As commentators, who earn their living trying to make sense of the world around them, we can deal with evil by confining ourselves simply to repudiating it and demonizing those who enact it, getting on our moral high horse as we call for stern, pre-emptive measures against them, then move on. Next issue please, we have columns to churn out here, week after week. That, of course, is not only the easy way out, but is a cop out.
In order to write meaningfully about evil — and the London bombings weeks ago are clearly a manifestation of that — we have to comprehend it, to comprehend why its perpetrators do not see the senselessness, the horror, the futility of their acts.
Alas, in these bad-tempered times, an attempt to dispassionately distance ourselves from these people in order to understand them — to transcend our emotions, as it were, to make room for our intellects — can be construed as an attempt to explain away “evil doers,” even to sympathize with them.
Ignorance of the motives, the social forces, the psychology of a suicide bomber, or any other kind of terrorist, is the worst possible posture to have here.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair hit the nail on the head, two days after the London bombings, when he described the globalized world we inhabit these days, with its diverse nation states and human communities representing subsystems of the same global system, dynamically interacting with each other, affecting and in turn being affected by each other.
“Where there are appalling forms of poverty in one continent,” he said, “the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent, they spread to the rest of the world.”
Add to that appalling form of alienation, the subjugation of one people by another, emotional suffering at the loss of one’s sense of worth and sense of place in one’s own world, and the inability to be the determining force in your own personal and national destiny, and you have a deadly brew.
It is infantile, not to mention egregious and fallacious, to say that there is something in the religion of the Other — in this case, Islam — that propels an individual to commit acts of terror. On the contrary, a man of faith, any faith, is a man whose life is inspired by the desire to help the poor, by contemplation of the wondrous nature of His creation, by generosity, by love for those less endowed, by strong moral values, by a sense of direction in one’s life and, above all, by respect for those People of the Book other than one’s own.
Let me indulge a recollection here. I like to think of myself as a goodly Muslim, having grown up in a home — in the Palestinian refugee camps, no less, those putative “enclaves of hatred” — where an uncle, a man imbued with an aboriginal sense of wisdom and wordliness, would often pay us a visit over the weekend, and not only recite a surah for us from the Holy Book, but interpret it as well.
How come, we the children sitting around him would ask, you want us to love the Jews, to respect them as a People of the Book, when they have dismembered our homeland and expelled us from our home?
His answer was always the same: They have gone astray, they have departed from the Book, and it has not always been like that between us and them.
Moreover, he would add, our struggle against the Jews of Palestine does not derive from their being Jews, but from the injustice they had perpetrated against us. We are all God’s creatures, he would say over and over again. We have our Book, and they have theirs, reminding us of how in the Hadith we are enjoined by the Prophet (pbuh) against hurting those of another faith.
Uncle Omar, a true Muslim, instilled in us, at an impressionable time in our lives, a benign, as opposed to a sinister or racialist, view of the Other, and an intellectual inquisitiveness about the Other’s faith and view of the world.
I have read, indeed studied, the Bible not because I’m about to become an apostate, and I have explored and continue to enjoy African-American Gospel music and Gregorian chants by the Trappist Monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani, not because I prefer them to the Mowashahat, but because I enjoy them and because nowhere in Islam does it say that the artistic, or for that matter theological, effusions, of other faiths should be avoided or denigrated.
In like manner, nowhere in Islam does it say that a Muslim’s grievance, no matter how compelling, will justify that a Muslim go out there and kill innocent people in order to right the wrong, real or imagined, committed against him.
To be sure, “the evil of men,” has been with us, in all its forms, ever since time immemorial. It is universal, clearly not unique to any one people. Men of all races and creeds have been seduced — and reduced — by it.
In the Holy Books, we read of how Cain murdered his brother out of envy. In literature, Macbeth killed the reigning king in pursuit of naked power, and Marquis de Sade’s characters inflicted pain on their victims in pursuit of pleasure. In Germany, Nazis committed unspeakable crimes in the name of a venomous ideology of racial purity.
In the US, fanatics have been convicted of murder in assaults on synagogues and churches (Kerry Noble, leader of a violent cult in the 1980s, comes to mind) in order to facilitate the advent of the Apocalypse and the return of the Messiah. In the Congo (and please read or re-read “King Leopold’s Ghost”) the Belgians worked millions of Congolese to death in the mines — literally worked them to death for the inferior species of men they were considered. And closer to home, Al-Qaeda sent suicide bombers to New York and Washington allegedly to destroy the instruments of American domination in the Muslim world.
So if you can pull rank on anyone here, my friend, throw the first stone.
We need a psychologically, spiritually and culturally informed response to all this if we need to understand the kind of violence — senseless and banal — that is pursued by Muslims wrapping themselves in the mantle of their faith, in reality a nihilistic form of unfaith.
Perhaps we should begin by realizing, wanton psychologizing aside, that the dread that these terrorists are spreading is an attempt, deep down, at the core of their mutilated being, to project their own inadequacies, sense of existential ennui, emotional fatigue and loss of elan in their lives onto their victims.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of prominent, albeit clueless, voices being raised these days about how to deal with the issue: Deal with them harshly, limit their entry into the country, deport the bums, whatever, unless you want the US and with it the rest of the “free world” to get rolled over by Islam.
Take the recent book, “The Cube and the Cathedral,” by George Weigel who argues that Europe cannot remain Europe if it allows itself to become “full of Muslims,” just as Samuel P. Huntigton (of the “Clash of Civilizations” fame) argues in his new book, “Who Are We,” that America cannot remain America if it is full of Hispanics.
That, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, who reviewed both tomes in the Washington Post last Sunday, “betrays the deepest values of the Enlightenment and the tolerance and individualism that are the West’s greatest strengths.” And, heck, that includes a betrayal of the American way as well.
But you get the picture. The public debate has gone bad in the teeth.
Where’s Uncle Omar when you need him so he could put in his two cents worth of thoughtful and compassionate observations about what the issue is really all about.
