the reign of God always beckoned in the future. It was going to be the Age of the Proletariat (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the resurrected Roman Empire (for the Fascists); or explicitly the Reign of Christ the King (for the Spanish Phalange); or the Third Reich, meaning the resurrected Roman Empire in an Aryan version (for the Nazis). (Berman 2003: 48-9)

To which Berman adds a further point of comparison: ‘The coming reign was always going to be pure – a society cleansed of its pollutants and abominations.’ (p. 49) I need not quote Berman further, because the parallels will be clear to everyone.

John Gray articulates the same point but in a different way: ‘radical Islam’, he argues, submits itself to a ‘uniquely modern myth’ (p. 3). Like the Communists and the Nazis, ‘radical’ Islamists ‘are convinced that they can remake the human condition’, and that ‘history is a prelude to a new world’ (p. 3).[2]

None of this, however, is to deny that Al Qaeda’s moral and political philosophy is essentially primeval in inspiration. Certainly, Al Qaeda is very much a phenomenon of late modernity, a response to what Ernest Gellner calls the ‘uprootings’ of globalization (see esp. Gellner 1992). But it is wholly misleading to suppose that the ideas to which it is committed are, as Gray suggests, ‘quintessentially modern’ (p 26). Far from it. For all its apparent symmetry with Nazism and Stalinism, Al Qaeda’s ideology is explicitly and self-avowedly anti-modern in nature: resistant not only to the principle of secularism, but also to any practice not (supposedly) sanctioned or ‘anticipated’ in the Koran.

This ideology is strongly present in all of bin Laden’s recent pronouncements and provocations. Consider, for example, the 1998 ‘Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders’. (This was published in London on February 23 by the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, bearing the signatures of bin Laden and the leaders of Jihad groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.) Among the opening paragraphs we find the following proclamation: ‘Since God laid down the Arabian peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with its seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these Crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, crowding its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food.’ (Cited in Lewis 2003: xxiv-xxv) The declaration then goes on to identify three main points of grievance:

First – For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.

Though some in the past have disputed the true nature of this occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety have now recognized it.

There is no better proof of this than the continuing American aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from Arabia despite its rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories for this purpose but are subjugated.

Second – Despite the immense destruction inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader Jewish alliance, and in spite of the appalling number of dead, exceeding a million, the Americans nevertheless, in spite of all this, are trying once more to repeat this dreadful slaughter. It seems that the long blockade following after a fierce war, the dismemberment and the destruction are not enough for them. So they come again today to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third – While the purposes of the Americans in these wars are religious and economic, they also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it.

There is no better proof of all this than their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest of the neighbouring Arab states, and their attempt to dismember all the states of the region, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Sudan, into petty states, whose division and weakness would ensure the survival of Israel and the continuation of the calamitous Crusader occupation of the lands of Arabia. (See Lewis 2003: xxv-xxvi)

These crimes, says bin Laden and his fellow signatories, constitute a ‘clear declaration of war by the Americans against God, His Prophet, and the Muslims. In such a situation, it is the unanimous opinion of the ulema throughout the centuries that when enemies attack the Muslim lands, Jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim’ (see Lewis 2003: xxvi). The declaration concludes with the injunction to ‘kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military’. This, it states, ‘is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim’ (see Lewis 2003: xxvii).

Of the three areas of grievance listed in the declaration, it is the first and the second – Arabia and Iraq - which are the most deeply felt. I quote Lewis’s explanation:

For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget, the Holy Land par excellence is Arabia and especially the Hijaz and its two holy cities – Mecca, where the Prophet was born, and Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; the country whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and became its standard-bearers. The Prophet Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did his immediate successors, the caliphs, in the headship of the community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq, and its capital, Baghdad, was the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compare in significance with Arabia and Iraq. (Lewis 2003: xxviii-xxix)

The chief cause of bin Laden’s resentment, it seems, is the not the arbitrary and repressive way in which the United States exercises its power in the Middle East, but its very presence in the Middle East. This is a theological grievance, not a political one. Moreover (and if you will excuse the tautology), it reflects a sentiment which is fiercely indifferent to dialogue or compromise. And when bin Laden does contrive to mention overtly political grievances, the shadow of religion is never far from the foreground. Robin Blackburn exaggerates only very slightly when he writes that ‘when bin Laden refers to “peace in Palestine” what he probably means is driving all Jews, Christians and atheists into the sea’ (Blackburn 2001). We can indeed be certain that no settlement for the Palestinians or the Chechens or the Kashmiris or the Bosnians would have appeased bin Laden’s barbarous piety.

