Facing up to unholy terror
The chroniclers tell us that the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid II (ruled 1876-1909) made a habit of keeping a small child on his knee in his weekly appearances in public. The 34th sultan of the House of Osman assumed that no decent assassin would willingly gun down a child. From the discotheques of Tel Aviv to the nightclubs in Bali and the schools in Beslan, the assassins are now of a different breed. The moral limits of our world have been stretched to the breaking point. The political ideologies of terror, armed with a religious warrant, have been defining our limits of tolerance, our morality itself, downward. "We love death," said that quintessential merchant of death Osama bin Laden, "as much as the infidels love life." Alas, this is not an idle boast, and terrors in the name of a radicalized, aggrieved Islamism have become a rebuke to claims of progress in our contemporary world.
The Russians now claim a 9/11 of their own; Spain had been given a signal day of mourning six months earlier, when commuter trains were blown apart by bombs assembled by Arab drifters and jihadists. In truth, Israel had been the first battleground in this ongoing war between civilized life and terror: It was there that pizzerias and buses and discotheques became targets of terror. It was there that the cultists of death cut their teeth and developed their rituals of mass murder--the videotapes, the boys (and then the young women) with headbands proclaiming their zeal for "martyrdom," the posters lionizing mass killers. And it was there, too, that religious preachers bent the faith to their will. In distant lands, it was said that the ferocity of these attacks derived from Palestinian "grievances," that this conflict was sui generis. But the ruin soon spread to other lands.
Earlier this month, a thoughtful and brave Saudi columnist, Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, in the London-based Arabic daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, ignited a storm with a piece of writing of extraordinary daring entitled "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists Are Muslims!" It was time, he said, to acknowledge that the terrorist attacks of the past decade, in "buses and schools and houses" the world over, were carried out by Muslims. There is a "malady" in Islamic lands, he wrote, and a cure for this malady begins with "self-knowledge" and the end of denial. "Our sons, the terrorists," he wrote, "are loose in the world, the natural products of a deformed culture." In his autopsy, al-Rashed took on the preachers and the muftis, the religious judges, who have found in the Scripture warrant for this deadly radicalism. He singled out Sunni Islam's most influential preacher, the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. That cleric rules the airwaves with his access to television and the Web. He had issued a fatwa authorizing attacks on American civilians in Iraq, and al-Rashed saw in this ruling the ruinous ways of the radical preachers: "Imagine a man of religion encouraging the murder of civilians, a man in the fullness of old age inciting young boys to murder when two of his daughters are studying in the United Kingdom under the protection of a presumably 'infidel' power. We can't redeem our youth unless we take on the men of religion who have turned into revolutionaries who send other people's kids to war while they send their own to European and American schools."
Roots of rage. We don't know when this new terribleness was ushered into the world of Islam. But we know that at its roots lie the forces of envy and resentment, an attraction to the emancipated ways of an encircling global culture that Muslims can neither master nor reject. The young homicide bomber walking into a Tel Aviv discotheque has come to serve a warrant of death on people his age whose ways he yearns for yet cannot have. Cunning in their reading of the bewildered and the vulnerable, the preachers and the entrepreneurs of death have given this terrible rage sanctity. In the safety of England, a Syrian-born preacher, Omar Bakri Mohammad, recently opined to the Sunday Telegraph that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a "just cause." With the heartbreak of Beslan in the background, this man said that "if an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq."
In our innocence, we think that a battle ought to be waged for Muslim hearts and minds, that perhaps if we refined or amplified our message, this hate would be driven away. It is in this spirit that the 9/11 commission recently recommended the launching of a campaign of public diplomacy in the Muslim world. But this is illusion. For at heart, this war for Islam is one for Muslims to fight. It is for them to recover their faith from the purveyors of terror.
This story appears in the September 20, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.