29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Issue No.562
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001 Issue No.562 |
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False gods and true idols
Nawal El-Saadawi* finds hope in the time of terrorism
I opened my eyes this morning to find myself in a warm, ochre room with sun pouring down onto my bed. I could almost have been at home in Kafr Tahla, my village in the Nile Delta. Memories poured up from my childhood, yesterday, 70 years ago. I saw myself aged seven, with my schoolmates, shouting in the street in a demonstration against King Farouk and the British army in Suez.
But no: this is not Egypt. This is Durham, where I came nine years ago. The sky then was as it is today: blue, Carolina blue. It welcomed me like my village sky. I came to America to escape the fundamentalists who had threatened me: the same men Anwar El-Sadat had supported in the hope that they would help him overcome his opponents, and who turned against him on 6 October 1981.
I will never forget that day. I was lying on the floor of my prison cell, surrounded by 11 other women whom Sadat had incarcerated. We were a motley group: hard-line Marxists and fanatical religious fundamentalists and myself in the middle. Many were in despair, sure that they would die in jail. Sadat's death was unimaginable -- as unimaginable as the event I witnessed mere weeks ago, the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York. Who could have imagined that these two terrible events would be engineered by almost the same people?
I had landed in JFK airport exactly a week earlier, on my way to Montelair University, where I was to spend the academic year as a visiting professor. I was horrified, yet I chose not to watch television, avoiding the obsessive repetition of the imploding towers. These were not unfamiliar images to me. Living in the so-called Middle East (middle of what?), I have seen many explosions, many bombings, many collapsing buildings, many civilians killed. Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iran: these are just some of the countries that have witnessed devastation in the past two decades alone.
Each time there is an explosion or an attack on civilians I am horrified. I am absolutely opposed to murder. This, however, is the first time I have been bombarded over and over with the same question: "What did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attacks that killed innocent American civilians at the World Trade Center?" Why, I wondered in amazement, had I never been asked this question before? Could it be that American lives are somehow worth more than Palestinian, Iraqi, Somali, Libyan, Algerian, Afghan or Iranian lives?
In the days following the attacks, the phone kept ringing. Journalists wanted to know: "Is Islam more prone to violence and terrorism than any other religion? Does it encourage suicide attacks in the name of God?" During the past quarter century, I have devoted myself to the study of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What I have learned is that these three faiths resemble each other closely. I was particularly struck by the value attached to relations between men and God, and between men and women; by the importance of death for God's sake, and of holy wars against infidels -- those who believe in another religion.
History is full of blood: that of Jews, Christians and Muslims. It is full of wars fought in the name of God and country. Rulers do not distinguish between the two. In the eyes of George Bush and the US government, the American soldiers who die in Afghanistan are martyrs and heroes who will have died for God and the United States of America. Religious and national anthems are one and the same: God Bless America, In God We Trust, One Nation under God.
So why, I wonder, do so many people believe that only Islam encourages its adherents to die for God, or mobilises its nation to fight holy wars?
Islam, Christianity and Judaism, viewed from the outside, are patriarchal religions. But those who immerse themselves in their histories will discover that in fact they should be considered matriarchal. In Judaism, it is the mother who gives her offspring her religion. When he was a baby, Moses's mother gave him to the River Nile to protect him from Pharaoh's tyranny. She rescued him from the same river to suckle him, train him, and make him the prophet who led the Children of Israel into the Promised Land. The same is true of Christianity: it was Mary, the mother of Christ, who fed him, trained him and made him a prophet.
In the case of Islam, Mohamed's mother, Amna, knew even when he was in her womb that she was carrying the prophet of Quraysh. She died when he was a baby, but he found a second mother in his wife Khadiga, a wealthy and powerful woman 20 years his senior, who taught him everything. She believed in Christ and Mary; she was literate and knowledgeable about the Torah and the Gospel. She introduced Mohamed to these sources and liberated him of his economic responsibilities as a husband so that he could spend his time studying and meditating in the cave on Mount Hira. She prepared him to become the prophet and leader of Quraysh.
When Mohamed received his first revelation, he was terrified. He rushed to Khadiga, trembling. He asked her to hold him, to cover him. She took him into her embrace, calmed him and reassured him that what he had seen was not the devil but an angel, an envoy from God. She told him to stand up and tell the world that he was the messenger of God, who would spread Islam in the world. She appointed him as God's messenger; she was the first to call him a prophet.
After Khadiga's death, her role in the evolution of Islam and the making of the prophet was ignored systematically. During the 20 years they spent together, Mohamed did not marry another woman. During the time that separated her death from his, however, he married several. Khadiga's name could have been mentioned in the Qur'an as one of the most important influences in Mohamed's life. But she is not mentioned even once. Mary, on the other hand, merits a long chapter. She is the only woman whose name is mentioned in the Qur'an.
When the Prophet Mohamed conquered Mecca and ordered his men to break the idols and destroy the images of all previous religions, he spread his arms to protect the icon of Mary and her son, saying: "Destroy all the images except for this one." Why, then, is there such furious enmity between Christians and Muslims? Why the Crusades, yesterday and today? Why do people not pay attention to the fact that Islam emerged from the womb of Christianity, Christianity from the womb of Judaism, and Judaism from the womb of Ancient Egypt's great goddesses? Why do they not acknowledge that the Torah and the Gospel are mentioned in the Qur'an as divine books?
