Since the tragedy in NY on Sep 11, we have all been bombarded by a never-ending stream of news about the disaster, the culprits, our military and other responses, etc. etc. etc. Recovering from the tragedy and its consequences and dealing successfully with the perpetrators of the crime are not going to be easy. Certainly, only a military response is not going to bring back those who perished nor necessarily bring justice to the killers. There is another element which needs to seriously be taken into account, which most of us are already at least vaguely aware of. The following was in today's San Francisco Chronicle. It's only one person's viewpoint, but I found it well worth reading. For what it's worth:
sfgate.com
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OPEN FORUM
No Clash of Civilizations
Bin Laden doesn't speak for the 'wretched of the Earth'
Anissa Mariam Bouziane Sunday, October 14, 2001
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As rockets rain down on Kabul, while the fires still smolder beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center, voices across the globe are heard trying to explain "why" these tragic events are taking place. Out of the cacophony, I hear two major themes emerging: one proclaiming the new battle lines of our age -- the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West -- and the other reciting the litany of despair felt by the majority of the non-Western world and announcing that this hopelessness is the reason for terrorism.
I am an Arab American, Muslim woman and a New Yorker. I was born in America to a Arab father and a Western mother. I lived in the United States until I was 7, and then moved to the Arab world, where I spent my formative years until returning to America to go to college. I know about the divide between East and West.
I know about the supposed "chasm that can never be bridged." I live in that chasm and, the last time I checked, I was a pretty well-integrated human being.
For me, the clash of civilizations theory holds very little water.
I do know first-hand the taste and smell of despair that has been festering for years in the Middle East and Muslim worlds. I stood outside my home under the torrid Middle East sun on a day when the local government was forced by the International Monetary Fund to cancel subsidies on products such as flour, butter and cooking oil. Still today, I recall the icy taste of fear that overwhelmed me as I wondered how even my middle-class family would now make ends meet. I remember seeing the smoke rising from the shanty towns down the hill and hearing a collective roar emerging from people who had nothing to lose.
I also know that Osama bin Laden does not speak for the "wretched of the Earth." If he did, the horizon he points to for our collective tomorrows would be one of equality, justice and freedom for all peoples of our tiny planet. Instead, he offers a bleak landscape where the Koran -- a sacred and inspiring text -- has been reduced to an outdated penal code, where half the population of his world -- namely women -- is held in enslavement, where hate and violence are seen as the only answers to a desire for change.
Ihave seen the birth of the despair so many are searching to understand today -- it happened one day when I was 11 or 12, not far from my school, where there was a municipal maternity ward, whose funding fell far short of its needs when international aid failed to arrive. A woman, who had just given birth there a few hours before dragged her weary body out of the building, clutching a bundle wrapped in newspaper. She sank down against the whitewashed wall of the little market where I used to buy my chewing gum, and unwrapped her bundle, revealing her newborn child. "The ward has no blankets," she replied flatly in response to my terrified stare, then unbuttoned her blouse and lifted the now-screaming child to her breast.
The school bell rang, and as I was but a child, I turned and ran, but that moment has remained with me forever. I wonder now if in that instant -- when a mother fed her infant the milk of her own desperation -- a potential terrorist was born. Today, I know that anyone who would come to that woman's rescue could have harnessed the energy of her heartache. I failed to do so as an 11- year-old child, but what if a seasoned Islamist extremist had come up to her once I ran away? What if he had given her a blanket -- would that have been enough to harness her agony and make it his to use?
I speak here of individual moments of despair. The Middle East is home to great human injustices: the continued oppression of the Palestinian people, the starvation of the Iraqi people, massacres of Sabra and Shatilla -- icons of hopelessness abound. Bin Laden and other Islamist extremists' cunning has been that they did not act like children and run away, ignoring the growing desperation in the Middle East and Muslim worlds. Rather, they identified it and have silently used it as the means to reach their political objectives.
When bin Laden drove his twin chariots of death and destruction into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, along with those jets, he hijacked the legitimate despair that is so much a part of the reality of the non-Western world.
Today, he hopes to convince the world to accept the equation that the death and destruction he has unleashed is justified by human anguish. But to do so is to play his game and to create a reality where civilizations collide and despair justifies terrorism.
Do not tell me that bin Laden, with his vision of the world, is the heir to thinkers such as Frantz Fannon, Patrice Lumumba, Mahatma Gandhi, or even luminaries from another age: Ibn Khaldun and Rumi. I was recently reminded of the late Pakistani scholar and intellectual Eqbal Ahmed's analysis of modern Islamists. Ahmed said they are "concerned with power, not the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations." We must be careful that in acknowledging the forces that have brought our world to this dangerous brink of all-out war, we not give credence to bin Laden's political aims.
Wherever we are from, whatever our reasons have been in the past -- that we were too young to know, or too child-like to act -- we can no longer turn our back on the helplessness and desperation rampant on this planet. Let us take human anguish out of the hands of bin Laden and his cohorts. Let us right the wrongs committed against humanity. Let freedom and justice truly know no boundaries and not belong to one people more than another.
The chasm between East and West is uncharted territory where the blueprints of our tomorrows have yet to be drawn. Let us not turn this space into a no- man's-land of mine fields and barbed wire.
I do not wish to live in a world determined by bin Laden, where my pen and my camera are taken from me, where a father is scorned for indebting himself in order to educate his daughters. Let us meet here and begin a dialogue aimed at building a world beyond despair.
Anissa Mariam Bouziane is a writer and filmmaker. |
