BLACK TUESDAY: THE VIEW FROM ISLAMABAD

by Pervez Hoodbhoy

Samuel Huntington's evil desire for a clash between civilizations may

well come true after Tuesday's terror attacks. The crack that divided

Muslims everywhere from the rest of the world is no longer a crack. It

is a gulf, that if not bridged, will surely destroy both.

For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing

jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with

other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people

jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather

than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many

Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less

sharply. The heads of states of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein

excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the

US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned

denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary

Muslims and extremists.

But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because

this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions.

One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian

expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass

political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.

Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the

government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of

the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students

at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in

the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds

gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the

WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.

A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political

behavior have broken down and new ones are yet to defined. Catapulted

into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of

events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response

that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and

practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral

supposition - the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also

requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps,

the order of which is not interchangeable.



Before all else, Black Tuesday's mass murder must be condemned in the

harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without

seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it,

and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the

perpetrators. The demented, suicidical, fury of the attackers led to

heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed

the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal

condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by

which people can communicate.

Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene

is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the

attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal,

were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal

human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate,

maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds.

What was that?

Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to

understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay

this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably

the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century

as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting

terrorism" and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance,

fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea

of missile defence systems. But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed

with no more than knives and box-cutters have shown with such

devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern

nations are far too vulnerable to be protected - a suitcase nuclear

device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan.

Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of

survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.

Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidical terrorist can

be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their

breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of

humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global

superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of

their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme

arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily

dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation

forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and

Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of

70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable

of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a

crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and

awesome cruelty of a doomed people".

It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from

the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the

CIAs misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where

do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson

to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?

If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then

the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell,

has promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And

to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to

unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not

bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist

attack.

This not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other

such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But

indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing

hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of

Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its

favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and

promote never-ending tit-for-tat killings.

Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging

with the people of the world, especially with those that it has

grieviously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable

constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must

extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It

must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases

and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing

through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in

the name of globalization.

But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour.

There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living

in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch-conservative

head of Pakistan's Jamat-i-Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture

before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a

"pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a

mosque, and preach my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist

for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries. One

hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon

and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there

is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever,

and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be.

The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large,

chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a

fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and

friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises

serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is

perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings.

This is not an argument for doing away with one's Muslim identity. But,

without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be

threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly

emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and

on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any

member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US

are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business

being there.

To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake

will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror,

to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the

Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine.

Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need

to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular

species is far from guaranteed.

The author is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University,

Islamabad.