Pervez Hoodbhoy

page 20 • variant • volume 2 number 15 • Summer 2002 Muslims and the West after September 11 Pervez Hoodbhoy Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high- The second assertion is even further off the energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, mark: even if Islam had in some metaphorical Islamabad. This article is based on a speech deliv- sense been hijacked, that event did not occur on ered at the Center for Inquiry International confer- September 11, 2001. It happened around the 13th ence in Atlanta, Georgia, 2001. century. Indeed, Islam has yet to recover from the America has exacted blood revenge for the trauma of those times. Twin Towers. A million Afghans have fled US bombs into the cold wastelands and face starva- tion. B-52s have blown the Taliban to bits and A dismal present changed Mullah Omar's roar of defiance into a Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not pitiful squeak for surrender. Usama bin Laden is ask about Islam; Islam is an abstraction. Moulana on the run (he may be dead by the time this arti- Abdus Sattar Edhi and Mullah Omar are both fol- cle reaches the reader). But even as the cham- lowers of Islam, but the former is overdue for a pagne pops in the White House, America remains Nobel Peace Prize while the other is a medieval, fearful—for good reason. Subsequent to ignorant, cruel fiend. Edward Said, among others, September 11th we have all begun to live in a dif- has insistently pointed out that Islam carries very ferent, more dangerous world. Now is the time to different meanings to different people. It is as ask why. Like clinical pathologists, we need to sci- heterogeneous as those who believe and practice entifically examine the sickness of human behav- it. There is no "true Islam." Therefore it only iour that impelled terrorists to fly airliners filled makes sense to speak of people who claim that with passengers into skyscrapers. We also need to Injured innocence faith. understand why millions celebrated as others "Why do they hate us?" asked George W. Bush. Today Muslims number one billion, spread over died. In the absence of such an understanding This rhetorical question betrays the pathetic igno- 48 Muslim countries. None of these nations has there remains only the medieval therapy of exor- rance of most Americans about the world around yet evolved a stable democratic political system. cism: for the strong to literally beat the devil out them. Moreover, its claim to injured innocence In fact, all Muslim countries are dominated by of the weak. Indeed, the Grand Exorcist, disdain- cannot withstand even the most cursory examina- self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance ful of international law and the growing nervous- tion of US history. For almost forty years, this their personal interests and steal resources from ness of even its close allies, prepares a new hit list "naiveté and self-righteousness" has been chal- their people. No Muslim country has a viable edu- of other Muslim countries in need of therapy: lenged most determinedly by Noam Chomsky. As cational system or a university of international Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. We shall kill at will, is early as 1967, he pointed that the idea that "our" stature. the message. motives are pure and "our" actions benign is Reason too has been waylaid. To take some This will not work. Terrorism does not have a "nothing new in American intellectual history— examples from my own experience: You will sel- military solution. Soon—I fear perhaps very or, for that matter, in the general history of impe- dom encounter a Muslim name as you flip soon—there will be still stronger, more dramatic rialist apologia." through scientific journals, and if you do, chances proof. In the modern age, technological possibili- Muslim leaders have mirrored America's claim are that this person lives in the West. There are a ties to wreak enormous destruction are limitless. and have asked the same question of the West. few exceptions: Abdus Salam, together with Anger, when intense enough, makes small state- They have had little to say about September 11 Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the less groups and even individuals extremely dan- that makes sense to people outside their commu- Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for the unification gerous. nities. Although they speak endlessly on rules of of the weak and electromagnetic forces. I got to Anger is ubiquitous in the Islamic world today. personal hygiene and "halal" or "haram," they know Salam reasonably well—we even wrote a Allow me to share a small personal experience. cannot even tell us whether or not the suicide book preface together. He was a remarkable man, On September 12th, 2001, I had a seminar sched- bombers violated Islamic laws. According to Dr. terribly in love with his country and his religion. uled at the department of physics in my universi- Taha Jabir Alalwani, chair of the Virginia-based And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by his ty in Islamabad, part of a weekly seminar for (and largely Saudi-funded) Fiqh Council, "this country and excommunicated from Islam by an physics students on topics outside of physics. kind of question needs a lot of research and we act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Though traumatized by events, I could not cancel don't have that in our budget." Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is consid- the seminar because sixty people had already Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim ered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My next- arrived, so I said, "We will have our seminar today communities in the US, Canada, and Europe have door neighbour, also an Ahmadi, was shot in the on a new subject: on yesterday's terrorist responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers neck and heart and died in my car as I drove him attacks." The response was negative. Some stu- atrocity. They have proclaimed first, that Islam is a to the hospital. His only fault was to have been dents mindlessly rejoiced in the attacks. One said, religion of peace; and second, that Islam was born in the wrong sect.) "You can't call this terrorism." Another said, "Are hijacked by fanatics on the September 11. They Though genuine scientific achievement is rare you only worried because it is Americans who are wrong on both counts. in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-sci- have died?" It took two hours of sustained, First, Islam—like Christianity, Judaism, ence is in generous supply. A former chairman of impassioned, argumentation for me to convince Hinduism, or any other religion—is not about my department has calculated the speed of my students that the brutal killing of ordinary peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about Heaven: it is receding from the earth at one centi- people who had nothing to do with the policies of absolute belief in its own superiority and its metre per second less than the speed of light. His the United States was an atrocity. I suppose that divine right to impose itself upon others. In medi- ingenious method relies upon a verse in the millions of Muslim students the world over felt as eval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were Qur'an which says that worship on the night on mine did, but heard no counter-arguments. soaked in blood. Today, Christian fundamentalists which the Qur'an was revealed is worth a thou- If the world is to be spared what future histori- attack abortion clinics in the US and kill doctors; sand nights of ordinary worship. He states that ans may call the "Century of Terror," we must Muslim fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars this amounts to a time-dilation factor of one thou- chart a perilous course between the Scylla of against each other; Jewish settlers holding the sand, which he plugs into a formula belonging to American imperial arrogance and the Charybdis Old Testament in one hand and Uzis in the other Einstein's theory of special relativity. of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off A more public example: one of two Pakistani waters we must steer by a distant star towards a their ancestral land; Hindus in India demolish nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion careful, reasoned, democratic, humanistic, and ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earli- secular future. Else, shipwreck is certain. Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil separatists. er proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. The Qur'an variant • volume 2 number 15 • Summer 2002 • page 21 says that God created man from clay, and angels But Brzezinski's "stirred up Moslems" wanted and genies from fire; so this highly placed engi- to change the world; and in this they were des- neer proposed to capture the genies and extract tined to succeed. With this we conclude our histo- their energy. (The reader may wish to read the ry primer for the 700 years until September 11, rather acrimonious public correspondence 2001. between Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and myself in 1988 on this subject, reproduced in my book Islam and Science—Religious Orthodoxy Facing the future And The Battle For Rationality, published in What should thoughtful people infer from this 1991). whole narrative? I think the inferences are sever- Prophet) in favour of the Qur'an. Others seized on al—and different for different protagonists. the modern idea of the nation-state.

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