Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [184]
In the Islamic world, symbolic violence had a different history. Faraj linked his jihad back to the earliest days of the faith, which gave these murders a solid context and ideology that had eluded the rootless anarchist Nechaev. By stages the Islamic revivalists also abandoned any hope that virtue would ever come from the secular Muslim states. Only a godly society “rightly guided” by the Holy Qur’an would do. They refused to make any compromise or accommodation with the powers of the earth, whether these were governed by Muslim rulers or were Western mass-democratic states. They were driven by the conviction that through endless sacrifice and implacable determination their jihad would eventually triumph. For the revolutionaries, the blood and sacrifice of the martyrs would eventually restore the purity of the faith. Moreover, the destruction of every one of those who were “corrupt upon earth” would hasten that salvation. How such enemies were designated was tied only very loosely to tradition and long-established custom.33 Ancient maledictions were easily adapted to meet the needs of contemporary polities.
In the modern era a new meaning and practice of jihad has been evolving.34 This transformation has two distinct facets: its meaning within the world of Islam and its impact outside. But the two, of necessity, intersected. In 1978, the revolutionary Iranian government violated all the rules of diplomacy and seized the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Some years later, on NBC television, the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, explained himself.35 He talked of America as “the great Satan, the wounded snake.” The U.S. reaction was continuing outrage at the treatment of its citizens and contempt at being described as the devil. It was supporting Iraq in her long war with Iran.
Few noticed the “wounded snake,” the last part of Khomeini’s denunciation. It was classed as mere abuse. In fact, this was the deeper meaning underlying his verbal assault. The ayatollah was referring to an ancient tale of the imam Ali, whose father, Hussain, was martyred at Kerbala. Hussain’s cruel death was the founding moment of Shia Islam. This gave the parable a special significance in Iran. The story recounted that once Shaitan (the devil) had decided to disturb the imam’s prayers. The devil then took the form of a snake and bit the imam’s legs continuously. The imam felt the pain but he continued praying as if nothing had happened.36 What Khomeini was saying was that the devil, the United States, might wound but could not impede the devoted Muslim. A wounded snake would perhaps become more vicious but it would weaken and eventually die.37 “All-powerful” America, he believed, would ultimately give way to the God-given power of Islam.
No institution (or a recording angel) has collected many of the recent examples of public Christian maledicta against the Islamic world. However, there is an organization that has translated and then disseminated very many of Mediterranean Islam’s diatribes against the West, and Israel. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) was established in Washington, D.C., in 1998 with the aim of “bridging the language gap between the Middle East and the West.” Its political objective is “to inform the debate over U.S. policy in the Middle East”; its status is that of an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, translating and disseminating material in eight different languages.38 Despite these claims, its single-minded political commitment is overt, and in pursuing it, amid much other material, the institute has assiduously garnered Arab maledicta.
Some of the most mordant texts translated by MEMRI are the Friday sermons to the faithful in the mosques, recorded and then often spread by modern technology over the Internet. (I have also found public sermons