Nor should the rest of us feel too smug. The war against religious obscurantism, a war many people believed had been won long ago, is breaking out all over, with ever greater force. Gobbledygook is back in style. The pull of stupidity grows everywhere more powerful. The young speak of the spiritual life as if it were a fashion accessory. A new dark age of unreason may be beginning. High priests and fierce inquisitors are cackling in the shadows. There are, once again, anathemas and persecutions.
Meanwhile, slowly, beautifully, the search for knowledge continues. Ironically, in the whole history of the sciences, there has never been so rich or revolutionary a golden age. Big science is unlocking the universe, tiny science is solving the riddles of life. And, yes, the new knowledge brings with it new moral problems, but the old ignorances are not going to help us solve these. One of the beauties of learning is that it admits its provisionality, its imperfections. This scholarly scrupulousness, this willingness to admit that even the most well supported of theories is still a theory, is now being exploited by the unscrupulous. But that we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. Not all theories are of equal weight. The moon, even the moon over Kansas, is not made of green cheese. Genesis, as a “theory,” is bunk.
If the over-abundant new knowledge of the modern age is, let’s say, a tornado, then Oz is the extraordinary, Technicolor new world in which it has landed us, the world from which—life not being a movie—there is no way home. In the immortal words of Dorothy Gale, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” To which one can only add: thank goodness, baby, and amen.
OCTOBER 1999: EDWARD SAID
All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented.” This is the opening of Out of Place by Edward Said, one of the finest memoirs of childhood and youth to be published in many a long year, a work that prompts the critic to reach for his highest comparisons. It can justly be likened to Proust’s great novel-cycle because of its own recapturing of lost time; to Balzac, for the clarity of its social and historical perceptions; and to Conrad. The author is a Conradian scholar, but he is also, like the Nigger of the Narcissus, a sick man who is nevertheless determined to live until he dies. (Said suffers from CLL, a form of leukemia.) One of the many things to be said about this book is that it is a heroic instance of writing against death.
As its beginning shows, Out of Place is keenly aware of the inventions, blurrings, and imagination-figments that go to make up our sense of ourselves and our kin. It knows everything there is to know about displacement, about rootings and uprootings, about feeling wrong in the world, and it absorbs the reader precisely because such out-of-place experiences lie at or near the heart of what it is to be alive in our jumbled, chaotic times. How extraordinary, then, that so nuanced, so transparently honest a book, whose every page speaks to its author’s immense honesty and integrity, should become the center of an intercontinental political storm! For Said has been malevolently accused of fraud, of having falsified his own life story and having based a lifetime of political involvement upon “thirty years of carefully crafted deception”: of, in short, not really being a Palestinian at all.
The author of the current attack, Justus Reid Weiner, has unsavory backers: the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, primarily financed by the Milken Family Fund. Yes, that Michael Milken, the crooked financier jailed for, you’ve got it, fraud. But even though he boasts of having spent three years on Said’s trail, his accusations are flimsy nothings. Weiner can’t deny that Said actually was born in Jerusalem. To “prove” that Said and his family don’t merit the status of Palestinian “refugees” or “exiles,” however, Weiner does claim that Said didn’t go to St. George’s School in eastern Jerusalem and that the family house there never belonged to them. This is all hogwash. Fellow-students of Said’s have come forward to confirm that he did indeed attend St. George’s, and that the Saids were well known as an old Palestinian family. At least one of these students said as much to Weiner, who conveniently failed to mention the fact in his attack.
The house in Jerusalem was in the name not of Said’s father but of close relatives. To use this as proof of anything is to ignore the everyday realities of extended-family living. And, anyway, how trivial can one get? Is it seriously proposed that Said’s out-of-place early life, spent partly in Jerusalem, partly in Cairo, somehow disqualifies him from speaking as a Palestinian? That it’s okay for Weiner, an American Jew transplanted to Israel, to speak as an Israeli but not for Said, a Palestinian re-rooted in New York, to speak for Palestine?
