Mosharraf Zaidi

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=135224

9/11 and the Muslims’ crusade

Thursday, September 11, 2008
Mosharraf Zaidi

Seven years since the atrocities of September 11, 2001 and the Muslim world’s crusade against itself continues unabated. From Algeria to Indonesia and everywhere in between colonial residue continues to be used as an excuse for inexcusable governance. If there is any introspective Seven Year Itch in the Muslim world, it is not clear how it is manifesting itself. In seven years Muslims have still not prepared a case against the hijackers who have mutilated their faith, still not educated the advocates who will take this fight to the misguided, and still not prosecuted those that seek to poison generations of Muslims children with their bloodlust and their quest for an alternative but cynical and depraved political power structure.

Of course Muslims are responsible for their own fate, but if the Western world was interested in helping Muslims overcome centuries of debilitating decline, its gone about it in a way that is, well, typically Muslim. It has wasted every opportunity, clouded its own message, delivered it using the wrong messengers, and owned up to none of its failures.

Western orthodoxy has fundamentally failed to understand the denial that drives even secular Muslims to float conspiracy theories and question the accepted wisdom of what took place on 9/11. It has consistently obfuscated the language around terrorism to simplify life for itself, creating a new post 9/11 language that is sexy, but hypocritical and offensive. (There is no such thing as a Jihadist, or a Jihadi. If it is Jihad-doers that we seek to define, then the word we are looking for is mujahid, (plural: mujahideen). But of course, there are still too many warm and fuzzy feelings associated with that word for the neo-Conservatives that once sang Allah Hu Akbar and kumbaya with the very “evil” they now battle).

The West has done worse than get its grammar and language wrong. In trying to develop the underdeveloped Muslim world, it has failed to make up its mind between Three Cups of Tea and a few dozen schools that are Oprah-worthy, or entire states and national systems that work, with millions of children that may not be ready for prime time, but will never be on America’s Most Wanted list either. It has painted the Muslim world as one divided between moderates and extremists, whereas not surprisingly, there are extremist moderates, and moderate extremists, and there is everything in between that hazard-pay diplomats cannot possibly be expected to understand from the depressing comfort of bunkers in color-coded zones of safety.

Perhaps most unforgivably the West has played chicken with the self-perception of Muslims’ liberty and dignity. It has sought stability and open access across the Muslim world for itself by making sweetheart deals with dictators, warlords, and criminals. It has had the audacity to call dead children “collateral damage”. And yet the question, “why do they hate us?” keeps reappearing. If predator drones and hellfire missiles haven’t done the trick in the tribal areas of Pakistan, maybe Mullah Jack Straw’s fatwas on the hijab explains what is happening in Bradford and Yorkshire. If Haditha and Abu Ghuraib didn’t quite float the Iraqis’ boats in Baghdad and Basrah, Senator Obama’s unmitigated disgust at being called a Muslim might be leading Southeast Michigan the way of Bradford.

The brutality of children dying from missile attacks should not be difficult to understand for Western governments, and yet somehow it is. This complete blindness to the fate of the children of others, by a Western social order that has come further than any other in human history in protecting and nurturing its children, and “not leaving any of them behind”, is incomprehensible.

It is impossible on this seventh anniversary to expect any improvements in the Western prosecution of the war against 9/11’s perpetrators. Why? Because even as 9/11 American blood lust fades, post 9/11 political stupidity does not. Bill O’Rielly and the radical mullahs of the Republican Party, having finally admitted to the stupidity of attacking Iraq in the first place, insist that they cannot now leave without “winning”. Democrats, having had their chutzpah handed to them by Karl Rove’s brilliant scare tactics for over a decade, have outdone even themselves—committing to leaving Iraq, but also committing to increasing US troops in Afghanistan.

Yet there isn’t a credible Muslim voice in the world that is engaging in the discourse required to chart a new and better path in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it is Rory Stewart, a British diplomat and traveler (not unlike Ibn Batuta) who is taking the case to the West. There isn’t a credible Muslim voice in the world explaining the similarities between Abraham’s children (aale Ibrahim), rather than exploiting them. Instead, it is Karen Armstrong, a former nun, who is articulating the real Islam and separating it from the Fox News caricature built by Osama Bin Laden. There isn’t a credible Muslim voice in the world explaining why it is dangerous to tar and feather the largest Muslim military in the world. Instead, it is Eric Margolis, an American journalist that has to anthropologically dissect why the ISI and Pakistan are genetically insecure in the neighborhood they occupy.

There is no worse indictment of Muslims than the fact that there are still no credible leaders in the world (save perhaps Tariq Ramadan), whose primary identity is Muslim. Here too the West does its part, exacerbating the decay by confusing second rate intellectuals and foreign policy ambulance-chasers for Muslim thought leaders. The resultant vacuum is continually being filled by the mutilated Islam of killers and arsonists. Seven years since the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and there is still nothing to celebrate in the Muslim world.