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By Root 1346 0

put it. In the medieval or early modern total wars against evil, even the primitive methods of social control were relatively efficient. How much more, then, could be achieved with the modern systems of information and control? It would mean reverting to the inquisitorial mind-set I described earlier in this book. There is a high price in social terms for reinventing heresy. But there should also be the nagging doubts as to whether it would work. The evildoers now seem to be more powerful than ever, and like the unclean spirits in St. Mark’s gospel, their name is Legion.74 However, demonizing new enemies like Al Qaeda in crusading language is to misunderstand their power and practice. The temptation is to consider them primitives stuck in a set of seventh-century beliefs. According to traditional Western thought, these fanatics would have no truck with images, television, or the Internet. But they are not primitive in this sense. Osama bin Laden is not preoccupied with ancient prohibitions, like the public display of images. His face is everywhere.

THE EMINENT POLITICAL SCIENTIST BASSAM TIBI HAS DESCRIBED this mélange of tradition and modernity as a “half-modernity,” which he calls “a selective choice of orthodox Islam and an instrumental semi-modernity.”75 Charles Kurzman puts it into a more precise context: “Few revivalists actually desire a full fledged return to the world of 7th century Arabia. Khomeini himself was an inveterate radio listener, and used modern technologies such as telephones, audiocassettes, photocopying, and British short-wave radio broadcasts to promulgate his revivalist message. Khomeini allowed the appearance of women on radio and television, chess playing, and certain forms of music. When other religious leaders objected he responded, ‘the way you interpret traditions, the new civilization should be destroyed and the people should live in shackles or live forever in the desert.’ ”76

This hybrid is hard to understand if you believe Islamic culture has remained essentially unchanged from the seventh century. Even as shrewd an observer as Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, resorted to crude cultural stereotypes to sustain a view of changelessness. I quote his words exactly as he spoke them:

Cultures that see themselves in contest with the West, and see themselves as really great proselytizing cultures themselves, like that of Islam, find it very difficult to adapt to somebody else’s dominance, to adapt to modernity … if you look at the way men dress in the world, it’s always to me a very interesting indication. Japanese prime ministers and businessmen wear Western suits. Chinese prime ministers and businessmen now wear Western suits. In the Arab world it is essentially a mark of dishonor to wear a Western suit.77

This is plainly wrong. In Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and much of Iraq, Western clothes (shirt, trousers, or a suit) are normal business attire for urban men.78 These states are just as Arab as those of the peninsula and the Arabian Gulf, yet government officials and businessmen in the northern Arab lands do not normally wear the thobe (sometimes colloquially called the dishdash) or the abaya. As in the West, the clothes that a man wears in these countries is determined by local custom, status and wealth, age and social circumstances.

What is Zakaria suggesting? Are only those who wear traditional dress honorable Arabs? Yet even that traditional dress is in many parts of the gulf a reinvention, rather like the kilt in late-eighteenth-century Scotland.79 And many peninsular Arabs who wear national dress every day at home often don a suit when in the West. I suspect he is hinting that Arabs are fixed in the past, socially (almost genetically?) incapable of accommodating change or becoming modern. Such an observation might be understandable from some ignorant stay-at-home but not from an erudite and widely traveled scholar. So how can he mistake the evidence of his own eyes?

This is a new version of a very old story.80 For many nineteenth-century Western visitors