Religions are political, economic, social, cultural and moral ideologies, inseparable from their spiritual dimension. The soul is not separable from the body or the mind and politics cannot be rent asunder from religion in any county. How blatantly obvious this has been in the past seven weeks. Bush, Blair, Bin Laden and the Pope speak the same language. They speak in the same name of God, but they are thinking only of oil.
When he declared war on Afghanistan, George W Bush's military discourse was steeped in religion. He was going to fight Evil and the Devil (Osama Bin Laden) with enduring, eternal justice. Eleven years ago, his father launched the good Gulf War against the Devil of the time, Saddam Hussein. And let us not forget the Pope's trip to Uzbekistan and other countries of the Caspian region to pave the spiritual way for the military invasion of Afghanistan -- and, eventually, to control the huge supplies of oil in the region.
God is used today to camouflage the real reason for war in our region, which is oil. In Africa, God is used to disguise diamonds. Bush Sr described his war for oil in the Gulf as liberating Kuwait from the Devil. Bush Jr is describing his war for oil in Afghanistan as liberating the world of terrorism, and Afghan women from the Devil. But the US's oil policy cannot be hidden.
Sheila Heslin, then the National Security Council aide responsible for analysing international energy issues, testified in 1997 that US policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy sources. The US did so, she explained, specifically to promote the independence of these oil-rich countries, to break Russia's monopoly control over transport of oil from the region, and to promote Western energy security through the diversification of supply.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, countries from Turkey to China have become coveted prey. The US must control the energy-rich countries of the Arab world and the Caspian region if it is to remain the world's sole superpower. Whoever controls the Caspian will have a counterweight to Arab oil, and vice versa. Since oil prospecting began in our region, almost all the wars have been fought for oil and in God's name. Postmodernists replaced God with culture or civilisation: hence the clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. In 1920, the US pressured Britain, then the dominant power in our part of the world, into signing a "red line agreement" to ensure that Middle Eastern oil would not be developed by any single power without the participation of the others.
Since 1932 and the discovery of oil in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the fight for oil has continued relentlessly. The conflict between the US and the USSR was all about oil. This was no clash of civilisations. In 1948, the state of Israel was established with the help of Britain and the US to control the oil. The CIA played a role in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to eliminate any form of resistance to US control: witness the coup in Syria in 1949, or in Iran in 1953. Egypt was the battlefield during the 1950s. Then came the 1967 and 1973 wars. How many young men from my village were killed in those wars? Yet in all those years I never heard the word oil cited as a casus belli -- only God.
Political and religious dichotomies are reproduced in the postmodern dichotomies that split the world into universals and cultural relativism. Both can be false or both can be true; it depends how you use them. The current concern with the clash of civilisations is the most vivid example of the distortion of universalist language: the West vs Islam. The civilisational divide that pairs geography and religion as universals applying to specific cultural groups allows Bush and Bin Laden to kill each other in highly uncivilised ways. Bush warns before he kills, therefore he is civilised. Bin Laden kills without warning, therefore he is uncivilised. So it is just a matter of warning before killing; that is the only difference between civilised and uncivilised.
Bush bombs the Red Cross and civilians in Afghanistan, and millions of Muslims consider him a terrorist. Bin Laden bombs the WTC and the Pentagon, and they consider him a freedom fighter. Civilised Americans like Senator Jesse Helms support the creation of the proposed international tribunal, as long as the United States is not subject to its jurisdiction. Civilised women like Madeleine Albright consider the killing of 5,000 Iraqi children every month an acceptable price to protect oil and American Christian values.
Two years ago in Seattle, demonstrations by thousands of enraged civilians from all over the globe tried to undermine the power of capitalism and succeeded in shaking the powers that be. A little over two months ago, a few enraged civilians from all over the globe attacked the headquarters of the WTO and succeeded in terrifying the world. The transnational corporations can easily put these buildings back together again, but they cannot resist millions of organised, united opponents.
Some commentators -- like Salman Rushdie, writing in the New York Times on 2 November -- think that, to defeat terrorism, Islam has to be reconciled with modernity. But who said Islam is more resistant to modernity than other religions? What do we mean by modernity and post-modernity, anyway? We have to eradicate the roots of terrorism, whether religious or economic or political or military, whether individual terrorism or state terrorism. Most of the people in the world consider the US and Israel terrorist states. Of course we need to separate religion from politics and restore religion to the sphere of the personal. We need secularist, humanist societies -- not only in the Islamic countries but everywhere, above all in Christian America and Jewish Israel. We need to abolish the colonial and neo-colonial principles that dominate modernity and post-modernity. We must struggle against the transnational organisations that globalise from above to exploit us all, regardless of religion, gender or colour. The WTO does not believe in cultural difference.
Hope is power; and I am optimistic, in spite of everything.
* The writer is the author of many books, most recently Love in the Kingdom of Oil, a novel.
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