When a distinguished writer is attacked in this fashion—when his enemies set out not merely to give him a bad review but to destroy him—then there is always more at stake than the mere quotidian malice of the world of books. Professor Said is no stranger to controversy and, as a reward for being the most incisive and visible Palestinian intellectual of the last quarter century has received his share of death threats and abuse. This latest attack, however, is something new. And in spite of its flimsiness it has been given a great deal of credence, first in Commentary magazine and then in many leading U.S. newspapers, and in the British Daily Telegraph.
Even stranger is the fact that no American paper would publish Said’s rebuttals, which eventually appeared, ironically, in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz. The Israeli media are thus shown to be fairer than those Western organs acting as Israel’s defenders.
Said is a passionate advocate of reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians. It isn’t hard to conclude that his enemies are not. The attack on Said is also an attack on what he stands for, on the world he has hoped for decades to argue into being: a world in which Palestinians are able to live with honor in their own country, yes, but also a world in which, by an act of constructive forgetting, the past can be worked through and then left in the past, so that Palestinians and Jews can begin to think about a different sort of future. That there are extremists in Israel determined to thwart this vision is not news. That so much of the Western press offers these extremists such ready collaboration ought to be news. It is certainly a scandal.
NOVEMBER 1999: PAKISTAN
Pakistan’s new military strongman, Pervez Musharraf, has promised to purge the state of corruption before restoring democracy. Pakistan-watchers will recall that when an earlier cartoon of a dictator, General Zia of the waxed mustache and raccoon eyes, was in his prime he, too, used to speak of cleaning up the country and then holding elections. Zia promised and canceled elections so often that it became a joke. His title in those bad old days was CMLA, which officially stood for “Chief Martial Law Administrator” but which, people began to say, really stood for “Cancel My Last Announcement.” Perhaps fearing such a reaction, General Musharraf has preferred not to announce elections at all. This is hardly an improvement.
Let’s ignore for a moment the obvious fact that General Musharraf’s refusal to give a timetable for restoring democracy is in itself a corrupt act, his second such misdeed, the coup he engineered being the first. Instead, let’s take a look at the condition of the stables he has undertaken to clean up. The Nawaz Sharif government was economically incompetent, unpleasantly autocratic, deeply unpopular, and widely suspected of many forms of corruption, including election-rigging. Its actions merit the most thorough investigation. But how can General Musharraf, who has already accused Nawaz Sharif of trying to murder him, and has called that alleged attempt “treasonable,” persuade us that his regime’s inquiries will be dispassionate and credible? A generation ago, General Zia executed Prime Minister Z. A. Bhutto after a show trial. The echoes of that case can already be heard in Musharraf’s pronouncements on Nawaz, and they’re getting louder.
Benazir Bhutto, her People’s Party, and her husband, Asif Zardari, also have many questions to answer. They, too, stand accused of large-scale corruption, and Zardari of being involved in the murder of Benazir’s own brother as well. Wh
en Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, Benazir could and frequently did dismiss such charges as part of Sharif’s political vendetta against her. Not very surprisingly, she has rushed to welcome the Musharraf coup. How will General Musharraf convince us that justice will be done in the Bhutto-Zardari case as well?
Look beyond the political parties and you see the real causes of the social wreckage of Pakistan. The poppy fields of the North-West Frontier have been producing opium for as long as anyone can remember. Nowadays they produce great quantities of heroin as well. To be exported, that heroin must travel a thousand miles south to Karachi—past Army units and octroi inspection points. In the opinion of every expert commentator I know, the Pakistani drug industry simply could not operate without the active cooperation of the bureaucracy and the Army. If General Musharraf would have us believe in his anti-corruption platform, he must first demonstrate that the Army has cleaned up its own act. How exactly does he propose to do this? And what does he intend to do about Karachi, which is presently a terrifyingly wild and all-but-lawless burg, in the grip not only of violent sectarian politics but also of the drug overlords and criminal mafias? Karachi’s citizens speak every day of the collaboration between the city’s police force and organized crime. What is General Musharraf’s plan for the redemption of his country’s most important city?
