The Fire This Time
In the matter of these cartoons now stirring up these worldwide protests, we are in what should be familiar territory. A generation earlier, when the Indian-born Muslim author Salman Rushdie published his novel Satanic Verses, the book-burning and the protests began in England, then the storm spread to the Islamic world. The clerical "redeemer" of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had just begun to take stock of the terrible war his "revolutionary children" had fought against Saddam Hussein. Rushdie's work of fiction came to the rescue. It was against that background that Khomeini had issued his fatwa, a sentence of death on the offending author. An embattled revolutionary regime would thus assert its primacy in the world of Islam. Today, too, "activists"from the Muslim community in Denmark, where the cartoons first appeared, would take their furies back to Islamic lands, and Arab and Muslim regimes--regimes known for their great brutality against Islamists--are riding this dialed-up rage and harnessing it for their own purposes.
It has now come to light that a Danish citizen of Lebanese descent, Ahmad Akkari, 28, lit the fuse when he took a booklet of these cartoons and turned up in Arab lands. He was to find his audience among religious authorities in Lebanon and in Egypt, among the functionaries of the Arab League, and among Syrian officials who had been waging a war of their own against the Muslim Brotherhood--all eager to be offended and to show their devotion to the faith.
Akkari was a man on a mission. He would "spike" his cartoons by attaching to them hideous material that had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that had commissioned them. Islamists like Akkari are quintessential practitioners of taqiyya (dissimulation), for infidels are never owed the truth. In his defense, Akkari would say that he had separated the more offensive images--hate material from the Internet--from the cartoons, by several pages of letters. In truth, this was a distinction without a difference. The crowds that would sack Danish and Norwegian diplomatic missions in Beirut and Damascus, the crowds that would rise in howling, spasmodic outbursts all the way from Gaza to Indonesia, had no use for such fine distinctions.
Damascus was to this crisis what Iran was to the Rushdie affair. The Syrian regime is under the gaze of the world; it had just lost the dominion of plunder it had built up in Lebanon. Commissions of inquiry are looking into its crimes in Lebanon. The Danish gift arrived just in the nick of time, and a regime based on a minority esoteric sect, the Alawites, picked up the banner of the faith. No one was fooled by those "spontaneous" protests that erupted in Damascus--a city of stultifying tyranny. And no one could fail to see Syria's hand in the protests that hit Beirut.
Wickedness. Once upon a time, there was hope that modern Islam in Europe would spawn a liberal variant of the faith. Those hopes, it must be conceded, now lie in ruins. In Amsterdam and in Copenhagen, in the suburbs of France, and in the great, cosmopolitan world of London, a merciless idea of Islam has put down roots. Preachers and "activists" have found in the welfare state, and in the canons of liberalism and multiculturalism, the perfect weapons with which to wage their jihad against modern life. They are in the West, but not of it. True allegiance is owed to the religious cell; one at war owes nothing to neighbors living in wickedness.
Historically, European nationalism had been a matter of blood and soil, and that idea of nationhood has certainly delivered its own verdict of ruin. But these doctrines of unfettered multiculturalism put the nations of western Europe to a great, cruel test. Denmark now has its reckoning with the furies and the bigotry, as Madrid and Amsterdam, London and the suburbs of France have had their own, similarly dark reckonings. The Dutch and the Danes appear ready to "re-claim" their nationhood, and Europe has awakened to the presence within its borders of a strand of politicized Islam, surly and unreconciled to the demands of modern life. The radical Islamists offer Europe a way out: submission to the die-hards, the option of serving as a haven from which the Islamists would wage their holy war against those dreaded regimes in the Muslim world that had banished them to begin with. It is odd, this spectacle of these children of Islam fleeing the fire, and the failures, but carrying them to distant lands once welcoming and benign.
This story appears in the February 20, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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