9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Flying blind
Two Hours that Shook the World, September 11: Causes and Consequences, Fred Halliday, London: Saqi Books, 2002. pp256
The appearance on booksellers' shelves of Two Hours that Shook the World, September 11: Causes and Consequences within six months of the fateful events from which the book takes its title begs the question of whether the author, London School of Economics Professor of International Relations Fred Halliday, is the fastest academic in terms of researching, writing and publishing a book currently in circulation. Even though a perusal of the book's introduction and notes reveals that only two of the 12 chapters are original to it, perhaps putting paid to the author's claim to the aforementioned title, Halliday's achievement is no less praiseworthy.
Two Hours is an informative response to some of the more facile ideas about the implications of 11 September that have gained frightening currency in the wake of the tragedy. Halliday lays responsibility for this state of affairs upon the media, policymakers, the clergy and political activists. In an attempt to ameliorate this situation, he practices a sort of epistemological triage, putting together a political primer to illuminate the events of last autumn. As such, Two Hours will, I think, be relevant and comprehensible to a wide and diverse audience, including casual followers of the day's headlines, social science academics, activists and policymakers.
Most of the volume is made up of articles that Halliday has published in other collections and periodicals over the last eight years. Its main topics are Islam in the contemporary world, political violence, political trends in several Persian Gulf countries and the phenomenon of anti- Americanism, although the Palestinian situation is also treated in a chapter on the post-Oslo peace process. In keeping with his introductory text approach, Halliday sandwiches treatments of these matters between a glossary of "keywords" -- his selection of which ranges from the informative to the glib -- and appendices comprising key documents relating to 11 September and its aftermath.
Accordingly, the book opens with definitions of terms like fatwa, the identification of Hamas and a presentation of central concepts in contemporary Middle Eastern politics. The collection is rounded out with statements by Al-Qa'eda figures, United Nations Security Council resolutions concerning the events of 11 September and the 1999 Tashkent Declaration on the conflict in Afghanistan. Devoid of the trappings of a dry academic treatise directed at building up or knocking down currently fashionable paradigms, Two Hours, and consequently much of Halliday's work over the past decade, is guided by what is actually happening in the world, the events of 11 September revealing the prescience of the LSE professor's work.
Though it gains much from Halliday's research agenda, however, his new book is also well- served by its author's command of the tools of academia. He marshals an extensive knowledge of theory pertaining to international relations and to political sociology in the book, for example, as well as an impressive grasp of the history of international conflict and domestic politics in Middle Eastern countries, the latter undoubtedly supported by his knowledge of Farsi and Arabic.
The sense of urgency in Two Hours is apparent not only in the swiftness of the book's production, but also in its content, as Halliday encourages readers to understand and to respond to the issues highlighted by 11 September in a reasoned manner. This goal is particularly apparent in Halliday's discussion of contemporary Islam, which is the focus of four chapters. Indeed, in the wake of 11 September, fears about an imminent clash between a monolithic and belligerent Islam and the West, as well as attacks in Western countries on Muslims and Arabs, or on people who are assumed to be either or both, make a reasoned exploration of these topics a moral imperative.
Adopting a people-centred approach, rather than one that focuses on texts, Halliday discusses political Islam and "Islamophobia", rooting both phenomena in power struggles over profane matters. Not surprisingly, Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" propositions are given a drubbing. Proponents of Political Islam, argues Halliday, are primarily concerned with obtaining political power within their own societies. When Islamists cite religious texts to justify the nature of the power that they seek to impose, or their use of violence in striving for such power, they do so in a highly selective manner. Thus, Halliday suggests, too many people have taken Islamist claims to represent a single, true Islam at face value. Added to which, he points out, it is possible to find writings that can be used either to justify or to criticise the use of violence, the extension of women's rights or the different economic systems, not only in Islamic texts but also in those of other religions.
However, Halliday really brings the American political scientist Huntington's notion of "clash" firmly down to earth when dealing with the argument that there is widespread hostility in the West towards Islam. In fact, this phenomenon is better described, writes Halliday, as "anti-Muslimism", in which Muslims -- and not their religion -- are the objects of Western resentment. The antecedents and explanations of this enmity vary depending on geographical location: for Europeans, they tend to relate to anxiety over the economic competition allegedly presented by immigrants, while in the US, such attitudes are linked more to fears that oil supplies might be restricted and to terrorism.
Accordingly, anti-Muslimism, writes Halliday, is highly contingent. Recourse to Islamic texts and well-meaning dialogues between civilisations are unhelpful in trying to comprehend the significance of Islamist organizing, or in improving relations between Muslims and peoples of other faiths in the West. Instead, a more useful approach would be to take contextual factors as a starting point.
Of predominantly Muslim countries where Islamists are, or were, organising themselves politically, one can infer from Two Hours that its author would consider a useful approach to understanding such organisations to be one that directed attention to the transfer of state power from one group to another, as well as to the relevant country's economic performance and labour- market trends. Regarding the integration of immigrant communities in the West, examination of the national economic situation, labour markets and segmentation of these along ethnic lines, would all tell the interested observer more about conflicts between Muslims and people of other religions than would recourse to holy books. At the very least, Halliday's book seems to say, the general public would do well to adopt a more sceptical view towards warnings of a combative and essentialised Islam or, for that matter, of a monolithic West bent on world domination.
