Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [342]
Instead of trying to sell a way of life whose attractions are evident from queues of people seeking visas, the West should also simply represent hope by bringing fresh water and school buildings to places without either, or by providing major disaster relief in emergencies such as earthquakes, like those that hit Iran and Pakistan, or the Asian tsunami and the Burmese cyclone.12 It should also be encouraging voices of Islamic authority beyond the Arab world, for example in Turkey or Indonesia. The Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs has sought to conform the hadith to life in the twenty-first century. The West should also stand firm for the rights of women, denouncing such abominations as so-called honour killings, prohibitions on educating girls and gender-biased divorce and inheritance laws.
There is no point in elderly conservatives being nostalgic for the Cold War or for a West that in important respects no longer exists for kids who listen to world music or take their pre-university gap years in Africa or South America. Even an oldie like this author has CDs of raï music, the Egyptian chanteuse Uhm Khaltum and more arcane recordings from Mali, mixed in with Bach and Beethoven, while some of the most interesting novels I have read have been by Algerians and Egyptians. The entire world is just a click of a mouse away. During the Cold War, enterprises like the Congress for Cultural Freedom confronted state propagandists in the Eastern bloc, in place of today’s Al-Manar, As-Sahab or Al Jazeera, plus six thousand or so websites bouncing back and forth mainly on the West’s own servers. In addition to jihadist websites, there are also chat-rooms and social networks, perhaps the real sites of auto-radicalisation among young Muslims, although the technology changes so swiftly it is difficult for someone of my age to tell.13
Given the confusions in our own cultures, not least their institutionalised saturation with the dogmas of multiculturalism, and the widespread post-modern rejection of authority, truth and meaning, how exactly do rationalists project a single view of Western society’s values? Do states need civic religions? What do we do about the growing number of people who inhabit a virtual world where, as in TV’s X-Files, everything is a hidden conspiracy and where a three-month inquest has not comprehensively dispelled belief that MI6 murdered Princess Diana? How do rational people counter a pervasive fascination with the irrational or such potent myths as the ‘Crusader-Zionist’ conspiracy against the global ummah? Merely setting out the historical truth of the matter is clearly insufficient, just as it is for dedicated Holocaust-deniers, a category that often overlaps with such circles.14
One approach gaining international ground is for high-level Muslim clerics unequivocally to condemn Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism. The Saudi cleric Shaykh Salman bin Fahd wrote an open letter this year to Osama bin Laden saying: ‘How much blood has been spent? How many innocent people, children, elderly and women have been killed, dispersed or evicted in the name of al Qaeda?’ A similar condemnation came from the grand mufti of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. While prison-based schemes in Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Malaysia have chalked up some success in reorientating people imprisoned for low-level bloodless extremism (an option that does not exist in the West), Britain has seen the launch of the Quilliam Foundation. Led by Maajid Nawaz, a British Islamist imprisoned for five years in Egypt, the Foundation aims to confront young Muslims with the perils of extremism. It bluntly recommends cutting all ties with Saudi religious funding. It further insists that Muslim communities should ignore charges