Bush is right: this is not a clash of civilisations
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown *
We have heard only one truth from the Bush'n' Blair axis of deceit in
the past six months. All else is lies, mangled truths and spin. But when these treacherous
leaders claim that this is not a war against Islam, they are right. It is a new
crusade, but it is not against the Islamic faith nor only against Muslims, or
their culture, whatever that means.
Yet this description of the invasion is gaining currency. Last week, a
Muslim woman on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day piously opined that the war
is seen as an assault by Westerners on the Muslim way of life. Her evidence?
The fact that American evangelicals are at Iraq's borders waiting to go in with
food and bibles.
It is true that Christian fanatics – among them Franklin Graham, son of
Billy, who sees Islam as “evil” – do see this as a holy battle. But if the only
outcome of this military abomination were to be an influx of sanctimonious
Christian missionaries with beaming faces and exhortations, Iraqis would hardly
panic. The poor around the world are clever enough to know they sometimes must
nod politely and accept bibles in order to get at essential goods.
Last week, the vulpine and diabolical Saddam latched on to the idea of
military jihad. He called this a holy war and appealed to Islamists, and to the
many Muslims filled with rage who are desperately seeking meaning.
Too many dictators and xenophobes in the world today are Muslims, but it
is also indisputable that Muslims are facing injustice and institutionalised
prejudice which makes them feel that they are the new Jews. The Rushdie crisis,
the Balkan wars, Chechnya, and now Iraq have persuaded them that their lives
and beliefs are targeted by the powerful nations, all of which are
predominantly Christian. Some of this is simplistic (the US put down Serbs to
protect Bosnian Muslims, for example) but the pain and fears are real and
justified.
Nevertheless, this explanation of the war in Iraq must be vigorously
rejected. It disables the anti-war resistance and perilously underestimates the
threat of this new empire. It affirms conservative Americans such as Samuel
Huntington, who believes that the West has irreconcilable differences with
Islam and that a “clash of civilisations” is inevitable. It reduces culture to
essentialist stereotypes, with no permeability between the tribes of the world.
Muslims and “Westerners” in this discourse live in enclosures, with malevolence
their only messenger.
The reality is that more non-Muslims than Muslims have protested against
the war thus far. The Arab nations today – the abject leaders and their people
– watch Iraq turn into a colony without taking to the streets in their
millions. Fear of imprisonment, or worse, should not stop them. Why didn't they
raise their fury against Saddam for all these years?
In 1998 when the price of onions rose in India, the most wretched of
peasants raised hell and shook up their government. In the Middle East most
people with wealth, erudition and political acumen sit tight in all this chaos.
It is Muslims and others in the West who are having to fight on their behalf.
Has any Arab millionaire living in his Park Lane mansion given millions to the
anti-war movement? If so, do let me know.
The most incisive critics of this invasion include Muslims like Lord
Ahmed and the Iraqi political scientist Kamil Mahdi, and also Arundhati Roy,
Martin Amis, Nelson Mandela, Harold Pinter, actors and directors from Hollywood
and Britain, our poet laureate Andrew Motion – whose new poem is a profound
anti-war statement, the singer George Michael, the atheist Oxford don Richard
Dawkins, the architect Richard Rogers, the academics Correlli Barnett and
Professor Avi Shlaim, many church people, the right-wingers Peter Hitchens and
Matthew Parris, and the scholar Patrick Seale.
Millions of black and white Europeans are anti-war. On Thursday,
protesting Americans gathered in London – a reminder that millions of them are
moral anti-imperialists too. People otherwise divided have amassed to reject
the manufactured reasons for this invasion and to condemn the perpetrators, who
will win this war but will have destroyed the soul of that suffering nation and
wounded our democracy and international obligations.
I have just finished reading Civil Society in the Islamic World, edited
by Amyn Sajoo, which shows how the quest for modern, democratic citizenship is
now emerging in the most dormant of Muslim countries. Professor John Gray
argues in his provocative new book, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern,
that new radical Islam is shaped as much by Western ideology as by Islamic
traditions. Globalisation makes such promiscuity inevitable. While everybody
argues about social cohesion in Britain, lo and behold we see it happening
before our eyes in the anti-war movements.
We gather together because we value our values, the ties that bind us –
justice, democracy, true independence, global parity. Some of these are what
Islamists would describe as “Western” and some come out of the long struggles
of peoples against foreign rule. How proud I feel to have imbibed both these
traditions and that today I fight for principles which are universal, and not
only “Islamic”.
* The Independent, 07 April
2003. y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk
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