Understanding terrorism, whether that perpetrated by Islamists or by other groups, has been hampered by responses that either "mythologise" or that "exaggerate" it, Halliday contends. A more constructive approach to the phenomenon, which the author prefers to term "political violence," would recognise that terrorism as a means of bringing about political change is not only amoral, but also ineffective. However, to dismiss outright the causes in whose name acts of terror are conducted, writes Halliday, would be equally misguided. Political violence, after all, tends to "short-cut" other processes of change, and it is accordingly adopted as a strategy without a mandate from the very people in whose name it is perpetrated.
Halliday also injects a much-needed sense of proportion into discussions of this topic with his observation that often the ultimate targets of such violence are not entirely innocent of using force against their own civilians. To Halliday's list of instances in which states have used terror against their own citizens one might add the subduing of the Islamists in Hama, Syria, under Hafez Al-Assad, Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and, closer to home for Westerners, two instances that Gore Vidal recently wrote on in the US magazine Vanity Fair, namely, the massacre of Native Americans in South Dakota in 1890 and the FBI's response to the Branch Davidian colony in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
In an attempt to disaggregate the Middle East and, presumably, to give readers a more informed idea of the political dynamics of societies where Political Islam has flourished, Halliday outlines the features of power in Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Less theme-driven than his other chapters, these studies outline the sense of political drift and stagnation in these countries in a manner more akin to informed investigative journalism than to social-science writing. Even so, the themes that emerge from these summaries pertain to many countries in the Middle East. Political and economic power in these countries has by and large remained in the same hands for at least the last decade, and the institutions through which political participation is supposed to occur are becoming increasingly moribund, often coming to life only to protect the prerogatives of those controlling them and to prevent others from making their own claims.
Unemployment looms in the not-so-distant future in even the wealthier countries, many of whose economies are in disarray. Meanwhile, Islamists are active in the political sphere in these countries, trying to limit women's rights and to censor the production and distribution of cultural products, especially books. Whether Islamists are on the margins of Middle Eastern societies, as they are in many non-Gulf states, or at the centre, as they are in Iran, these groups have been remarkably successful in getting the state to cave in on such matters.
Halliday' s emotional timbre rises only when he deals with anti-Americanism. His 1991 article on the subject, reprinted here, was first served up to the very people he was criticising, the European left, being published in the British periodical Marxism Today. A generalised hostility "towards all that America stands for, or is supposed to stand for," is the stance that he attacks. Calling for a sense of proportion in Leftist tendencies to blame the US for various ills worldwide, he takes issue with the tendency to exaggerate American belligerency and the categorical rejection of US intervention. Halliday argues that the US has, in fact, had a history of restraint, noting its reluctance to become involved in World War II and in Bosnia in the 1990s. He adds that "sneering at American aggressiveness comes strangely from other countries, given their record in modern times", noting the unsavoury history of British and French imperialism.
Although Halliday indisputably scores points on technical merit with these observations, his anti-Americanism chapter nevertheless neglects to mention ignoble instances of US intervention, such as that in Vietnam and Nicaragua. And although he does mention these instances in one of his newer chapters, conceding that the anger they aroused was well-founded, his implication that Europe's imperialist history somehow renders Europeans' opposition to US military campaigns disingenuous is a bit hard to take. A fuller discussion of anti-Americanism, and one not so inconsistent with the general tone of the book, might have assessed whether European protests have encouraged the continent's leaders to lobby the US concerning its worst excesses, or whether they have helped to fuel protests in the US against such shameful episodes. Perhaps this sense of disjuncture, since some obvious instances of ill-conceived US policy are not dealt with in the extended treatment of US interventionism, can be put down to the nature of the book, its being made up of sections published at different times and for different audiences.
Another tricky point that emerges from Halliday's discussion of anti-Americanism is his assertion that peoples engaged in liberation struggles need information about how to engage with the US constructively -- not merely to be convinced of how "unremittingly evil it is." Although this is also a fair point, and one backed up by the cases of Eritrea and South Africa, like many of Halliday's more provocative arguments, it could have done with further elucidation and application to a wider range of cases, especially in the Middle East.
While Halliday's chapter on Palestine, first published in 1999, seems out of date in light of recent events, the remainder of the book paradoxically offers much that is illuminating on the current situation in the occupied territories. Perhaps this fact is testimony to the wisdom of Halliday's choice of emphasis. After all, his approach to explaining 11 September is to outline the political situation in the Middle East and to explain many of the key topics by which the region tends to be understood by the Western public. More specifically, political violence, Islamist organising and the need to engage the US constructively are clearly also all dimensions of the conflict between Palestine and Israel.
Although Two Hours came out remarkably soon after last September's events, I predict that it will have a long shelf-life, given its useful elucidation of the key dynamics of change both internationally and in the Middle East. And if, as Halliday suggests in his concluding chapter, the world since 11 September has been "flying blind in strategic, economic, political, cultural and existential" terms, this book is a useful tool for anyone interested in understanding what is happening around them, and, it is to be hoped, in making the world safer for all its citizens.
Reviewed by Willa Thayer
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