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Clash of extremes
November 07, 2001
By Denis Solomon
It is no accident that the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States took place in the midst of a cycle of anti-globalisation protests, soon after the American repudiation of the Kyoto agreement, and with Bush and Sharon lately elevated to the thrones of the United States and Israel respectively.
Islamic fundamentalism is one of the two prongs of a worldwide anti-market, anti-globalisation, and anti-modern movement. The other is composed of elements of civil society in the Western countries: the NGOs, environmentalists, workers and students, angered by the power of multinational business, who made their presence felt in Seattle and Genoa.
In the words of Ignacio Ramonet, editor of the prestigious French journal Le Monde Diplomatique, "the real masters of the world are no longer those [Parliaments and national governments] who wear the trappings of political power, but rather those who now control the financial markets, the international media houses, the information superhighway, cyberspace and genetic technology".
Under this planetary board of directors, says Ramonet, there is a sort of international executive council: the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the WTO and Nato.
The theological underpinning of Islamic fundamentalism is a rigid interpretation of the Koran. That of the anti-G8 movement, if it has one, is to be found in a vague post-modernism. In this theory, the evils of industrial society are products of the Enlightenment's exaltation of reason and rule-governed thought. When this is rejected, the only valid rule, in politics as in art and philosophy, is that there are no rules. Hence post-modernism's rejection of its predecessor form of anti-capitalism, Marxism.
Strange bedfellows, one may think. No one claims that Islamic terrorists and the Genoa protesters are consciously collaborating (though the former may have infiltrated the latter). But there is a philosophical link. Theologically, Islam is not so much opposed to the Enlightenment as it is untouched by it. It has known no Reformation, no Vatican II. But part of its theology has always been the defence of the poor. So both Islamic fundamentalism and the anti-G8, anti-WTO protest movement are motivated by the same economic conditions.
Their greatest point of resemblance, though, is that they are both transnational. In the words of the American political scientist Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad versus McWorld, terror has no address. In the case of Islamic terrorism this is obvious; but it is also true that, as Ignacio Ramonet says, "an embryo of international civil society is developing" to fill the vacuum left by the failure of elected governments to protect their people against the tyranny of the market.
Both these extremisms oppose the economic and political order of the Western world only to the extent that that order is itself extremist. In Barber's words, the market economy knows neither justice nor equity. The American economist Elie Cohen points out that the industrialised countries have systematically reneged on their promises of liberalisation in areas where the developing countries have an economic advantage, such as textiles, agriculture and steel; while themselves maintaining important areas of protectionism and "shamelessly" applying anti-dumping rules.
The developing countries have the feeling that they have made more concessions than the industrialised ones, for example on the basic issue of intellectual property, thus maintaining the Western countries' monopoly of know-how and their right to set their own price on its products. The Caribbean experience of this is the WTO banana issue. But the extremism of the Western economic order extends to all areas of international relations. The unnecessary United States blockade of Cuba is as mindless and inflexible an application of a rigid theology as any of which Islam is guilty. The American rejection of the Kyoto agreement, like the American torpedoing of the International Criminal Court, is a flat unilateral repudiation of the duty of compromise in addressing shared problems.
Muslims see, not only the poverty of their co-religionists in Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangla Desh, but above all, the plight of the Palestinian people, as results of the same phenomenon. Israel's replacement of Barak with Sharon just as real concessions were about to be made to the Palestinians strengthened the hand of organisations like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, who have always thought that extremism can only be fought with extremism.
The Genoa protesters are part of the system they are condemning. As they break shop windows, they wear Nike shoes. Islamic terror is also curiously intertwined with the Western market economy. As Benjamin Barber says, the World Trade Center hijackers used the Internet, airliners, credit cards and cellular phones to plan and carry out their attacks. They were not desperate, ignorant men, but highly trained and competent individuals.
But there is a difference. As products of the Enlightenment, even if philosophically they reject it, the Genoa protesters are part of the dialectic to which the Enlightenment gave birth. They represent a swing of the pendulum set in motion in Europe in the late 17th Century by the recognition that there is good and bad in everything: science and industry have both virtues and vices. The main characteristic of Islamic fundamentalism is that it sees only the vices. Israel, the Jews, the United States, science, reason, technology, exploitation, inequality, all boil down to one thing: the Devil. Which is the answer to the question about how intelligent and highly- trained people could kill innocent people and themselves. For the religious extremist, outside his own beliefs there are no innocents. The French jurist and professor of religion Odon Vallet, author of the book Dieu a changé d'adresse ("God has moved house"), says "when one has a profound belief in Paradise, to lose one's life is much less serious than to lose one's soul. And killing the enemy becomes the same thing as putting down evil".
Much the same could have been said of mediaeval Christianity. When the Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, leader of the crusade against the Cathar heretics, was asked by his commanders how they were to distinguish between Cathars and non-Cathars in a defeated city, he replied "Kill them all; God will recognise his own".
In the West, Christianity has not only undergone profound philosophical changes, but has become separated from and subordinated to the State (the same State that has itself become subordinated to international market forces). Fanaticism has been replaced by what one American professor of religion calls "civil religion". Islam, on the other hand, has remained theologically monolithic.
Islamic terrorists believe literally in a text that has not changed in fourteen hundred years. Furthermore, the apologia of the Western liberal in favour of a "mainstream", peaceable Islam (and Bush's excuse for mixing food parcels with bombs), is historically inaccurate. In the words of Odon Vallet, the history of Islam is inseparable from warfare. The first century of Islam was a century of holy war, in which the rapid expansion of the Muslim world coincided with the elaboration of the Islamic doctrine, "impregnated with a spirit of conquest and violence."
• To be continued
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon