9/11: islamic worlds: all articles

The Qur'an as training-manual in a war on unbelief. Plus: Omar al-Qattan tours Disneyland Islam, Murat Belge tracks the fundamentalist mind (archive)

This is not a clash of civilisations, in part because the battle of ‘fundamentalist’ Islam is itself a product of modernity. For Muslims as for others, an openness to contradictory modern life and identities, amidst the search for a common ethical language, is the only way forward.

"Think, America. Why do we hate you?" This sentiment, which appeared in the first demonstrations against the ‘war on terrorism’, expresses two essential requirements of a new Western approach to the Muslim world: to think and to know.

Forgetfulness can be fatal: according to this BBC correspondent, alienation of the Taliban by the west led directly to the events of 11 September.

Since 11 September, the images of the war against terror which have been presented to us by the hegemonic western media are predominantly masculine on all sides: George Bush, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Mohammad Atta, Osama Bin Laden and the male soldiers launching the missiles to smoke out the terrorist. Again and again men have appeared on our TV screens, flexing their muscles, raising their rhetoric to put fear in the heart of their enemy.

The terrorists may still be hiding out in caves, but the caveman mentality is widespread among all the participants in this war. They think that this conflict, which is getting wider and more serious by the minute, cannot be resolved except through military action.

After 11 September 2001 I was frequently asked, as many scholars of Islamic studies probably were, why certain people are prepared to hijack an aeroplane and plunge themselves and all the other passengers to certain death. I do not have an answer. What I have done instead is to tell three stories – about the cult of martyrdom in Shi’ite Islam, about modern fantasies of salvation through self-sacrifice, and about power politics in the Middle East – which together assemble the elements of a fourth: the unfinished story of the modern world.

The essence of Islam is the pursuit of moral perfection. That is not contingent on what the US or Israel does. For Muslims in America, 11 September is a challenge to self-reflection about the culture of hatred in their midst.

In the war over Kuwait in 1991, and now the ‘anti-terrorist’ war, the Palestine issue has been invoked by Arab and Taliban radicals to lend legitimacy to their struggle with the US. From the Palestinian viewpoint, this is a dubious blessing. The editor of Palestine Report examines the war’s impact on the internal struggle between the Palestinian Authority and its Islamic opponents.

The abstract universalism that produces extremist violence is rooted in the modern intellectual and psychological complexes of the Islamic world, says Murat Belge.

The long journey from the Kurdish mountains has taught this distinguished journalist painful lessons about the mismatch between Islam and democracy – and the pitfalls of multiculturalism.

With the current temptation to give in to the idea of a “clash of civilisations”, a complete ideological re-think becomes ever more urgent.

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At this stage in globalising history “America” has come to be seen by many as a stand-in for the “cosmopolitanism” that was once associated with Jews. “America” represents some kind of soulless, materialistic, rootless way of life that they detest.

The speed, reach and supports of today’s Islamic terrorism owe much to globalisation. But there is a silent majority building in the Islamic world, and among the young people of its diaspora. Can they take the fanaticism out of fundamentalism?