Talk of the Town - Pepsi or death? October 03 2001

I’ll take the real Islam

When I flew to Spain last month, I sat across the aisle from a young woman who was a physics major at a university in California. She was taking a year off to study Arabic in Morocco.

“Arabic?” I said. “Why Arabic?”

“I just need a break from physics,” she said. “But I think the Arabic world is trying to tell us something that we in the West don’t understand.”

Of course, I’ve been haunted by her words ever since. They came back to me this morning as I read the European edition of The Guardian at my favorite cafe under the ancient trees of the Plaza de San Lorenzo in Sevilla. The Guardian printed an interview with Mullah Omar Mohammad, the Taliban leader, by the Voice of America. According to The Guardian, “the broadcast was pulled ... following objections from the U.S. deputy secretary of state and senior officials of the National Security Council.”

I’m not surprised. What comes across in the interview is a chilling logic that points to the profound difference between our government and those of the Arabic world. When the interviewer commented, “Do you know that the U.S. has announced a war on terrorism,” Omar replied:

“I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the other is that of Bush. The promise of God is that my land is vast. If you start a journey on God’s path, you can reside anywhere on this earth and will be protected. The promise of Bush is that there is no place on earth where you can hide that I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled.”

It would be erroneous to generalize the excesses of the vile fundamentalist Taliban to all of the Arabic world, but Omar’s comment does demonstrate that in the Islamic world, religion and government are not separate in the same way they are in the U.S. An argument that makes secular sense doesn’t necessarily make sense to a state guided by religion. Thus, in the case of the Taliban, it is literally nonsensical to expect them to turn over Osama bin Laden, who represents the highest ideals of their fanatical sect. In fact, Omar told the Voice of America that giving up bin Laden would mean that “Islam is finished.”

The extremity of our differences was well demonstrated when an Afghan in Peshawar told The Guardian: “The Americans love Pepsi Cola, but we love death.” Author Ian Baruma reminds us that a people’s willingness to die for a religious leader in the face of American materialism is not new. Pearl Harbor was partly the result of the Japanese cult of emperor worship that made self-sacrifice on his behalf the highest ideal of a culture that had come to scapegoat American values for its own failures. The kamikaze pilots, highly educated young men, performed an act of suicide that embodied the spiritual ideal of evanescent beauty that perishes in exchange for glorious immortality.

Not all nonsecular governments are violent extremists, of course, but they are almost always confounding to us. The Tibetan government, prior to the Chinese invasion in 1959, was a religious state led by the Dalai Lama. His unrelenting attitude of acceptance, the insistence that the invaders be loved, earned the exiled Dalai Lama the Nobel Prize. But it confounds the Western mind.

There’s little doubt as to the wisdom of keeping government and religion separate in our own country. God knows we had a hideous demonstration of our own religious extremism when Jerry Falwell blamed the terrorists’ attack on gay people, abortion rights activists and, probably, the Teletubbies. His eventual apology, issued in stages and only as public opinion against him escalated, was about as sincere as Pat Robertson’s sudden “confusion” over Falwell’s remarks — even though he fully supported them at the time they were broadcast. Just imagine if Robertson, Falwell or Pat Buchanan really did succeed in putting Protestant fundamentalism in the Oval Office.

We are wise to keep church and state separate, to realize that freedom of worship should be guaranteed but that religious convictions alone are a poor basis for modern law. But America will have to realize that the rest of the world — particularly the Arabic world — doesn’t necessarily share our belief. We will have to begin respecting that in our new diplomacy. Sometimes it may mean we are hated no matter what we do. Other times, it may mean we can make ourselves more agreeable through humanitarian actions.

Islam, as George Bush has reminded us repeatedly and to his credit, is not a violent religion. Ironically, I’ve spent the last month in Sevilla, a city that was dominated for centuries — like the rest of southern Spain — by Islamic rulers. It is well known that the Moorish rulers were tolerant of religious differences, allowing Jews and Christians to worship openly. It was the Christian conquest of the region, under the enduring spell of the Crusades, that gave rise to the Inquisition, which mainly targeted Jews, but also required Moslems to convert or be expelled.

I spend many evenings here at a cultural Islamic center, where I hear music — particularly flamenco — that has its earliest roots in the period when this area was called al-Andalus by its Moorish rulers. Flamenco teaches us how to relate to pain, chaos and oppression. And I was brought here, too, by my fascination with the work of a Sufi master, ibn Arabi, who was born in Sevilla during the glory days of al-Andalus and developed what amounts to a psychology based on beauty and the use of the imagination.

Yes, there is much — terrible and beautiful — that the Islamic world has to tell us. In its compassionate response, the world is handing us the perfect opportunity to start listening and learning.??