The Clash Within Civilizations

Consider the following:

1. On April 25, 1967, the Syrian army magazine Jaysh al-Sha‘b (‘The People’s Army’) published an article by Second Lieutenant Ibrahim Khalas, entitled ‘The Means of Creating a New Arab Man’. ‘God, religions, feudalism, capital, and all the values which prevailed in the pre-existing society’ are no more than ‘mummies in the museums of history’, Khalas proclaimed. Arab society and civilization, he insisted, must recognize that

There is only one value: absolute faith in the new man of destiny…who relies only on himself and on his own contribution to humanity…because he knows that his inescapable end is death and nothing beyond death…no heaven and no hell…We have no need of men who kneel and beg for grace and pity…’ (Cited in Lewis 1973: 13)

Here is how Lewis describes the reaction to Khalas’s article:

This was the first time that such sentiments had appeared in print in any of the revolutionary Arab states. The result was electrifying…In the face of mounting tension and hostility...the author of the article and the editors of the journal were arrested. The following day [May 6] the semi-official newspaper al-Thawra (The Revolution) proclaimed its respect for religion, and shortly afterwards it was announced that the article was planted by the C.I.A., and the resistance concerted with “the Americans, the English, the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Zionists, and Selim Hatum (a Druze opponent of the regime). The troubles continued, and on 11 May the author and editors were sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment. (Lewis 1973: 13-4)

2. On November 20, 1979, a group of 1,000 or so Islamic extremists seized the Great Mosque in Mecca, and held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. ‘The aim of this spectacular attack’, explains Gilles Kepel, ‘was to protest against the corrupt rulers in Riyadh, who, they said, worshipped no god but the rial (the currency of Saudi Arabia)’ (Kepel 1994: 29). After a ‘murderous struggle the attackers, who had taken refuge inside the mosque, were captured and subsequently executed’ (p. 29).

3. On October 6, 1981, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Cairo by militants of the Islamist group Al-Jihad (‘The Holy War’). ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, the group’s ideologue, ‘rationalized’ the act in the following terms:

It is our duty to concentrate on our Islamic cause, and that is the establishment first of all of God’s law in our own country and causing the word of God to prevail. There is no doubt that the first battlefield of the jihad is the extirpation of these infidel leaderships and their replacement by a perfect Islamic order, and from this will come the release of our energies. (Cited in Lewis 2003: 135)

In April 1982 Faraj was executed on the charge of planning and instigating Sadat’s murder.

What, if anything, connects all these episodes? Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on the response to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, provides us with an answer:

For a long time now, a major fissure has been opening in the Muslim world…To speak very roughly and approximately, Muslim societies are undergoing a general crisis of adaptation to modernity and to ‘the West’. Some states, like Turkey and Egypt and Algeria, are faced with violent internal challenges to secularism, because secularism has been the guise either of corruption or of arbitrary rule. Others, like the Gulf States and Pakistan and Indonesia, have seen Islamic rhetoric used as the excuses for corruption and arbitrary rule, and have still faced rebellions from those who claim to be more truly Islamic. Among the most secular and pluralist Muslim populations, which are probably the Bosnians and the Palestinians, maltreatment at the hands of non-Muslims has caused some to value secularism more, and some to draw the opposite conclusion and value Muslim principles more dearly. (Hitchens [1999] 2000: 111-2)

That is how the world looked in 1999. Since then the crisis to which Hitchens refers has become even more acute, culminating in the increasingly violent clash between secular Muslims on the one side and Islamic reactionaries on the other.

On September 10, 2001, it would have been true to say that nothing more vividly illustrated the depth and intensity of that clash than the Rushdie ‘controversy’. Undeniably, this was a civilizational clash. But it was a clash within civilizations not, pace Huntington (Huntington 1997), between two opposing ones. On February 14, 1989, Rushdie had indeed become world-historical (see esp. Amis 1993: 170-8).

The Muslim world is emphatically not, as Huntington would suggest, at war against ‘the West’, but, on the contrary, with itself. The causes and manifestations of this war are formidably complex (see Kepel 1995, 2002; Riesebrodt 1993; and Bruce 2000). What is clear, however, is that the September 11 terror attack was a direct consequence of its prosecution. Hitchens expresses this argument as follows:

There is a civil war raging within the Muslim world, where many believers do not wish to live under sharia any more than I do. This war has been at an incandescent pitch in Algeria, for example, for more than a decade. It is smouldering but still toxic in Iran, in Egypt, among the Palestinians and now in some of the major cities of “the West”.

But the extremist and fundamentalist side in that war has evolved a new tactic. By exporting the conflict and staging it in Europe and America, it hopes both to intimidate and impress those who are wavering. This simple point was made, you may remember, in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania about 12 months ago, and we can be entirely certain that it will be rammed home to us again. (Hitchens 2002b)

Should one require further supporting evidence for this position, one need go no further than the assessment set out in Fred Halliday’s excellent book Two Hours that Shook the World (2002). Huntington’s thesis systematically fails to consider ‘the most important cause of the events of 11 September…namely’:

the enormous, long and very violent clash within the Muslim world between those who want to reform and secularize and those whose power is threatened or who want to take power in the name of fundamentalism. It is not, as Huntington asserts, that Islam has “bloody frontiers”…It is rather that within Muslim societies a war has been in train for decades, and found on 11 September a dramatic transnational expression…The goal [of the fundamentalists] is…to seize power, political, social and gendered, within their own societies. Their greatest foe is secularism: this is the internal clash that led to the World Trade Center atrocity.

