Religion has many dimensions. For most people it is simply a matter of fact. They were born in a particular faith and see no reason to step outside their ancestral code of belief.
For most believers, of any religion, the practice of faith is an occasional commitment rather than a consuming one. What turns a normal believer into a soldier of a shadow army, or, in an extreme case, a potential suicide-missionary? The answer does not lie in rocket science, but in common sense, commonly visible. It must be stressed, at this point, that we are discussing the ordinary individual, and not the fringe fanatic. Every faith, every society, every nationality has its share of fringe fanatics — racists, or berserk ideologues who believe they can achieve their fantasies by the arbitrary use of terror. Normal Americans know, for instance, that a white supremacist is morally wrong. No one goes to school to learn that.
Perhaps the Bush White House has forgotten how much genuine sympathy America received from Muslim peoples and nations after Sept. 11. No sane person supports mayhem and the death of innocents. No cause can justify injustice. So why are television screens exploding with images of normal young Muslims who have picked up the gun? The answer may lie in the sentence just used: No cause can justify injustice. There is always more than one side to a story. Israel has as much right to exist as any Arab nation, but the moment the defense of Israel becomes an exercise in brutal injustice against Palestinians, we know that a moral line has been erased and beyond that moral line wait suicide-missionaries ready to give their lives.
It might be perfectly legitimate to condemn Saddam Hussein as a despot, but when anger against despotism becomes selective, and when Saddam becomes an excuse for occupation and neocolonialism, then we know that a moral line has been crossed. It is perfectly natural that a believer should find his source of inspiration in faith, for faith is his measure of the moral code. This is true of all religions. When a Hindu soldier of the Indian Army seeks courage from the temple he has every right to do so, just as his Sikh counterpart takes the name of Wah-e-Guru and his Muslim comrade in the same army takes the name of Allah. Who else will Moqtada Sadr turn to except Allah? He has at least as much right to turn to Allah as George Bush when he claims that God asked him to invade Iraq.
There is an increasing sense that whatever little justification there might have been for the occupation of Iraq disappeared with the ouster of Saddam. Anne Barnard, in an incisive story (International Herald Tribune, Aug. 12), reported the mood among the Marines who have gone to save Iraq for democracy etc. The headline of the report from Ramadi was an answer rather than a question: GIs in Iraq are asking: Why are we here? Lance Corporal Anthony Robert, 21 years old, understood who he was facing. “People are tired of us being here. It’s the same as if someone came to the US and started taking over. You’d do what you’d have to do.”
Ordinary people. They would do what they would have to do. Patriotism is the strength of ordinary people, young men who once had no desire except for a decent job, a pretty wife and wonderful children. Ordinary men with ordinary dreams have become the extraordinary fighters of Najaf and Fallujah. Propagandist theories will not fit them, not if they are repeated a million times over compliant media. Where is the great Shiite-Sunni divide through which Pentagon strategists had hoped gleefully to march? Such divisions have melted in the heat of a common cause. They did exist, but in a different context. They might return, but only after this fire has been quenched.
Even “pliant” media has a way of turning counterproductive. The Americans uprooted the television channel Al-Jazeera from Iraq because they did not want its stark and scathing reportage about the offensive against Moqtada Sadr and the mosque of Hazrat Imam Ali. So what does a “cooperative” channel like Al-Arabiya do on the morning of Friday, Aug. 13? It mentions “Syed Moqtada Sadr” every five seconds. Do I hear a stress on “Syed”? His “jihad” dominates the news and sure enough there are anti-American demonstrations through the Arab world after Friday prayers. In the meantime Al-Jazeera has lost a story but reinforced its credibility.
The sense of siege that began in Palestine has now seized Iraq. But its catchment area is widening to include nation after nation in the Western alliance. The case of a Bangladeshi in Tokyo, Mohamed Islam, is relevant. In May he, along with four other Muslim men, was spreadeagled on the front pages of the Japanese media, through a nudge from the authorities, as the sinister heart of Al-Qaeda in Japan. After 43 days in jail, all they could find against him was that he had hired two illegal migrants, one of them his brother. He was fined $3,000. The problem is not the mistake. Mistakes will occur. The problem is that his innocence was not considered news. For the mass of the Japanese that untruth is still the truth, while the injustice turns yet another normal person into a man with a mission, even as he becomes a symbol for those Muslims who would like to paint the world in black and white.
The indifference of governments to Muslim sentiment indicates a barely concealed contempt. Governments are supposed to be responsible, and if this is their cue who can blame those unburdened by intelligence or decency from indulging in hate campaigns that get increasingly more hateful? I learn from friends that a new book is now available at Barnes and Noble, America’s largest chain of bookstores, and through Amazon, called “Muhammad: Prophet of Doom,” written by a certain Craig Winn. Those who have read this book describe is as a turgid, inaccurate diatribe. I suppose you cannot stop fringe-fanatics from writing junk, but to find such a book on the august shelves of Barnes and Noble means that it has the support of people who would not consider themselves fringe-fanatics. Muslims find it difficult to fathom why such fanatics take particular pleasure in abuse against the person of the Prophet.
Muslims have their fair share of fanatics too, but you will not come across a virulent attack on Jesus Christ. In India and Asia, Hindus and Muslims have lived together for upward of a thousand years. I cannot think of a single instance of a Hindu writer indulging in such prurience against the person of the Prophet. Neither will you find a single instance of a Muslim writer being malicious about Hindu gods.
Issues that would have been dismissed with a shrug five years ago are now becoming pieces of a looming, dark jigsaw puzzle. History is the ebb and flow of wars of dominance and empire. For a thousand years the tide flowed in a particular direction; reversal was inevitable. Where there are men there will be ambition, greed and conflict. But when hatreds enter the political space then conflict acquires a raw, personal dimension. The technology of war has improved for both the state and the individual.
If the United States Air Force can precision bomb a small part of an apartment block to hit a specific target, then a cell of individuals can also assemble a weapon of mass destruction. George Bush invaded Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction of the past. All of us, together, as nations, as societies, as creeds and races, need to sit together, act together, now, this moment, to abort the weapons of mass destruction that are being conceived in minds inflamed by anger. If George Bush does not see the urgency, perhaps his successor will.
