Issue No. 603
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Heritage |
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Anatomy of sympathy
Doubtless many Egyptians found political consolation in 11 September: Youssef Rakha absorbs the mood of the public then and now
Insofar as it registered at all it was a vindication. America, the most glorious of all monsters, had been vanquished. Could this really happen? In Cairo people are constantly looking out for an excuse to take a break from work; this time, the persistent postponement of immediate concerns -- neither dogged nor abrupt, but simply, indefinitely sustained -- acquired unprecedented justification.
Colleagues at the office would quietly shuffle to those rooms with the benefit of a television screen: ongoing, tidal manoeuvers evidencing all the symptoms of sleep walking, to which nobody -- not even the strictest Tuesday-night disciplinarians -- managed to object. And within the many-hued congregations forming before satellite-mediated broadcasts of the 21st century's first vision of apocalypse, faces contorted with incredulity, sorrow or gleeful pride all nonetheless retained the glazed expression of someone who has just been roused.
No one had thought it possible: an attack, an exultant attack on the arbiter of political existence, the author of globally oriented frivolity, the purveyor of economic inequity; the New World Order in person had been spectacularly snubbed. With the exception of one Third-World spokesperson, a Mugabe supporter with an endearing propensity for childlike melodrama, there was almost no hysteria. While he traipsed along the corridors, overjoyed, stopping frequently to announce, in breathless high tones, the destruction of the Pentagon, the death of the American Dream, the triumph of the oppressed, only concern over the victims was voiced. Those who had relations in New York began to make phone calls. Alternate grins and grunts punctuated the muted conversations, which consisted largely of questions and answers.
So much for the educated, the well informed. On 11 September 2001, the news was drifting quietly through Midan Tahrir, wordlessly almost: something momentous had happened in New York; the famed and envied Rome of the contemporary world seemed to be (deservedly?) falling. Not that there was any such critical appraisal of the overriding sentiment. The response, which did not altogether stand in need of hysteria, was visceral and inarticulate -- so much so that it would be a few days before the café-goers who naïvely admired the poetic justice of it all ascertained that an enormous building other and perhaps more important than the Pentagon had been blown up, literally, by a deliberately suicidal, not a stray, domestic plane. Known by the confusingly simple title of World Trade Center, this establishment -- so they were told by countless scholarly and media pundits who seemed, much like the hordes of employees whose extended breaks from work were no longer justified, to have suddenly found their calling -- was the very symbol of US supremacy.
Even prior to George W's decision to hold Al- Qaeda responsible, the bipolar dimensions of an insinuated and inevitable World War III had been intuitively perceived. On one side there was Israel and the consumerist paradise of the West (indeed some taxi drivers would prove more dismissive of US allies than of Washington itself, railing against Tony Blair instead of the Bush administration); on the other: Palestine, "genuine Muslim warriors" who risked their lives in Jihad, Arab civilisation. The latter had won a significant battle in the ongoing combat.
For 12 months the commentary has amounted to a description of that drama, individual protagonists of which were directly identified at the earliest stages. And while the aforementioned pundits continue to advance their much-of-a-muchness versions of one conspiracy theory or another -- the failure of thousands of Jewish World Trade Center frequenters to show up on 9/11; the Qur'anic significance of the numerical figures representing the hour, day, month and year of the attacks -- paradoxes abound.
Bin Laden's iconic face was compared to Christ's and Che Guevara's, for example. Yet a little more thought reveals that, were he truly and perfectly innocent of the operation, as sympathisers still insist, he could hardly inspire such feelings of identification and dignity.
A year on in Midan Tahrir the significance of the memory is nearly completely lost amid the hustle and bustle of ever more straining, ever less effective existential bargaining. Nothing has changed except, perhaps, the sense of vindication with which the event was perversely, if never ludicrously, imbued. Through the interim focus shifted to Sharon, to Mulla Omar and eventually Hamid Karzai. The plight of Palestinians and Afghans felt progressively more harrowing, the consolation of alleged victory less and less palpable as time went by. Pundits began to talk about Arabs and Muslims paying an exorbitant price for America's own myopia.
Where vindication had been felt, gruesome revelation was dawning on the 'man in the street'. The most impressive spectacle of modern times had done little to advance the cause of the oppressed. Insofar as it had an effect at all it further alienated Arabs and Muslims abroad. Thousands of Afghans, Arab Afghans, Palestinians were being massacred. Thousands of the truly and perfectly innocent, political agents of nothing more than the aforementioned bargain for existence were being arrested, interrogated, detained, watched.
Just before the regime was replaced in Afghanistan, the iconic face of Islam was reportedly observed at the head of a thousand horsemen near the summits of the Hindu Kush Mountains -- never to be seen again.
Café-goers slowly relented, pundits were more evasive. Anger gradually turned into melancholy. For a moment the existing clash of civilisations had been forcefully orchestrated. America, by definition, could learn nothing from the experience; the oppressed, by virtue of their powerless and inarticulate lack, will remain oppressed.
And Mugabe supporters who failed to express sympathy with 11 September's American victims will likewise continue to support Mugabe.
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