<<< The challenge of September 11 >>>
An interview with A. Sivanandan by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF)
The events of September 11 and their aftermath, in terms of government policy, have thrown up a series of contradictions for anti-racists about freedom of expression, human rights, religion and Islam, in particular.
CARF asked veteran campaigner and anti-imperialist writer A Sivanandan for some pointers.
irr.org.uk
Excerpt:
CARF: Are you going along, then, with Huntington's argument that there is a 'clash of civilisations' between the West and Islam?
AS: No. That's bullshit. It's ahistorical and superficial. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations but the imposition of one civilisation on another, and the resistance that follows from that. The clash of civilisations theory also implies that the clash is between a superior civilisation and an inferior one. But it was Islamic civilisation that, through its achievements in mathematics, geography, medicine, literature, art and architecture, helped to advance European civilisation. Centuries of colonial oppression and imperialist exploitation, however, have forced certain sections of Islam to retreat into the safety of fundamentalist beliefs. And this has been further heightened by the mass poverty inflicted on Islamic countries by puppet dictatorships installed and/or maintained by western powers for their own interests - principally oil.
Where then can the oppressed find succour, except in religion, 'the sigh of the oppressed'? But what begins as the sigh of the oppressed is transformed, in the hands of the religionists, into the 'opiate of the masses' and gives fundamentalism its impetus. And the West, in turn, has tried to counter nationalist aspirations and communist influence by financing and promoting fundamentalist movements and reactionary regimes. Is it any wonder that, as Malcolm X said in another context, the chickens have come home to roost?
To get back to Huntington, the clash of civilisations theory distracts us from locating the epicentre of the conflict: Israel, which is not only a vivid example of the West's double standards and the humbug of western 'democracy', but also a constant, in-your-face reminder that terror can work if it is properly organised in the guise of a state, under the pretext of survival.
[...]
CARF: But why the rise of fundamentalism?
AS: Since the communist parties died, since the post-independence nationalist projects of autonomous development foundered, people have had no alternative value system to turn to, no political agency to organise them. Against the ideology of global capitalism is only the ideology of religion - Mammon versus
Mohammed.
But religion comes with a price tag: ritual. And when ritual begins to define religion, it corrupts it. Ritual is
based on customs and habit, religion is based on rights and values. Rites separate; rights unify. Rites contribute
to superstition and ceremony; rights contribute to universal values. There are no essential differences in the
value systems of religions, only in their rituals, social habits and customs.
And that is why, for me, the most significant thing about September 11 is the challenge it poses to Islam
itself: to live up to its own values and principles of universality, which are not only the values and principles
of all religions, but also of modernity.
What I am saying, in effect, is that the modernist revolution is not over, only re-charged. It is
post-modernism that is dead - at birth.
[snip]
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