Beneath this suppurating surface lie deeper ills that a military regime is even less able to address. Pakistan is a country in which democratic institutions—make that democratic instincts—have never been permitted to take root. Instead, the country’s elites—military, political, industrial, aristocratic, feudal—take it in turns to loot the nation’s wealth, while increasingly extremist mullahs demand the imposition of draconian versions of Sharia law.
Nawaz Sharif’s government grew more fanatically Islamist as it grew weaker. General Musharraf’s quickly expressed determination not to permit fundamentalists to take over the state should be welcomed. But can any coup leader hope to create the kind of secular-democratic state in which coups become not only unnecessary but unthinkable? Can any elitist—and a man who believes he has the right to seize control of an entire nation-state is certainly that—be believed when he announces his desire to fight against elitism?
Musharraf has also made placatory noises toward India, and withdrawn some troops from the frontier. Yet he is the man responsible for planning this year’s catastrophic military adventure in Kashmir, and he has made many ultra-hawkish comments about India in the recent past. Why should we trust his new softer line when he has shown every sign of having an itchy trigger finger—a finger that now sits upon Pakistan’s nuclear button?
The Musharraf coup is, at present, very popular in Pakistan. So were the Pakistani nuclear tests. There are reports that after these tests ordinary Pakistanis went out to the blast sites and gathered up jars of radioactive earth as patriotic souvenirs. These jars, sitting in pride of place in Pakistani homes, may prove to be less worth having than they now seem. You could make much the same sort of hypothesis about the Pervez Musharraf regime.
DECEMBER 1999: ISLAM AND THE WEST
The relationship between the Islamic world and the West seems to be living through one of the famous “interregnums” defined by Antonio Gramsci, in which the old refuses to die, so that the new cannot be born, and all manner of “morbid symptoms” arise. Both between Muslim and Western countries and inside Muslim communities living in the West, the old, deep mistrusts abide, frustrating attempts to build new, better relations, and creating much bad blood. For example, the general suspicion felt by many ordinary Egyptians about America’s motives has created a heightened, almost paranoiac atmosphere around the investigation of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990. Now, all information pointing to the pilot Gameel al-Batouty’s responsibility for the aircraft’s fatal dive is believed to be tainted, in spite of indications that (a) he pulled rank to take over the controls from the co-pilot, even though it wasn’t his shift, and (b) the now-notorious religious mutterings immediately preceded the aircraft’s steep downward plunge. Meanwhile, theories exonerating the pilot are being propounded in Egypt almost daily—it was the Boeing malfunctioning, it was a bomb in the tail, it was a missile, and in any case it was America’s fault. The many proponents of these “anti-American” theories see no contradiction in believing with great fervor notions for which there is as yet no shred of proof, while vilifying the FBI for seeking to draw premature conclusions from such evidence as there is.
A more dispassionate version of events is needed. The FBI is perhaps excessively prone to seeing air disasters as crimes rather than accidents. That was certainly a problem after the TWA 800 crash. On that occasion it was the National Transportation Safety Board that eventually made the case for a systems failure causing an explosion in a fuel tank. But this time it’s the NTSB’s preliminary examination of the data that has thrown up the possibility of a pilot suicide.
The much-criticized leakiness of the investigating bodies can also be seen as reassuring: with so many loose tongues around, in the end the truth will out. By contrast, the state-controlled press in Mubarak’s Egypt is likely to reflect that government’s nationalistic unwillingness to concede Egyptian responsibility for the crash, which could further damage the tourist trade.
Unreason and emotion have by now thoroughly politicized this investigation. Let us hope that those who fear a U.S. cover-up do not create an atmosphere in which American and Egyptian politicians and diplomats do in fact seek to cover up the truth in the interest of their bilateral relations.
