LONDON, 16 March 2004 — I prayed fervently on Friday. Like millions of Muslims worldwide, I wanted the bombs in Madrid not to be the latest of too many attacks already by Islamist extremists. My hands were shaking as I held on to my little dua book with verses from the Qur’an and passed a tasbih (rosary) through my fingers, fast, as if rushing out litanies would maybe stop the next bomb from blasting the poor residents of Madrid: Invocations in vain.
Somewhere in Madrid another journalist — Gonzalo Suarez, of the Spanish newspaper La Razon — was feverishly hoping that this atrocity was not the work of Basque militants. That would be a terrible nightmare come true; it would disfigure everything.
It looks as if his wish came right and mine turned to ash. Although the Spanish government is still holding out that this could have been ETA wanting to wreak havoc on the country during the national elections, mounting evidence and new claims indicate that this probably was another spectacular, murderous display by Al-Qaeda.
Western Muslims like myself now enter another round of persecution and the contagion will spread. Generic hatred will be directed at anyone with brown skin, an understandable immediate response to what has just happened, but unjust nevertheless. I now understand perfectly how generations of Germans have been made to feel since the end of World War II, always guilty, always Nazis, always to be watched.
One lot of Muslim “leaders” will be forced under tremendous pressure to proclaim again and again that Islam does not condone these actions taken in the name of our God and our Prophet; the other lot will smile behind closed mosque doors and bless the killers whilst damning the West, where they, of course, have freedoms denied by their old rotten rulers. I don’t want to be made to feel abject and responsible for these monsters. The fact that I was born a Muslim does not make me a suspect, a tacit backer of these attacks. Americans living in Europe are not obliged to issue statements dissociating themselves from 1,500 cluster bombs dropped indiscriminately. I don’t want to have to show that I am “with” the West on all things because I am of the West.
The explosions in Madrid do not change my view that Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar were wrong to follow George Bush into an illegal war. How repellent to observe Blair using this bloodbath to deflect us away from the questions we will not stop asking him. His apocalyptic warnings sound like a tin with a rattling bead.
What will it take for the world to understand that you can be a Muslim, that you can feel a profound sense of injustice at the way Muslims are treated by powerful nations and their own leaders, and still, in spite of this, you would never, ever forgive the killings carried out by these new militant groups of Muslims around the world? How can we support what they do? Every carnage leads to further suffering for other Muslims. They carry out these Madrid attacks just when the moral weight was shifting as prisoners who arrived back from Guantanamo Bay started to describe their horrendous treatment by US and UK interrogators. Those who are innocent and still in Cuba will go through even more hell now, as will the other uncounted prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, Israel, and elsewhere.
Muslim asylum-seekers and migrant workers from incurably sick societies will find it even more impossible to get a fair hearing or chance. Europe has recently turned nastily xenophobic. The Madrid tragedy will validate this hatred and indifference. Last year, when I was lecturing in Spain, there was already much anxiety about Muslim immigrants, most of whom are an indispensable part of the modern Spanish economy. For as long as this terrifying, invisible gang carries on such bombings there will never be any reform in any Muslim state or territory and the most right-wing, hard-line governments are bound to get elected across Europe and in the US.
For me personally there is another deep sorrow. I love Spain, the place which locates my faith and my identity in Europe, for better and worse. The Moorish conquest of Spain was as morally questionable as the Spanish and British empires, but scholars agree that Moors were responsible for centuries of enlightenment. Every year British Muslims flood to Andalusia to reaffirm that we were once truly civilized, able to live in peace with all religions, brilliant artists and architects.
They took that away this week: Our solace, our connection with the continent we are trying so hard to claim as ours. How will I show my face again to my Spanish friends? How can I explain that this horror is terribly bad news for good Muslims too? How can they understand this, when grief and blood are washing through their lovely land?