(First blogged 13th July 2005)
Have not wanted to blog, these last few days. From Thursday onwards it seemed there were enough words in the world, and none of them adequate.
Besides, sometimes it’s better just to think. And the thoughts that haunted me all this week have revolved around bombs and greed and religion. A big ugly mess of doublethink, in fact. None if it makes sense.
It got worse yesterday. Turns out our bombers were suicides. Turns out they travelled to King’s Cross together, said their goodbyes, walked off separately into the public transport system, each carrying a small bomb, and simultaneously blew themselves to a thousand bits of pulp. Taking fifty or sixty other people with them.
It’s the first time such a thing has happened here, and it brought home with awful clarity a question I’ve played with before, but now takes on concrete meaning:
What on earth (or in heaven) makes someone do that?
I understand martyrdom in the heat of battle. There’s adrenalin and anger at work, and sometimes no alternative. But this was cold-blooded. They planned it. They got up in the morning and said goodbye to loved ones and travelled all the way from Yorkshire to London knowing they were going to do this thing. Knowing they were going to inflict unspeakable damage on the lives of ordinary people with loved ones of their own.
They had time to reflect, and yet they still did it. Just as they did in New York, and (let this be screamed from the unsteady towers of the British media) just as they do every day in Iraq and Israel.
I don’t understand.
I understand their anger. I understand that the US and Britain went to war in Iraq for criminally unjust reasons. I understand that Palestine is an open wound. I understand that Israel has learnt too much about self-preservation from its own history, and applies this knowledge clumsily. I understand the Islamic world’s suspicion of Western motives. I understand that while much of the world is poor, there are people in the West who live as rich as Croesus without concern. I understand that poverty leads to despair, and despair can lead to suicide.
But I don’t understand this. I don’t understand taking the innocent with you.
Unless you think it’s right. Unless you think you will be rewarded for your actions. Unless the reward and the actions are part of your belief system.
Unless it’s sanctioned by Islam.
I’m opening a barrel of worms here. You can’t examine the dogma of a religion (any religion) at a moment’s notice. I tried to get under the skin of Catholicism once, for a book. Almost drowned in contradictions and intellectual niceties. I’m sure Islam is the same. Every religion tries to express the inexpressible and fails; every church is packed to the rafters with commentators and scholars and zealots arguing about the shortest path to heaven.
So you enter a bunch of keywords like ‘suicide’, ‘martyr’, ‘Islam’, and ‘Koran’ into Google and what comes back is contradictory gobbledigook. Complex arguments about whether suicide and martyrdom are actually referred to in the Koran or just in the Hadith commentaries. Intellectually challenged hysteria tucked away in the small print at al-Jazeera about it all being Tony Blair’s fault. Israeli ‘security’ websites profiling the ‘typical’ suicide bomber. Far right American commentators attempting to justify a holy war of their own. Far right American psychopaths looking or any excuse to bury an arsenal in the woods. Stuff about Koranic sexual fantasy and al-Qaida brainwashing and the establishment of a worldwide pan-Islamic caliphate. Conspiracy theories coming at you from every direction.
The only thing that’s clear about any of this is that it’s unclear. Millions of decent Muslims the world over are appalled by atrocities committed in the name of their faith. And yet you can find clerics on the web writing about the Islamic legitimacy of ‘Martyrdom Operations’. They quote the holy verses and the Muslim scholars and conclude that this is not suicide, it’s Jihad – a divine religious duty established in the Koran and leading to rewards without end in eternity.
Let’s not go into the nature of those rewards. They’re so materialistic and insulting to women as to have no spiritual meaning whatsoever. But I can see how they would be enough to turn the minds of weak-willed young men with no prospects and a lot of repressed anger and no other way to make their mark on history.
If it’s open to interpretation, it’s open to misuse. Don’t fear the bombers, fear those who turn them. Fear any leader, from any religion, who points to a scripture and claims that it justifies an act of violence. Because scripture is written by mankind, to describe the nature of divinity; not by God himself.
Now I’m slipping further into the barrel, because I understand that Islam believes the Koran to be the literal word of God, dictated by Allah to the Prophet Mohammed through the Angel Gabriel. All the scholars are doing is interpreting the words of the divine.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Worse, it demeans the very nature of the God that Islam allegedly reveres. Worse still, it gives the fundamentalists carte blanche to commit any atrocity they like – provided they can link it, however obliquely, to a scrap of vague text written many centuries before.
This is not an exclusively Islamic problem. There are fundamentalists in the Christian church too. America is rotten with them: rapture-ready, ‘saved’, reading the Bible as a book of code that reveals we are living at the end of history. This is utter nonsense too, but George Bush speaks their language, and may even share their beliefs.
The only difference (so far) between Islamic and Christian fundamentalists is that the Christians haven’t yet produced these willing martyrs. Which brings us back to the real reason this shit happens: the war between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. On the whole, fundamentalists in the Christian West have too much to lose to want to strap bombs to their bellies.
Fools on both sides, responsibility on both sides.
The West is greedy and complacent. We need leaders who can steer us away from self-interest, political systems that have something to say about waste and over-consumption. We need to test our apparent faith in democracy and capitalism and globalisation, and be prepared to change when these creeds are found wanting. We need to stop assuming we know best.
Meanwhile, Islam needs to address its flaws. It’s not enough merely to condemn the bombers and their suicides as un-Islamic: Muslim clerics and political leaders alike have to show the world why. If they really wish to stop the bombings, they have to disconnect the action from the scripture. This is something only Islam can do.
And we all need to challenge fundamentalism, in any form. Al-Qaida, the British National Party, Charedi Judaism, the fundamentalist churches – they all feed on the same desperations, they all peddle the same lies.
If anyone ever tells you they know they’re right, you can bet your last dollar they’re wrong.
