LONDON, 16 November 2004 — When Pakistan President Gen. Musharraf warned that a new Iron Curtain could fall between the Muslim world and the West, he was voicing what must be a very general foreboding at the present time. It seems barely credible that a mere ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Cold War, ideological conflict was being characterized in the US and elsewhere as a thing of the past. Who could have anticipated the volatile post-Sept. 11 world, with a militaristic American administration proclaiming a “war on terror” that may last for generations?
It was the contention of the critically acclaimed three-part BBC television series, “The Power of Nightmares”, that filling their respective populaces with dread has become the obsessive raison d’etre of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Identifying them as the mouthpieces of neoconservative ideologues with hidden agendas, the series suggested that these two Western leaders were cynically exploiting public anxiety in order to shore up their authority and disguise what would otherwise be all too apparent: That they are emperors with no clothes who have entirely given up on politics as a means of making the world a better place.
With great persuasiveness, the maker of the series, Adam Curtis, maintained that Al-Qaeda is more a macabre fantasy dreamed up in Washington than it is a coherent entity. And he alleged that much of the alarming rhetoric peddled by the US and British governments — the claim, for example, that terrorists could wreak havoc in Western capitals with a “dirty bomb”, a nuclear device contained in a suitcase — is so much hyperbolic scare-mongering. According to experts fielded by the program, the injury inflicted by such a device would be limited; casualties would be few. It was, said the experts, the mass panic a dirty bomb was bound to precipitate that would be the real cause for concern. Echoing the famous remark of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Curtis’s program implied that what contemporary Westerners have to fear most is fear itself.
“The Power of Nightmares” was far from being simply an indictment of the duplicity of the Bush and Blair governments.
Bent on laying bare the Machiavellian motives of neoconservative policy-wonks, it also had a great deal to say about the career of the Muslim dissident, Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Egypt in 1966. Hardly known in the West, this former school inspector was portrayed as the architect of the anti-Western world-view that inspired Osama Bin Laden, as the chief source of Bin Laden’s conviction that the West is essentially decadent and that exposure of Muslim societies to its influence is inescapably corrupting. Today’s global conflict, Curtis argued, has its roots in rival forms of fanaticism that have evolved over many years. His analysis may have been a shade schematic, but his challenging series made a powerful case that pernicious, diametrically opposed ideologies are helping to revive the Middle Ages, a primitive world of polarized attitudes and pervasive brutality.
How to bridge the religio-political divide between East and West has become the preoccupation of the British/-Egyptian novelist, Ahdaf Soueif too. Brought up in Cairo in 1950s and 60s but long resident in Britain, Soueif — like her friend, the late Palestinian critic and humanist, Edward Said — is a literary cosmopolitan. In her new collection of journalism, “Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground”, she recalls how as a young woman she assumed that in an era of jet travel and rapid communications everybody was becoming a citizen of the world; at the same time, she believed that Arab and Western culture were mutually enriching.
More than a little wistfully, she looks back to the days when many saw a clear affinity between the best of Western and the best of Arab culture in terms of ideals of public service, justice and equality.
A writer who began by celebrating the common cultural ground, Soueif has found herself increasingly obliged not just to defend such ground but to demonstrate that it still exists. Much concerned with the Palestine-Israel conflict (her outstanding reports from the occupied territories feature large in “Mezzaterra”), she believes that unconditional American loyalty toward Israel has become far the greatest threat to the survival of viable East-West relations. If there was deepening alienation between the Arab world and America before the current Iraq war, it had, she insists, everything to do with the incestuous US-Israel relationship. Soueif believes that the question of Palestine is where the impact of the United States on world affairs is “most sharply in focus” and that failure to solve the Palestine problem will establish the global role of the world’s only superpower as “irredeemably malign”.
Soueif fears that, emboldened by a second presidential victory, the administration of George W. Bush is likely to go all out to fulfill the neo-conservative dream of world domination. Yet she is loath to despair, drawing hope from the unity of conscience of human beings all over the world — as exemplified by the widespread demonstrations that preceded the invasion of Iraq, by the anger of Americans and Europeans at the hideous pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison and by the courage of Israelis who refuse to serve the occupation, not to mention that of private individuals of many nationalities who have tried to stand between Palestinians and their destruction, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
Hope also lies in the existence of a book such as “Mezzaterra”, and few will dispute the urgency of its central message: That it is to the common ground that “every responsible person on this planet must now migrate”.
