By Salman Rushdie
Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A29
As the leaders of al Qaeda evade
capture, regroup and return to the
al-Jazeera airwaves to offer
menaces and derision, the United
States looks increasingly like a blind
giant, flailing uselessly about: like, in
fact, the blinded Cyclops
Polyphemus of Homeric myth, who
was only one-eyed to begin with,
who had that eye put out by Ulysses
and his fugitive companions, and who was reduced to roaring in impotent
rage
and hurling boulders in the general direction of Ulysses' taunting voice.
Indeed, the allegedly still-living Osama bin Laden might find the story
of
Ulysses and Polyphemus useful as an allegory of his own battle against
the
Great Satan of America. (Polyphemus, after all, is a sort of evil superpower,
a
stupid creature of great, brute force who respects no laws or gods and
devours
human flesh, whereas Ulysses is crafty, devious, slippery, uncatchable
and
dangerous.) Then again, he might not, for by wounding Polyphemus Ulysses
aroused the wrath of the Cyclops's father, Poseidon, the sea god who rules
over
the fate of all wanderers and fugitives, and was doomed never to return
home
until all his men were lost and home itself had grown anything but homely.
Allegory will take you only so far, however, and I rather doubt that Osama
bin
Laden spends much time poring over Book 9 of "The Odyssey"; but one of
the
more worrying aspects of our more-than-worrying times is the extent to
which
the ordinary citizenry of the Muslim world is prepared to go along with
the
Osama bin Laden mob's characterization of America in particular, and of
the
West and "the Jews" in general, as monstrous.
This, in spite of a concerted Western effort to counter the opposite of
this kind
of demonization. In the United States since Sept. 11, and also in a Europe
alarmed by the resurgence of the far right, there have been and continue
to be
laudable efforts to prevent Muslims from being tarred with the terrorist
brush.
Muslim voices, those of the people on the Arab, Afghan, Pakistani or Kashmiri
streets as well as those of intellectuals and politicians, are being given
media
time and space, and are being listened to. (The British Guardian newspaper's
decision to spend a whole week spotlighting "Islamophobia" is a recent
example.) Most of the voices we have heard have had extremely harsh things
to say about the United States of America, and its arrogance, brutality,
ignorance and so on.
It is difficult not to feel that even in the most civilized of these voices
there is
less passion for the battle against terrorism than there is for the polemics
of
victimization by the American Cyclops. It is difficult not to hear, in
the
widespread condemnations of the West's sybaritic, hedonist, sex-obsessed
individualism, milder echoes of the fanatical puritanism of the Islamist
extremists. It is difficult not to hear, beneath the condemnations of America's
suffering at the hands of Sept. 11 murderers, a gleeful note of schadenfreude;
it
is difficult to ignore the admiration for the terrorists' success in giving
America
a bloody nose. It is hard, too, to forget that Gallup poll, taken across
the Muslim
world a few months ago, in which, by a big margin, those interviewed denied
Muslim responsibility for Sept. 11.
Some of us have been listening out for something else: the emergence of
a
genuine Muslim polemic against the harm the terrorists are doing to their
"own
people." The war against Islamist terror will only be won when Muslims
around
the world begin to believe that fanaticism is a greater evil than that
which they
believe the United States to embody -- an evil, moreover, more damaging
to
Muslims, more socially, economically and politically destructive, and possessed
by the nightmare vision of the Talibanization of the planet. After nine
months
during which it has been repeatedly stressed that most Muslims are not
terrorists, but ordinary, decent human beings, it would be good to point
to the
birth of an international Muslim movement against terrorism. Unfortunately
no
such movement has emerged, nor is there the slightest indication that it
may yet
do so.
It's true that the U.S. government has seemed at times to be doing its
best to
justify comparisons to the blinded Cyclops -- except that this is a Polyphemus
whose blindness is largely self-inflicted. The litany of pre-9/11 intelligence
errors has been repeated many times -- the shelved reports, the untranslated
warnings, the sheer doltishness of American officialdom. We know now that
many prominent Bushies were busily opposing the allocation of resources
to
intelligence work right up to the moment of the attacks. And we know that
in
spite of the full deployment of all America's resources, no one has come
up
with a location for the hiding place of her greatest foe. One can't help
feeling
that the word "intelligence" is a misnomer here -- that "unintelligence"
might be
more accurate, or even "stupidity." The U.S. authorities claim that this
period of
blindness is at an end, that many conspiracies have been frustrated, many
threats identified, and some arrests made (even though, as in the case
of the
execrable Jose Padilla, they have been made on the very flimsiest of evidence).
Time will tell who is right: al Qaeda's blood-curdling spokesman Sulaiman
Abu-Ghaith or the U.S. government. Nobody I know is confident of the
outcome.
America can indeed look much like an ugly, blundering giant. America's
Middle
East policy, for example, is the terrorists' single greatest propaganda
weapon,
and the new Bush hard line is not exactly designed to change that. But
if,
indeed, most of the world's 1 billion Muslims want nothing to do with terrorism,
as we are constantly being told, then it's time that their leaders, educators,
information media and intelligentsia stopped creating the preconditions
for that
terrorism by perpetuating the image of a satanic, Polyphemus-like America
that
is well worth destroying.
Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury" and other novels.