That, to be clear, was Halliday (Halliday 2002: 46-7, italics in original), not Hitchens.

Moral Equivalence

This analysis is, of course, cursory and incomplete. It does not, for example, even mention the devastatingly important fact that the CIA, the ISI and Saudi Arabia’s security apparatus collectively incubated the very movements against which the United States is now campaigning (see esp. Cooley 1999; and Rashid 2001). But it does, I trust, go some way towards refuting the claim that the perpetrators of the September 11 attack were acting on behalf of the victims of American statecraft. The perpetrators, indeed, were the clones of the Empire, not its maligned subjects.

It also invites us to reconsider the idea that there is a moral equivalence between the violence of Al Qaeda and the recent military actions of the United States. We might, for example, attempt to compare the events of September 11 with the United States bombing of Khartoum: this is Chomsky’s preferred comparative case study. The bombing, he reports, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. This is because Clinton’s target – the Al Shifa pharmaceutical facility - produced over 60 per cent of the human and veterinary medicine in Sudan (see esp. Hitchens 1999: 87-103). Chomsky states that ‘Proportional to population, this is as if the bin Laden network, in a single attack on the United States, caused hundreds of thousands of people - many of them children - to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases, though the analogy is unfair because a rich country, not under sanctions and denied aid, can easily replenish its stocks and respond appropriately to such an atrocity…’ (Chomsky 2001c).

Chomsky’s analogy, however, contrives to obscure the following incontrovertible fact: those murdered in the September 11 suicide bombings were not (to use an obscene euphemism) ‘collateral damage’. Quite the reverse: their murders were the direct object of the ‘operation’. Or to put the matter differently: the terrorists of September 11 intended to murder thousands of innocent people; this can scarcely be said of Clinton’s bombing of Khartoum, for all its moral depravity and catastrophic consequences. We might also add that Clinton did not boast of having taught the Sudanese civilians a lesson; nor, furthermore, were his missiles full of passengers.

Chomsky’s position, it seems to me, is a uniquely poisonous version of what Orwell had in mind when he wrote the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. (Orwell 1994: 312)

The attempt to enforce a moral equivalence between the military actions of Al Qaeda and those of the United States not only discloses a form of denial about the totalitarian and fanatical character of Al Qaeda; it also discloses a masochistic contempt for our own society.

Conclusion: Whose Side Are We On?

September 11, as Amis wrote of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ (Amis 1993: 171), ‘feels rivetingly central and exemplary’: a resounding symbol or vector of a wider civilizational conflict. We are, indeed, engaged in a momentous and defining war: not, as G. W. Bush stipulates, against ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’, but against the forces of theocratic fascism. Moreover, this is a war about which no one (not even comrade Chomsky) can hope to be neutral, because no one (not even the heroic exiles of Ravello) can escape its vertiginously global reach: we are all combatants now. This, to put the matter at its starkest, is a war for civilization, against theocratic tyranny and violence and intolerance. It is – and must be – a ‘war’ because no dialogue is possible with the enemy: theocratic fascists, by definition, are intransigently opposed to compromise. ‘Fascism means war’, as the left used to say (at a time when it could indeed contrive a good slogan).

What clearly exhilarates Hitchens is the strongly internationalist character of this engagement: to fight theocratic fascism is not only to defend ourselves against a lethal foe; it is also to extend our solidarity to those for whom the threat of theocratic violence is most acute.

In the closing months of 1993 a range of thinkers responded, in Foreign Affairs, to Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, published in the same journal earlier that year (Huntington 1993). This is from Fouad Ajami’s contribution:

He [Huntington] has underestimated the tenacity of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these ways against great odds, always perilously close to the abyss, the darkness never far. (Ajami 1993)

And this is from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s:

Indubitably, important social, cultural and political differences exist between Muslim and Judeo-Christian civilizations. But the most important and explosive differences involving Muslims are found within the Muslim world - between persons, parties and governments who are reasonably moderate, nonexpansionist and nonviolent and those who are anti-modern and anti-Western, extremely intolerant, expansionist and violent. (Kirkpatrick 1993)

It is to precisely our secular, democratic and nonviolent allies in the Muslim world whom we must now show our solidarity. By declaring our allegiance with secularism and the trangressive forces of modernity we not only find ourselves on the right side of the argument, but also – we must hope – on the right side of history too.