Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  But none of them, not even Reagan, was a fervent crusader, in the Christian sense.61 His campaign against communism, his conservative and Republican credos, were all acquired with his second marriage. Religious convictions played a relatively minor role in the careers of both Roosevelt and Clinton. But Clinton’s successor, George Walker Bush, the son of Reagan’s vice president, is different. He, like Reagan, is a convert, but unlike his predecessor he was been born into the Republican aristocracy. His conversion was from the myriad sins of the flesh (notably alcohol) to the rapture of being “reconfirmed” (his own word) in Jesus Christ. Some questioned his sincerity, but there is no evidence for such cynicism. George W. Bush is a true believer, like indeed the majority of his fellow Americans. He reads the Bible daily.62

  FROM THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK I HAVE WORKED WITH THE NOW traditional historical assumption that, through the twentieth century, the West became increasingly secular while in the Eastern, Islamic world religious faith remained the more potent, both in society and politics. I am not suggesting the tired old fallacies about an unchanging East stuck in an immutable past, or as Edward Said memorably put it, “confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time.” He added “by the gaze of western percipients,” but I think that is too simplistic. Other local agents, closer to home, were also implicated in that process. But while staring East I failed to notice what was happening to the West, an even odder omission since my main theme is the Bakhtinian reflexive and reactive nature of the relationship between the enemies in the mirror.

  On Inauguration Day 2001, a reconfirmed, or born-again, Christian became the forty-third president of the United States. Contrary to the fears of many, but dictated by political prudence, this seemed at first to have had little effect. The second President Bush ran a traditional administration, despite the many passionate believers in its ranks. Until, that is, the cataclysm of September 1, 2001, called for a response off the scale of normal political responses. Now, thanks to Bob Woodward, no natural admirer of George Bush, we had within months of the events an insight into the conduct of affairs in the hundred days after the catastrophe in New York and Washington D.C. In Bush at War the author makes himself the omniscient narrator, who builds up his favorite characters, cheers for his heroes, and hisses at the villains. But despite this tiresome semifictive format, the important fact is the evidence on which his account is based. The sources are very solid. All the main actors in the drama spoke to him, at length, and often over several meetings. The president himself had two long, laid-back meetings with the journalist, and he described to him how he heard the news of the attack on New York and what dominated his response as seen on TV. “What you saw was my gut reaction coming out.”63

  Gradually, George W. Bush learned more and more to trust those visceral responses. He intimated that meetings planning the war should begin with prayer; he said repeatedly that this was the moment that a new United States would be reborn in the eyes of the world: “I do believe there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we’re almost hedonistic, that we don’t have values, and that when struck, we wouldn’t fight back.”64

  There were reasons for the president’s celebrated use of the word “crusade” in the aftermath of the atrocity. Faced with an apocalyptic situation, with fires still burning in New York and the smoke from the Pentagon visible in the heart of Washington, D.C., he was convinced that he had to find the right register for his first public speech after the catastrophe. He was certain beyond doubt of the dominating presence of threatening evil in the world. He had mused openly in these terms during a campaign speech at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in May 2000: “We’re certain there are madmen in this world, and there’s terror, and there’s missiles and I’m certain of this.”65 On the afternoon of Sunday, September 16, 2001, on the south lawn of the White House, he spoke to the press and the world:

  We need to be alert to the fact that these evildoers still exist. We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time. No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft—fly U.S. aircraft into buildings full of innocent people—and show no remorse. This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.66

  The president was tired and drained by the turmoil of events. The day before, he had been at Ground Zero in New York. Now he spoke from the heart, in a rambling and repetitious fashion, as he said, on the Lord’s day.67 But he made sure that he hammered home the word “evil” or “evildoers” time and again. His remark about a crusade came in an off-the-cuff response to a journalist’s question. What Bush actually said was: “This … this … this … crusade … this [pause] war on terrorism.”68 Listening to a recording again, you are struck how he struggled to find the right word, which was, for him, “crusade.”69 This was a word that came from deep inside, a gut reaction. It meant a lot to him: it signified the struggle of good with evil.

  It was the right response to what was, Bush said, “a new kind of evil.” Everyone would know what he meant, deep down. For the same reason he again used the language of maledicta on a much more formal and better prepared occasion. The utterances on September 16—the repeated reiteration of “evil” and “evildoers,” the invocation of a crusade—were in an impromptu setting. But in his next State of the Union message, on January 29, 2002, he once more insisted upon the same register:

  States like these [Iran, Iraq, North Korea], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.70

  Would “axis of hatred” have had the same impact as “axis of evil” in January 2002? Probably not. Some words are curiously resonant, and “evil” is one of them. So too are “crusade” and jihad. For much of the history described in this book, “infidel” was another. “Terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorist” have acquired many of the attributes of fear and horror that once attached to Turks and Tartars. There were many such regressions to the older world of maledicta in Bush at War, but one that stands out in particular.

  The president had signed a new intelligence order, the gloves were off.

  “You have one mission,” Black instructed [Cofer Black was the director of the Counterterrorism Center at the Central Intelligence Agency] … “Get Bin Laden, find him. I want his head in a box.”

  “You’re serious?” asked Gary [“Gary” was the senior agent on the ground in Afghanistan] … “Absolutely,” Black said. The new authority was clear. Yes, he said, he wanted Bin Laden’s head. “I want to take it down and show the President.”

  “Well, that couldn’t be any clearer.” Gary replied … In Afghanistan a few days later, the agent asked Washington to fly in some heavy duty cardboard boxes and dry ice, and if possible some pikes.71

  Incredible, perhaps, but Bush had been hugely impressed by Black’s go-getting attitude. In the president’s inner circle the CIA man was known as “the flies on the eyes guy,” from his earlier comment “When we’re through with them [Al Qaeda], they will have flies walking on their eyeballs.” Woodward concluded, after his lengthy interviews with Bush, that the commander in chief was “tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody.”72

  This dialogue seems more suitable to a sixteenth-century Ottoman sultan and a pasha eager to please than to a twenty-first-century United States administration. The reader’s mind races. What did Gary intend to do with the pike? Decapitate bin Laden with a government-issue machete, then parade it still dripping blood through the cheering ranks of U.S. troops, rather like th
e head of the Ottoman admiral at the battle of Lepanto? What this little episode suggests is that once you have entered the world of maledicta, with its accursed enemies, it is near impossible not to fall from a modern world respecting progress into the dark domain of raw faith. But just imagine if Black’s plan had been fulfilled, and he had carried the head of America’s evil enemy, in its dry ice, triumphantly into the Oval Office. How would the president have responded to this culmination of his crusade?

  The exercise of realpolitik generates so many similar examples of casual but necessary brutality that this minute picking over of a few words might seem a ridiculous scholastic exercise of the “how many angels can dance on the point of a needle” variety. But watching history in the making, without the benefit of hindsight and an archive, demands that we consider these tiny physical traces like those that archaeologists use to reconstruct an image of lost worlds. The argument of this book is that words and images matter, because it is often in these casual, ephemeral productions that the uncensored truth resides. Censorship can be of two types. We all self-censor, and the presentation President Bush makes of himself after preparation is very different from the man speaking off-the-cuff or under pressure. Then there is the censorship or artful rhetoric produced by professional speechwriting. In the hundred days after the murderous attacks on New York, it was the unguarded moments that provided the greatest insights and revelations.

  THERE IS NO PROBLEM IN REVERTING TO THE APOCALYPTIC REGISTER, to maledicta—if you are willing to accept the consequences. The columnist Arianna Huffington expressed the issue succinctly:

  I was always troubled by the President’s repeated references to “the evil ones”—from his first press conference after the attack, when he mentioned “the evil one” and “evildoers” five times, to his recent vow that “across the world and across the years, we will fight the evil ones, and we will win.” I objected not because the terrorists aren’t evil but because, as much as we would love it to be true, such a simple demarcation of good and evil flies in the face of history, religion and human nature.

  The lure of this kind of reductionist thinking is not a new one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself a victim of some of the most horrific evil of the 20th century, warned against it in “The Gulag Archipelago”: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”73

  It is enormously difficult to keep the language of maledicta under control, to hold it within bounds. It touches too many deep and visceral feelings, dramatizing the conflict between a good and an imperfect world.

  If the “evildoers” do pose an omnipresent or mortal threat, then perhaps the only alternative is to pursue them to the last extremity. So let us consider the operational realities, as Cofer Black might put it. In the medieval or early modern total wars against evil, even the primitive methods of social control were relatively efficient. How much more, then, could be achieved with the modern systems of information and control? It would mean reverting to the inquisitorial mind-set I described earlier in this book. There is a high price in social terms for reinventing heresy. But there should also be the nagging doubts as to whether it would work. The evildoers now seem to be more powerful than ever, and like the unclean spirits in St. Mark’s gospel, their name is Legion.74 However, demonizing new enemies like Al Qaeda in crusading language is to misunderstand their power and practice. The temptation is to consider them primitives stuck in a set of seventh-century beliefs. According to traditional Western thought, these fanatics would have no truck with images, television, or the Internet. But they are not primitive in this sense. Osama bin Laden is not preoccupied with ancient prohibitions, like the public display of images. His face is everywhere.

  THE EMINENT POLITICAL SCIENTIST BASSAM TIBI HAS DESCRIBED this mélange of tradition and modernity as a “half-modernity,” which he calls “a selective choice of orthodox Islam and an instrumental semi-modernity.”75 Charles Kurzman puts it into a more precise context: “Few revivalists actually desire a full fledged return to the world of 7th century Arabia. Khomeini himself was an inveterate radio listener, and used modern technologies such as telephones, audiocassettes, photocopying, and British short-wave radio broadcasts to promulgate his revivalist message. Khomeini allowed the appearance of women on radio and television, chess playing, and certain forms of music. When other religious leaders objected he responded, ‘the way you interpret traditions, the new civilization should be destroyed and the people should live in shackles or live forever in the desert.’ ”76

  This hybrid is hard to understand if you believe Islamic culture has remained essentially unchanged from the seventh century. Even as shrewd an observer as Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, resorted to crude cultural stereotypes to sustain a view of changelessness. I quote his words exactly as he spoke them:

  Cultures that see themselves in contest with the West, and see themselves as really great proselytizing cultures themselves, like that of Islam, find it very difficult to adapt to somebody else’s dominance, to adapt to modernity … if you look at the way men dress in the world, it’s always to me a very interesting indication. Japanese prime ministers and businessmen wear Western suits. Chinese prime ministers and businessmen now wear Western suits. In the Arab world it is essentially a mark of dishonor to wear a Western suit.77

  This is plainly wrong. In Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and much of Iraq, Western clothes (shirt, trousers, or a suit) are normal business attire for urban men.78 These states are just as Arab as those of the peninsula and the Arabian Gulf, yet government officials and businessmen in the northern Arab lands do not normally wear the thobe (sometimes colloquially called the dishdash) or the abaya. As in the West, the clothes that a man wears in these countries is determined by local custom, status and wealth, age and social circumstances.

  What is Zakaria suggesting? Are only those who wear traditional dress honorable Arabs? Yet even that traditional dress is in many parts of the gulf a reinvention, rather like the kilt in late-eighteenth-century Scotland.79 And many peninsular Arabs who wear national dress every day at home often don a suit when in the West. I suspect he is hinting that Arabs are fixed in the past, socially (almost genetically?) incapable of accommodating change or becoming modern. Such an observation might be understandable from some ignorant stay-at-home but not from an erudite and widely traveled scholar. So how can he mistake the evidence of his own eyes?

  This is a new version of a very old story.80 For many nineteenth-century Western visitors to the East, local dress—the flowing robes, the turbans or Arab head cloths (kaffiyah)—marked them as exotic primitives. Yet the modernized dress—Western frock coat and peg-top trousers of the Ottoman—was not an indication that they had emancipated themselves, becoming “modern.” Instead it was evidence of duplicity. They might pretend to welcome the blessings of Western modernity, but they would always relapse into their cruel and atavistic ways. At best they might claim a “half modernity,” taking the technological productions but never the philosophical underpinning of Western Enlightenment. Those unvoiced fears of Eastern untrustworthiness are still with us.

  I may be unfair to Zakaria, who always writes carefully and circumspectly.81 He might have “misspoken.” Yet it was said publicly and with such deliberation that perhaps it revealed what he thought but would not write. There is still an ambivalence toward the Islamic world that was magnified by the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “war on terror.” Yet those events only catalyzed a fear which has older and deeper roots.

  THE POLICY OF REMAKING IRAQ AFTER THE COALITION CONQUEST OF 2003 has been clouded by ambivalence. On one hand, there is the plausible vision of a society that can and might embrace liberal democracy. This is Zakaria’s perspective: “Iraq is already a nation. It is not even a failed state. It is a failed political system, which
needs to be transformed. In doing so, America and others in the international community can help. But ultimately it is Iraqis who will build a new Iraq. The single most important strength a society can have is a committed, reformist elite.” What will sustain the change is never forgetting the horror of the last thirty years. “National trials, memoirs, truth and reconciliation commissions, oral histories—all will help maintain and recover that memory.”82 All of which is true, but as this book has argued, the power of collective memory is notoriously difficult to direct or contain. The underlying doubt in Washington seems to be: will modernity really take root in all its aspects?

  Behind many Western approaches to a new Iraq lies a growing but unstated fear that the long period of Ba’ath rule might incongruously come to be remembered not just for its tyranny but also, nostalgically, for its bread-and-circuses lavishness. The vicious former government of modern Iraq was cruelly oppressive, but also committed to technical modernization and huge expenditures on social benefits. Spending on social reform and industrial development ended only when the cost of the Iran-Iraq war began to bite in 1982–83.83 Will the recovered memories of atrocity, even when buttressed by institutions of liberal democracy, be sufficient to prevent recidivism? Or do the leaders of the world superpower privately fear that there is in some collective Muslim Arab psyche that which tends toward secular tyranny, or, just as bad, inexorably toward an Islamic state?

  In formulating their responses Western policy makers might recall the ancient game of Scissors, Paper, and Stone. The rules are simple. “Two people face each other each with one hand behind their back. On an agreed signal each draws their weapon. The weapons are stone (a clenched fist), paper (an open hand), and scissors (index and third finger extended). The rules of combat are: stone blunts scissors, paper wraps stone, scissors cut paper. Therefore, each weapon beats one of the others, and loses against the third. If two identical weapons are drawn a tie is declared.”84 By analogy, the West has been trying to play a very similar game in its relations with the Islamic East, trying to find the winning strategy. Yet time and again it has made the wrong judgment as to which (ideological) weapon to use.85