To whom shall we give Access to Our Water Holes? - Islam and international relations

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Farid Esack

I have alluded earlier to another form of fundamentalism and wish to draw your attention to it as I move toward my conclusion. Muslim fundamentalism is little different from the postcommunist triumphalism that we are experiencing in the West today. For free-market triumphalists, there is only one path to salvation. Others must be converted or enslaved; eligibility to the world community is based on acceptance of their values; all else is tolerated for as long as it remains confined to the lunatic fringes. When it does become a cohesive force capable of challenging the dominant religion, then the fanatics move in with a vengeance. We have seen Grenada, Chile, and Nicaragua. "Free marketeers" have displayed every bit as much contempt for democracy as the fundamentalists in Algeria. As for respecting international law, the United States of America has yet to pay the fine imposed on it by the International Court of Justice for the illegal mining of the harbor of Managua.

The relentless march of Uncle Sam over the lives and cultures of everyone else causes huge resentment, as does uncritical U.S. support to states and "terrorist" groups--ranging from Savimbi's Unita in Angola to Massoud Rajavi's Mujahidin-i-Khalq in Iran-- that serve U.S. political and economic interests. A few years ago in the midst of the second Gulf War, Saddam Hussein--Invader of Kuwait and Butcher of Halabja in Kurdistan, where hundreds of thousands died in chemical weapon attacks -- was voted Man of the Year by more than 90 percent of the listeners of the BBC's Africa Service. Surely something is profoundly wrong when my neighbors rejoice at the burning down of my house. I may be bitter, watching them laugh as I try to douse the flames. The elders among them may protest--as Yasser Arafat vainly tried to do last week--that it was only a few of their kids who rejoiced. Those of us who live inside the neighbors' house -- mortified as we are at the rejoicing--know that it is much more widespread. Why did th e Korean people rejoice when hundreds of thousands of innocent people died when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

It may sound harsh at the moment to ask, "Who invaded Afghanistan and who trained the resistance to the communists? Who supported the rise of a religious alternative to the secular PLO in Israel just about fifteen years ago? Who armed Saddam Hussein to the teeth as a counterweight to Iran twenty years ago?" Whatever Osama bin Laden is, he is also the product of the USA and its involvement in Afghanistan. A Turkish proverb says this beautifully: "When the woodchopper strikes us with his axe, let us remember that the handle is also one of us."

When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he responded, "That would be a brilliant idea." The questioner had probably experienced Western civilization as something tangible. As a subject of British colonialism and a freedom fighter, the Mahatma had encountered little of its loftily proclaimed ideals. So, too, when President George W Bush spoke about Muslim fundamentalists as being "bitter at our freedom of speech, civilization and democracy," he was obviously blind to how others experience it. The world is still fresh with memories of the USA rejection of the Kyoto Protocol (climate change) and the International Criminal Court, the unilateral revoking of the Anti-Nuclear Missile Defense Treaty, and a recent World Court judgment against the USA in a case brought by Germany on the barbaric death penalty. In short, the USA fulfills a number of criteria that normally lead to being described as a "pariah state." Well, nothing quite succeeds as power, especially if you are the only one wielding it. (Just wondering about all of those liberals regularly clamoring -- and justly so -- for strong parliamentary opposition in the Two-Thirds World. Why is it so difficult to see what a one-party system has done to the world?)