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Tariq Ali says nothing that was not known already. Bernard Lewis’s
What Went Wrong covers much the same ground and provides
a better account of the Muslim countries’ search for a place
in the world. Ali, however, gives a non-European perspective
that neither Islamic fundamentalists nor crusading American
zealots care to remember. This enriches our understanding of the
crisis of contemporary Islam, its permanent schisms and, what is
more to the point, its involvement with the politics of terror.
"Islam,"
says Ali, "had always prospered through contact with other
traditions. Its origins lay in close contact with Judaism and
Christianity." But the fragmentation of its unified
structure into sects and groupings cast it into a limbo of
hopelessness. The more rigid sects like the Wahabis in Saudi
Arabia and elsewhere grew into a militant proselytizing force
spreading terror in the non-Islamic world and breeding the likes
of Taliban and numerous Lashkars in places as far apart as
Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kashmir.
He brings to light
— again not for the first time — the fact that Muslims and
Jews together fought the Christian crusaders long before the
machinations of the British created the Palestine problem, and
reveals the nexus between Western economic interests and
political intrigue in West Asia. But what stands out in Ali’s
chapters on Islam is the emphasis he gives to its
non-fundamentalist strain, ranging from the earlier apostasies
of Ibn Rwandi of Baghdad to the tolerant acceptance of dissent
by the Sufi sect of the creed. These branches of Islam still
retain a potent influence in some parts of the world, Kashmir,
for example, making it difficult for us to answer why insurgency
gained ground there.
A cultural feature
discussed by Ali and normally neglected by the more politically
correct liberals is the whole question of sodomy and its
relationship to women in general. "Islam’s strictures on
homosexuality are almost pathological," he writes and
connects these with the restrictions on women. This taboo takes
many forms, a mild acceptable one being the mystical celebration
of male bonding.
Ali exposes the
downright economic greed of the western powers, which is usually
masked in idealistic terminology. While many western analysts
see through the fog of this terminology, Ali speaks from the
inside, having witnessed the militarisation of his native
Pakistan and the recent appropriation of Afghanistan and Iraq,
to say nothing of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. He is not taken
in by the democratic rhetoric in which the ulterior American
imperialistic designs are clothed.
This fact is
further examined in Ali’s chapter on the nexus between oil,
imperialism and the so-called spread of ‘freedom and
civilisation’. With the enlisting of Israel in the ‘civilising’
mission it is not hard to see the ultimate design of the
exercise. Ali is good on Zionism, on the collaborationist
character of the military rulers in Pakistan and the
acquiescence of satraps like Hamid Karzai and the successive
ruling cliques in Kashmir.
He is equally
perceptive on the Islamic revolution in Iran and the American
designs on the ‘empire of evil’. In all these events he
discovers a western, mostly American, conspiracy to culturally
and militarily subjugate Third World countries. He offers an
effective antidote to the peddlers of ‘democratic reform’ in
the West who have been hyperactive during the Iraq invasion.
Ali’s knowledge
of Arab writing that he brings to bear upon his argument is
impressive. No commentator has found Munif’s Cities of the
Salt as authentic a mirror as he does. Very few western
writers use Third World literature in the way Ali does. This
gives to his potted histories (that is essentially what these
chapters are) their felt substantiality.
Appended to the
chapter "Marginal Notes on the Character of Defeats"
is Nizar Quabbani’s long poem Footnote to the Book of
Setback about the 1967 Arab humiliation. This poem is both a
dirge and a call to action. "We want an angry
generation/to plough the sky/to blow up history`85." The
poet was exiled from Egypt but the venerated singer Umm Kulthum
sang this poem and touched the nerve of a defeated generation.
Political interventions by poets are not rare in cultures that
suppress dissent, as many Arab regimes still do. Ironically, it
was left to the American military to ‘blow up’ Iraq’s
history, revealing the empire’s ugly face.
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BY
a strange happenstance I was reading Tariq Ali’s novel The Book
of Saladin in a Boston suburb while Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld
were pounding Iraq into pre-history. Ali presents the legendary
Kurdish warrior, warts and all, and sets the theme of the present
book: two fundamentalisms, call them jehadi and Crusading,
ignobly clashing over the cities and sands of one of the greatest
civilisations of the world.
