A Civilizing Mission (Page 2)

Today, many writers from the subcontinent--notably the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, also an admirer of Tagore--echo Ahmad's assertion that "nationalism is an ideology of difference." In his recent book Identity and Violence, Sen argues against the imposition of singular nationalist or civilizational affiliations on our robustly plural identities. "The same person," he writes, "can, for example, be a British citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stockbroker, a nonvegetarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a bodybuilder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird-watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God created Darwin to test the gullible." Like Ahmad, Sen a witnessed, as a child, the brutality of Hindu-Muslim riots. And for Sen, the way out of belligerent, civilizational partitioning lies in cultivating--even acquiring--a complex social identity. This should be true not only of individuals but also of cultures. No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry. In saying this, Sen is contesting the modern myth that Europe, and Europe alone, has been home to democracy and freedom. In Identity and Violence, Sen points to the tolerant regimes ruled by the Indian emperors Ashoka (third century BC) and Akbar (sixteenth century AD). When, in the 1590s, "the Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake," Akbar forbade the forcible imposition of faith and advocated individual choice in matters of religious practice.

It is impossible to read arguments like Sen's without thinking of Eqbal Ahmad, particularly at a time of resurgent racist mythologizing about the supposed divide between "East" and "West." This divide, according to Ahmad, was reinforced--or, for that matter, bridged--by political and economic interests, not by "cultures." In his speech "Terrorism: Theirs and Ours," a 1998 text that found a new life on the Internet after September 11, Ahmad reflected on the marriage of convenience between the United States and the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedeen, one that by then had ended in a bitter divorce with the rise of Al Qaeda. As he recalled:

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men in the White House.... They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans who looked as though they came from another century. After receiving them, President Reagan spoke to the press. He pointed toward them, I'm sure some of you will recall that moment, and said, "These men are the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers." These were the Afghan Mujahideen. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire.... Terrorists change. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter in the constantly changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is not.

During President Clinton's bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Ahmad warned: "The United States has sowed in the Middle East and in South Asia very poisonous seeds. These seeds are growing now. Some have ripened, and others are ripening. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed. Missiles won't solve the problem."

To read these passages is to be struck not only by Ahmad's prescience but by his loathing of fundamentalism, his hatred of imperial hypocrisy, his belief in the value of history, and his commitment to resolving political problems through diplomacy, not war. His writing on the Muslim world in particular was notable for its critical vigilance and integrity, its resistance to received wisdom. In a 1984 essay titled "Islam and Politics," Ahmad wrote that the truth of "the Muslim condition" had "slipped beyond the grasp of most 'experts.'" In his view, Islam in its exemplary form was a religion of the oppressed. Because its rise was dialectically linked to social revolt, he felt, the "religious force and cultural force of Islam continues to outpace its political capabilities." The structural unity that Islamic societies had achieved, especially in culture and education, had been disrupted by Western imperialism. As he put it:

The remarkable continuity which, over centuries of growth and expansion, tragedies and disasters, had distinguished Islamic civilization was interrupted. This change, labeled modernization by social scientists, has been experienced by contemporary Muslims as a disjointed, disorienting, unwilled reality. The history of Muslim peoples in the last one hundred years has been largely a history of groping--between betrayals and losses--toward ways to break this impasse, to somehow gain control over their collective lives, and link their past to the future.

Islamic fundamentalists, although they had little trouble raising their voices, only spoke for a minority; the majority of Muslims, Ahmad believed, had their faces turned to the future even as they remained rooted in the past. As he pointed out, the political heroes of the Muslim world in the twentieth century had been "secular, generally Westernized individuals": Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, Sukarno in Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and the nine "historic chiefs" of the Algerian Revolution. Even the PLO, he added, claimed to represent a "secular and democratic" polity, and "two of its three most prominent leaders [Marxist leaders George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh] are Christian."

Accurate as this analysis was for much of the twentieth century, it seems incongruous today when much of the region that so concerned Ahmad seethes with a passion that is defiantly unsecular. Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon. Still, this cannot explain why radical Islam (with its various branches, tendencies and strategies) has managed to co-opt the anti-imperial struggle in the Muslim world--and why, by contrast, the Third World Marxism that Ahmad embodied so brilliantly has been unable to offer existential comfort or a successful political program to the masses.

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