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Literary Review
Unholy wars
TARIQ ALI'S book is history-telling par excellence. It engages the reader passionately and enables him to understand the nightmare of history from which we wake temporarily when the event occurs, only to return to amnesia as our short memories move on to grapple with the next upheaval. His engaging and compelling narrative blurs the Western and the opposing fundamentalisms, the two being inherently violent, emphasising that all ideals of democracy put across by the West are only a façade to cover the self interested motives of oil greed and economic and political expediency in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran.
We find ourselves at a historical moment, in the process of a major change. Democratisation of violence has become the rule of social behaviour and instead of embarking on a "New World Order" we are faced by economic and political instability, and racial and ethnic discord that rages around the globe. It is not difficult to conceive how the rise of terrorism or fundamentalism can turn into a grim threat to various societies in the Islamic world and the West. Clearly, that is the West Asian story, the Kosovo and the Bosnia story, and I assume that more and more it is the Indian story, and also the story of the western world with a vengeance.
For a long time Edward Said has suggested that the best way of removing terrorism is to remove its causes. Undoubtedly, it is born of a burning resentment of injustice or an overpowering vision of an independent and more prosperous future. The religious and social contexts largely differ, yet the premises are more or less similar. Though the nature of such uprisings may vary from country to country, they find common ground in religion and the rigidity of the concept of the infallibility of any interpretation coming from the religious authority which is at the head of any extremist movement. Paradoxically, the notion of tolerance, which all religions preach, is turned into intolerance within the confines of identity politics. The objective in these cases is ultimately that of gaining power and the establishment of a religious nation-state that would not hesitate to resort to even dogmatic violence to impose an orthodoxy to control the social and political life of the people. Any opposition to this would be considered with utmost intolerance as an act of blasphemy only to be castigated and brutally punished.
But what have the governments in different parts of the world done to counter such violence, which has been the cause of complete societies being devastated and thousands of citizens killed all over the world? The demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Kashmir problem, the massacres in Punjab, the killings by the Islamic Salvation Front, or the daily blood bath in West Asia and then the heartless attack on the Twin Towers give a loud indication of the serious dimensions of this ongoing threat which rides unabashedly on the ideology of the coexistence of orthodoxy and violence.
The important question that one must ask is: why do these people feel threatened, and in the face of what kind of opposition to their identity do they take steps which are defensive and compulsively fundamental? Are not the Christians accountable for the escalation of Muslim fundamentalism in Western Europe? It is not a question of putting down the threat issuing from a minority of Muslims but to understand the attitude of the majority of the white population which is indirectly responsible for the rise of terrorism. It could, in fact, be argued that there is a legitimacy to all such protests, and to understand them it becomes vital to go into the social, economic, and political causes. The indifferent attitude of all secular forces to the religious militancy appearing in Gaza or in Godhra is not simply the problem of the Muslims or the Hindu fundamentalists, but also a failing of the Christians in Europe or Hindus in India.
One of the key ways in which power operates in societies is by setting up groups and versions of the "other" who can be both excluded from the opportunities of support and well-being that society may offer, and scapegoated as the cause of social or political trouble. Theories of identity politics are crucial in preventing the position of the other being reduced to that of a victim. In studying the complexities of identity, one must understand that there is a dogmatic or orthodox strain in almost all religions, yet the Western liberal discourse constructs the idea of the orthodox or the superstitious East or a rabidly fundamental Islam, ignoring the independent actions, the humour, the humane strengths of marginalised groups which can emerge in their own right. The most important lesson to be learnt from analysing issues of moral and philosophic relevance to the problem of fundamentalism is to try and avoid reproducing the effects of discriminatory power in one's thought.
No one has the right of imposing one's views on the other. Attentions to the question of identity can alert us to a much broader range of viewing other religions which are not inflexible or as dogmatic as our own, and thus may not be held to be as formidable as they are made out to be. No one can, with any certainty, lay down one universal moral philosophy. The new communitarian thinking can be one way of accepting ethnic debates without sounding ethnocentric. The current crisis indicates just how irrational have been the ideals of those who have imagined the world to come together on the basis of a shared set of universal values overlooking that diversity of values and ideology is natural to various cultures.
However, the legitimation of violence or terror can be expediently "discovered" not only in scriptures of Judaism and Islam but equally within Christianity. It is thus important to reject the categories of the "west" and the "rest". As Umberto Eco maintains: "We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban". The acts of terrorism in history either by the Christians or the Muslims cannot be explained by peace loving people. Understandably, the path of Islam or Christianity does not allow such criminal anarchy. A bifurcated world is there not because of race or nation; it is there because of what Mark Twain argued about the double face of terror in France: one that brought the "horror of swift death" and the other that emerged from "lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak". The former "inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million". We often forget the latter as being probably one principal cause of violence and agitation.
The confusion of misunderstandings, crude stereotypes such as suicide bombers, terrorists and fundamentalists by which we define the "other", and parallel absences of self-knowledge, along with American hegemony are all the causes of present discontentment and violence. Brutal foreign policies of successive U.S. governments, support for client regimes, scramble for profit-led globalisation are loathed, not the nation. Islam has certainly been on the receiving end and the west has not tried to understand that most of the Muslims around the world are tolerant and peace loving. If we were to ignore the religious fanatics and the tyrants, we can easily decipher a "core of shared values". The attacks of 9/11 were certainly celebrated in the Islamic world, but the mourning and sympathy that they aroused in the same world was systematically blacked out by the media.
One kind of fundamentalism stands in opposition to another. The harsher it is, the more it comes in clash with its adversary. Thus is it enough to talk about "the bulging vein of dissent and eroticism in the history of Islam"? The alarmed memory of Islamic fundamentalism stood in direct confrontation with another fundamentalism when George Bush arrogantly and in the swashbuckling style of a cowboy, stressed a day after the Twin Tower calamity: "How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I just can't believe it because I know how good we are." On one side is imperial fundamentalism "determined to discipline the world" and on the other is religious fundamentalism. And Ali's project is to "create a space in the world of Islam and the West in which freedom of thought and imagination can be defended without fear of persecution or death".
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali, Rupa and Co., p.428, paperback, Rs. 295.
SHELLEY WALIA
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