Muslims living in the West also continue to feel defensive, suspicious, and persecuted. Hard on the heels of the dispute about the EgyptAir tragedy comes a demand in “multi-faith Britain” that all religious beliefs, not just the established Church of England, be protected from criticism. The West’s alleged “Islamophobia” means that Islamic demands for the new law are by far the loudest.
It is true that in many Western quarters there is a knee-jerk reflex that leads to anti-Islamic rushes to judgment, so that British Muslims’ sense of injury is frequently justified. But the proposed solution is the wrong cure, one that would make matters even worse than they are. For the point is to defend people but not their ideas. It is absolutely right that Muslims—that everyone—should enjoy freedom of religious belief in any free society. It is absolutely right that they should protest against discrimination whenever and wherever they experience it. It is also absolutely wrong of them to demand that their belief system—that any system of belief or thought—should be immunized against criticism, irreverence, satire, even scornful disparagement. This distinction between the individual and his creed is a foundation truth of democracy, and any community that seeks to blur it will not do itself any favors. The British blasphemy law is an outdated relic of the past, has fallen into disuse, and ought to be abolished. To extend it would be an anachronistic move quite against the spirit of a country whose leadership likes to prefix everything with the word “new.”
Democracy can only advance through the clash of ideas, can only flourish in the rough-and-tumble bazaar of disagreement. The law must never be used to stifle such disagreements, no matter how profound. The new cannot die so that the old can be reborn. That would indeed be a morbid symptom.
Once again, a clearer form of discourse is needed. Western societies urgently need to find effective ways of defending Muslims against blind prejudice. And Islamic spokesmen must likewise stop giving the impression that the way to better relations—the path to the new—requires the creation of new forms of censorship, of legal blindfolds and gags.
JANUARY 2000: TERROR VERSUS SECURITY
Now that the big Y2K party’s over, think for a moment about the covert, worldwide battle that took place on and around Millennium Night. Behind the images of a world lit up by pyrotechnics, united for one evanescent instant by gaiety and goodwill, the new dialectic of history was taking shape. We already knew that capitalism versus communism was no longer the name
of the game. Now we saw, as clearly as the fireworks in the sky, that the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security.
I was one of the ten thousand gathered in London’s Millennium Dome, that same dome off which James Bond bounces while fighting the forces of terror in the latest 007 film. The audience knew—after hours of waiting to be frisked on a cold railway platform, how could it not?—that a mammoth security operation had been launched to safeguard the showpiece event. What few of us knew was that a bomb threat had been made, using an IRA code word, and that the dome came within an inch of being evacuated.
For days, the world had been hearing about nothing but terrorism. The United States had spoken the current bogeyman’s name—Osama bin Laden—to frighten us children. There were arrests: a man with bomb-making equipment found at the U.S.-Canada border, a group in Jordan. Seattle canceled its celebrations. One of the leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was released, and Japan feared a terrorist atrocity. President Chandrika Kumaratunga of Sri Lanka made history by surviving a suicide bomber’s attack. There were bomb hoaxes at a British racetrack and at a soccer stadium. The FBI feared the worst from apocalyptic groups and lunatic-fringers. But in the end—apart from poor George Harrison, wounded by one such lunatic—we got off relatively lightly.
Almost all of us, that is, because there was also the Indian Airlines hijack. The events at Kandahar airport have left no fewer than four governments looking pretty bad. Nepal, proving that Kathmandu deserves its terrorist-friendly reputation, allowed men with guns and grenades to board a plane. The Indian government’s capitulation to the terrorists was the first such surrender to hijackers in years; what will they do when the next aircraft is seized? And, finally, terrorists trained in Taliban camps and holding Pakistani passports disappeared from Afghanistan into, very probably, Pakistan. Thus was a largely defunct form of terrorism given a new lease on life.
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