I have been looking for the comments of Edward Said (a Christian Palestinian) on the events of September 11. Finally Libbe pointed me to The Nation:
I have never been a fan of Said's - since reading his Orientalism (New York, Pantheon Books, c1978) which I found seriously flawed with anti-Judaism, if not Antisemitism, back then. In this article he tries to create a nuanced view of recent attempts to describe the current struggle between "The West" and "Islam". Said does call the perpetrators work "homicidal evil", and he writes about the fundamentalist movement in Islam, quoting:
the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion."
Sounds like other fundamentalists we konw.
But, then, towards the very end of his article, Said writes:
Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."
I had to read this a few times. Judaism as a "successor [to what?!] haunted by what came before".
Then he says that Muslims and Christians talk of crusades and jihads while carelessly omitting the Judaic presence [in history? in the Land?].
I'll leave this for the time being....
Said's argument is similar to Andrew Sullivan's thinking in "This Is a Religious War"
In that sense, this surely is a religious war -- but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity.
This is the point we need to continue to stress.
The struggle is not against Islam (we hope), nor against Christianity. The struggle is, rather, against particular expressions of those faiths, such as those put forward by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell - as Robert Scheer wrote
And as Aryeh Neier wrote for the Soros Foundation in The Washington Post "Warring Against Modernity"
The calamitous events of Sept. 11 can be seen as a new phase in a long struggle in which tribalists and fundamentalists have identified cosmopolitanism and modernity as their archenemy.
and he continues
Our enemies are the contemporary counterparts of the Nazis -- for whom the Jews represented the cosmopolitanism they loathed -- the Khmer Rouge and those who bombarded Sarajevo from their safe perches in the hills. Every major faith is represented among both the assailants and the victims in this long- lasting global struggle. Recognizing this may help us avoid a clash of civilizations.
Or, to look at it from quite another perspective, it is not a struggle between various interpretations of religions, but, in the words of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami "closed and open circuits",
Another, related, thought from another perspective (Australian) (conversion is possible):
Syndey Morning Herald October 1, 2001
Were we US-bashers wrong all along?
Old certainties also died in the New York holocaust, writes Helen Darville.
Helen Darville, author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, is a high-school teacher and newspaper contributor.
Last modified 22 October, 2001